Tony Jennett

I scour the cottage for signs of past presence
L ike a famished orphan at the erstwhile site
O f a long-spilled rice-sack, grubbing some essence,
V estige of sustenance. Hope gutters fitfully not quite
...

A Muse whispers
and the soul's pricked-up, hand cupped ear
strains hard to catch each syllable
wafting over memory's embers
...

The mind and heart sustain contusions
By jumping to the wrong conclusions
And intellect, perhaps, divines
Too much by reading twixt the lines
...

A line of doggerel? Poor enough in truth,
For one so rich in spirit. Yet I won
...

An arctic blizzard whispers in my ear
Twelve inches off, through a block of new-cut snow
Howling, unpenetrating. Does it know
I'm sitting warm and smiling here?
...

Falling asleep all the time - that's expected
But I see the bag's gone that cries tears
In my arm. But the fire in my chest is not resurrected
And that for days? weeks? was the sum of my fears
...

The sun has just taken a suicide dive.
A dive to gambol and gamble with a sick spring lamb
Half a world away behind a line of westering waves
Wich all day flashed blue, crested white
...

With a final burst of red across the mirrored Llyn
The sun strikes copper from the glistening organ frieze
Of Glyder Fawr and sets behind Y Garn; old yogin
Lotus posed, his little lake couched twixt his knees:
...

So, hello vertigo! Bane of other's lives not mine.
...

Under a polycarbonate cover of riot shields
...

The sea loved him
Loved him for the sturdy ship
He gave for her to enjoy
Culled by his hand from a strip
...

They don't throw you on the scrapheap with a jeer, a leer, a scoff.
...

Moaning its broken-voiced bull-with-a-hangover wail,
Blinking its tired dim rheumy bloodshot eye
...

Nightwatch is over. Eyelids lighten with the lightening sky.
...

Die woman! Please! Just give up and die.
Your tangled life-line warps my strangled dissembling smile.
Juggernaut logic tears my tortured bowel:
Says you must go. And this I must hide away?
...

Part of a trilogy about lost love which includes 'Nightwatch' & 'Landfall'
as well as 'Dawn' For the aftermath read'Waitng for the Train' & 'Crater'
...

You told me that you loved me
You told me again,
And again I believed you.
...

Not Poets, please! I beg. That's far too grand for us
Not Wordsmiths, though that is within our radius.
Tinkers rather, for we take word coins and rub them in the dirt
And shine them with its earthy power to make them bright and pert
...

You're the silver flash of salmon in the limpid mountain stream,
Will o' the Wisp in moonlight, snatch of birdsong in the dawn.
You're the Houri-song that lingers from a half-remembered dream
And the bowel stirring flutter of a baby yet unborn.
...

Pyewhacket is my dainty, pretty cat
I got her from a stray cats' home but that
Cannot disguise the fact that she
Was once a witch's cat, but we
...