Poems
When you Said [poem]
When you said “I’m yours” I
never knew that, crouching on
all fours, I’d have to beg to know
the truth behind that clause
When you said you’re mine I
never saw, as one more in
your line, I’d soon receive
the lie which broke my spine
I am a Shadow [sonnet]
I am a shadow of my former self
dark
dangling
silhouetted
by a light
which screams
I love you
(I only sought to help)
but in the end
you faded
out
of
sight
My Poems
my poems chart my waters blue and green
blue for bruised and beaten – green for naive
in verse i point the way to where i’ve been
i wear my skipbeat heart upon my sleeve
© 2011, Alan Morrison
Broken Nails [poem]
and so I visit basements
once again
wherein were crushed
my childlike wanton joys
where mirrors make reflections
[rude (arcane)]
and strangely stunted weapons
fate deploys
The Mirror of the Mire [poem]
the poet is the pedlar of possibility
the architect of other worlds
reminder of responsibility
deflator of all hubris hurled
iconoclastic painter
dark defibrillator
narrator of all love unfurled
a rendezvous arranger
a nervous bold and
hungry bird
I Could not Say I Love you [poem]
I could not say I love you
(though I do).
To say that
I’m in love with you
would
(although so true)
some precious thing
undo.
I Clothe me in your Beauty [poem]
I clothe me in your beauty
a woven cloak of ochre made
blood-red inside and brown like earth
whose complex colours never fade
I bathe me in your blitheness
while showers of shifting senseness
wash my wilted soul with widening
waves of laced and lavish gladness
My Semantic Sea [poem]
I always have the feeling
that I say too much.
In my oral fever
I am constantly ready
with words that gush.
Bubbles come out
from my lips with ease;
I leave not one stone
unturned (unseized).
For words are to me
like a fecund flow
of turquoise-coloured
streams searching hard
for a place in a harbour
to anchor my wildest dreams.
So Much a Woman [poem]
you are more woman than I ever thought woman could be
a stream of softstrength waiting to hold and be held
laughingly. with gentleness we sigh at all the ways
that woman’s deep mystery-giveness is now no longer
deemed to be worthy of wonderful wide-eyed praise
it is your purity of heart which rolls away the layers
enabling you to feel that womansoul which shelters me
when in your presencesun I blithely bathe and you me save
with handsful of touchful healing strokes (not just with your hands)
like sea on the sands of time (you are now my tidal wave)
Incy Wincy [poem]
I saw a little spider
walking in the snow
All dressed up to kill
with nowhere left to go
I think I understand him
for I am just the same
going through the motions
our lives a stilted game
I cry out to the branches
and marvel at their bough
a mass of solid rootness
I envy it somehow
I never asked to be here
with rudeness I was hurled
headfirst into the vortex
a lonely broken world
[prismlike patterns take their toll
on a windowless monument
rolling down the pain of a vision
in a dreamly dense forested frown
I tossed in the sky like a billowing
white comely crown of potentially
golden angels whose name was
whispered with incense and myrrh]
I tried to find diversion
anaesthetise the pain
colour in the greyness
hush the hurricane
but after every sidetrack
I bumped down to the earth
a messy little business
a bloody afterbirth
people on the outside
watching my demise
laugh behind their fingers
a chance to sermonise
they lecture at their children
and warn them to be good
clip their wings with relish
(they’d kill them if they could)
[restless indigent papertrails will
mark out their territory’s winding lanes
with vast resplendent daisy chains
borrowed from outside mundane time
like clocksgonewrong while thinking
they can chime and all the while
remarkably very little happens which
hasn’t been programmed that way]
meanwhile back in Jonestown
(the name I give this place)
the hoods are hypnotising
the stupid human race
there’s really not much to it
they make an easy prey
place their heads upon the block
(they never disobey)
I’ve given up on finding
a place to lay my head
each time I close my eyes
I find a scorpion in the bed
everything declining
(so says the Second Law)
stuff decaying everywhere
descending into war
[happiness is a warmed-up desperate
dream of drunken dissolution’s dimly
lit passageways suffused with tempered
tidalwaves unsold in every marketplace
where robots scuff the ground with indecent
joy and Shakespeare shaves his beard and
and makes a ploy to take your mind into
his occult-laden weblike world of wasdom]
I’ve searched the thirteen seas
(which includes the ones inside)
vomited in all of them
it was just a bumpy ride
now I’m looking for an ocean
without a safety ring
the stormier the better
with no more apron strings
so now let’s bring a halt
to this childish little rhyme
I’d love to tell you more
but I’m running out of time
not that you’d believe me
for now you think you know
while wincing deep inside me
is the spider in the snow
© 2011, Alan Morrison
The Naked Troubadour 