Tomorrow

Tomorrow’s back pages

Tomorrow’s back pages are better than today’s

It’s only because you said you loved me

That I went away

The best line in the story was that one I could not say

Because it’s on tomorrow’s back pages

Which are better than today’s

Even if I heard you cry

The ink has dried on the page

Well you know my tears have dried

And I’m on another stage

So let the columns slip

Let the rows of words slip away

Tomorrow’s back pages are better than today’s

Dead Angel’s Of the Railway

Clipped winged angels bow their heads in the garden

Sitting there decaying waiting for death

As railway drinkers sip at the tables

They sleep in communion like the argent and sable

With the railway sleepers and the drunk’s breath

Romano nosed bar tenders serve out the beers

As from the same cup drink the true ones and pretenders

And radio silence cuts the rabbit’s ears

Across the noiseless countryside time is called

At closing time songs are sung through

And fly past towers of tenderness rhyme

That long ago a railway ran through here

When peat workers trudged their black shoes through snow

But all that’s left now for to show

Is the foot prints of birds that dance on their toes

Yet when I have slept, like the railway sleepers

I am the rhine, the south drain, the rain

It is buried deep in a nerve bundle of the solar plexus consciousness

Calling me back there to live

At closing time

When the glasses clink

And the voices fall silent

Who will remember the dead angels in violet?

With their wings cut off as if from shame

Holding eternity in their palms

Old as the peat beneath them

Decaying so quietly without violence

Sometime close to dawn

When the midnight choir grows silent

And the rains pita- patter on the window

Then the shadow of a rush of thought

Has cascaded through consciousness

Like a waterfall of memory

So precious and startling as ice flow

So transmutable as vapours

Which flow around us

That the single state of being

Is as three, a trinity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit

Or ice, water and steam vapour

That before the dawn we are in phase all three

From day into night

It all started with the morning light

As the trees wept their dew

And the grass blades seeped wet too

Then the bark warmed up and began to peel

The birds came out and began to reel

As the rocks sang beneath the crying waves

And the howling ocean came forth and gave

In crashing cymbals, and splashing spray

The fish sprang out and burst from grave

And the sky sang out to the ones who were saved

In the chorus of clouds that rumbled the waves

And sun like a ringing bell resounded down its rays

To the harps of sand banks that beneath them swayed

And every shell was clapping in time as the played

As the thunder shadows drummed aloud

And strummed the lightening that flashed in the cloud

And the seals which crowed their crowning cawing

With the sea gulls that danced above with their calling

Then the night came down as a shroud on a crown

Put in bounteous virtue the sea and the sound

While the Stars as triangles pinged around

And rang as bells in God’s royal rolls

The crescendo tinkering tinkling knells

That ends in the fathomless moon