Words tumble over one another,
Tangled syllables,
Chopped and torn in the rush to get out.
A cacophony of consonants,
Gushing like a waterfall,
Into a plunge pool of language, deep, dark and impenetrable.
I do not know these words,
These sounds so strange and wild and free.
I do not know my own mother tongue,
Spoken by a brother of fifteen.
Two figures standing silent on the corner,
Sentinels of glass and steel,
Watching over their noirish dreamland,
Their home of the brave, land where nothing is free.
Lonely, mist-bound romantics,
Ghosts of the coffee-house and the opera house,
Burning a thousand warm candles in the night,
Echoes of Gershwin at the day's dawning.
Dark shapes at dusk,
Guardians of these mean streets,
Patron saints of cruelty and greed,
Paladins of cold, hard honour.
Twin pinnacles reaching for eternity,
The new mansions of millions of years,
Rooted in blood they rise in crescendo,
To dreams of highest art.
The silhouettes of an ideal,
Spectral custodians of a bygone age,
A fantasy of indomitable will,
Fallen into flame and dust.
Ivy-strewn skeletons, side-by-side,
All that remains of a once-great world,
In the cold shadow of the bomb,
Yet now they stand no more.
An empire of the mind,
Past, present,
Future,
And never was.
Gone.
I couldn't, I shouldn't,
I wouldn't, I can't,
I won't and I shan't, but I might.
I'll do it, I've done it,
I did it I did,
Though it doesn't look right in this light.
I would fain journey to the palace of Neptune's bounty,
Where tidings of joy and sorrow
Bear in their piebald embrace
The finest prize of fair England's kitchens.
The sons of Poseidon, in gilded armour caparisoned,
Girt about with Earth's once-buried treasure,
Most regally anointed,
And tried by the ordeal of flame.
Steeped in ocean salt and the agar wine,
Sanctified by the blood of love's apple,
Washed in the bitter tears of the Citrus limon,
And blessed by the sauces of far Tartary.
Or in other words,
Greater in brevity,
If lesser in poetry,
I'm going to get some fish and chips.
When my mind is free I rise out of the mud,
From clouds of smoke and suffocating dust,
To walk in the cold, clear air and dance among the stars.
I turn my face to the solar winds,
And like dandelion seed on a spring day,
I twist and tumble in the universe,
Or hang still perhaps, as the universe turns about me.
I see the Earth above me,
Mountains like molehills and trees like matchsticks,
And the far, silent bustle of tiny cities,
Where towers of glass and steel,
Declare their petty majesty.
I stride across the world as aeroplanes and satellites,
Buzz about my head.
Insects that dare to dream of dragons.
I look upon the world and I look to the wide sky.
I see the great
And the small
And know the immeasurable distance between them.
When my mind is free I see the void,
The vast and awesome beauty,
And the little doings of my own mean kind,
A thousand nothings in the everlasting dark.
With eternity before me,
I turn to the smallness,
And go back to that little world,
Where I am not alone.