Michael Maxwell Steer

Could I but spin a golden melody
from myself as a spider draws
her silken web, whose very flaws
make perfect records of her busy body.
...

When the everyday miracle, love, strikes
all the resonant chords within us chime
and even the tawdry ruts of likes and dislikes
dissolve into harmonies of rhyme.
...

Hey howya doin' St Peter?
I got better gates than that.
Pearl's such a mess,
You need gold to impress -
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To whom I cry I know not:
yet into that echoing dark
I raise my voice, asking
only for shelter against the
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Night words fill the silent air
and hang like predawn mists, drifting
lazily across the fields
of consciousness. Blown gently by
...

The anguish, also, is god -
the desire for transcendence.
The search for unity
of experience
...

When you first start to walk the road, when you first start to roam,
you have no destination and no way home;
but as time and chance occur to each man,
so soon you develop some kind of a plan.
...

I am sitting, here, in this room
where the energy of our love-making remains constant,
distant echo from a galaxy traveling away at the speed of lies -
the red-green shift of passion barely detectible as radio-waves -
...

What did I think when I knew you had gone there?
I thought of the space between us -
the radio channel once filled with chatter,
now stilled with the atmospherics of cosmic silence.
...

In this corner of Oxford it was always Sunday morning -
the silent chimneys once bustling with the kitchen smoke
of a hundred dead cooks sending their burnt offerings
swirling like incense above the respectable tall red roofs:
...

Like snow outlining fences,
wool from the downland sheep
creates a winter postcard
in this sullen spring.
...

Beauty is the pregnancy of a dew drop
Beauty is in the dancing light -
In the majesty of a mountain top
And the lazy warmth of a summer's night.
...

I make it hard for you, don't I?
Headstrong, impetuous, ego-led!
How can you wrap your loving
wings are such as me?
...

In poems I record my passage across the trackless wastes
of night, where I receive such startling clarity -
as if the milky way were opened to invite me in,
and I, a child, enter Aladdin's cave
...

I stood in autumn fields
where great warm thighs of hills
rose between wooded cwms
like earth-bound venuses
...

O my darlings, nothings matters more
to me than knowing of your health and growth.
If wishes can empower, then all I wish
is that your adult self discovers how to
...

We are many alternating realities,
like the layers of a sweet whose different
tastes we only experience as the outer
coating wears away …
...

Two of them
running golden throu the stubble,
camouflaged
by sunlight, so that only crackling
...

I am the tempest
I am the shaken tree.
I am the echo of the wind
...

In ageless earth the properties of matter
Transformed some dust in molten temperature
To a sparkling diamond, lustreless
Where it lay unseen - a sleeping princess
...