Love’s perilous shallows


Those sunken…

relationships,
cause wrecks,
when love is perilously shallow.
Reluctant and scorned, the captains,
dive into their slippery,
ill-gotten, untitled, reckonings.


A backpedalling pool,
of thick, cementing gruel,
turning stomachs,
into, trodden, broken,
ceramics,
and, once, placid waters,
into, viscous, panics.


“King Cnut was awash,
with humility, and, a gut-wrenching knot, in his defeat, to the seas,
and, deemed them; majestic,
Godly, and, hallowed.
For, he knew, then, that his reign,
could not stop, the rains of April,
nor, reverse the ocean tides,
despite his courtiers’ love,
being perilously shallow.”


The salty waves,
of harpoon-shaped tears,
submit to sandy cheeks of forlorn,
creating crestfallen beach tides.
Memories resurface; embittered,
and, resentful,
as, sodden spite, is beckoning.


Frostbitten, arctic remarks,
chisel those, once, bleeding hearts,
into cold, scuppered; currachs.
Punctured, and, capsized,
from, ice-veined, blue-blood, it freezes, and, attacks;
subverting, and, destroying the voyage; of doomed solicitude;
when love is perilously shallow.


The cost of living


As the final autumn leaves

Blanket the pavement beneath my feet

I’m reminded of tears of grief

Falling from hungry children’s cheeks.


In the guise of a vulture

Autumn austerity circles overhead

Eviscerates community and culture

Dining on poverty-stricken dead.


They call it a cost of living crisis

But when you take more than you’re giving

That’s a loss of giving crisis

And a sin there’s no forgiving.