Falling

(The futility of falling in love).

Of happiness, but does he ask
the venerable, winking Hotei why?
With a smile, though some would say a cynics grin,
laughter leaches from his mouth unbidden,
wrapped in the paper-thin sarcasm of an unwanted gift.
He dances to the merry tune,
but heavy feet may be his downfall yet
as songs of emerging love and longing
start sweet and low
then finish in a hale and hearty lust.
So happiness is indeed within him,
he feels her warmth
wrapped tightly to his chest
caressed, as with the hangman’s noose
he swiftly falls
through the waiting, gaping trap of love.

© Graham Sherwood 12/2011

Tomb Angel

(In a graveyard).

Captivated, I can only stare as
you appear, a ghost to me.
Tell me how I should love you?
Without a touch, the feintest scent,
nor hidden smile on chiselled cheeks.
Ageless, set in such nubile torpidity,
your sombre marbled eyes
propose the question that stony lips
are doomed ne’er to form.
Demure sentinel, beautiful guardian
waiting for me.


© Graham Sherwood 12/2011

Friday Lies

(Deceit and its outcome).

With a favourable wind at your back
and me leant forward, eyes stinging
we, surprised, stumble together.
Once more you peel off another raffle ticket
from your library of lies,
the rest are shuffled together like paper money
banded by the hallmark of your guilty conscience.
But lucky for me, the one I take
slips from my suspicious fingers
thus ruining my afternoon.
As you leave me
with the swagger of a gambler
who can afford to lose her money,
at least today,
you notice the disappointment in my eyes
and re-chalk your cruel bookmaker’s slate
with the long odds of my tortured truth

© Graham Sherwood 11/2011

Two Minutes

(A personal armistice reverie).

The giant bell commands a silence
with its muffled clarion,
hard struck upon my leaden heart,
self-consciously I stop, put down my work
and fall into the darkness
of a solemn solitude.
From right to left the boys go running by
towards their sure oblivion
into the angry spitting guns,
I see them sprawled across the wire
abandoned laundry hanging
stained by the stench of tattered flesh.
But from the devastating shells no sound
and all anguished cries are mute
in this living hell, seen from the darkness
of my two-minutes silence.


© Graham Sherwood 11/2011

Saturday Night Sunday Lunch

(The futility of misplaced faith).

You push me from the crumbling edge
of a tumultuous Saturday,
into the torpor of God’s Day,
to drown there
in other people’s dreams.
But tumbling through that thicket
of the faithful,
washed by the splash of cheap communion wine
my wafer-thin atheism
is passed from mouth to mouth
for Sunday lunch.
And later, replete, our friends depart
to gird their egos once again,
sated by the tasty flesh of my
defenseless crucifixion.

© Graham Sherwood 10/2011

Road Man

(A study on inappropriate footwear).

Those battered soles
that seem to walk half a pace behind
slow-hand clap your every stride
an irritating desultory applause
the metronomic drag and slap
rasps such gritty rhythms.
to a journey without destination.

© Graham Sherwood 10/2011

Sixty

(Carelessly titled piece about time passages).

Are you my guardian demon
or I, your Noah’s dove?
Memories find their way back through the mist,
like the blind ferryman, who knows the tides
and the perilous reef.
They eventually arrive, blown around my legs,
like yesterday’s abandoned newspaper.
Their sharp words bend my ears,
but with the ambivalence of the vine
I shrug them off.
They cannot harm me
I have been standing here too long.
Secretly I seethe, and for a moment you recoil
before goading me with your lion tamer’s chair and whip.
Then your lovely head is placed between my chastised jaws,
and all around the leaves fall beyond the point of no return,
from proud green to embarrassed humble bronze.

© Graham Sherwood 10/2011

Waiting for the words to come

(Word block can be a very difficult condition, not often written about
but often complained over).

The atmosphere in the room is deafeningly silent,
gently squeezing my temples, tasting like fog.
A pregnant desolation, brightness is dark,
your face is firmly turned from mine,
choosing not to hear my cursed appeals.
I am waiting for you, I know you will speak, always do.
You lift a shoulder to give me hope,
but hope flares like a damp match, then dies
a death of cynical dissatisfaction.
Once again, I am face down in this muddy chasm
and all is quiet once more, I sleep.
Then in the warmth and turmoil of a dream
you’re there, unexpected, arms outstretched,
courting me with pretty words.
My muse.

© Graham Sherwood 10/2011

Black

(It wasn't the fact that Amy Winehouse died today
but more that so many talented people squander their gifts).

Today is black,
and deathly quiet
the music lies under a veil of black.
A tormented life has now turned black,
and talent stifled, in vague outline
is coloured in black.
Notes and words on vellum
of beauteous youth
now play starkly black,
charred and burnt.

© Graham Sherwood 7/2011

Retrospect

(An observation on the irrelevance of things
that were once both important and beautiful).

Cold bedclothes strewn, abandoned parachutes
occasionally billow in rhythm to
this winter chill in summer’s sun.
I drift back to the reality of a day
from the smoking tallow of a night
blinking quickly, thinking slowly.
There the door awaits, open for me to fall through
once again bringing all my uncollected baggage
to stack neatly on your mat.
We were all beautiful once but didn’t know,
then, unhindered by regrets and
without the knowledge of the life to come.
Behind our banal conversations
we hear those old songs that
were the wallpaper of our past,
now abused in advertisements for goods
we’ll never need or want.
Now sadness for those wondrous never-ending days,
when touching flesh, hearing words and seeing love
rebounding from your lovely eyes
was all that mattered.


© Graham Sherwood 7/2011

Eyelight

(Pure idle melancholy and nothing more).

Today’s Tuesday sun is butterscotch
a creamy brightness, eager
to rinse away the dew soaked dawn.
Here we sit like executioners preparing to lynch
the only thing hanging, the silence
perfectly executed by us both.
This suspense, determined as we watch our lives expire
holding loving hands,
our wishes stuffed into manilla envelopes
bribes to our inheritance.

© Graham Sherwood 7/2011

Gothick?

(This fellow was real, an out of place, alien in his home town).

Sallow turned milk cheeks
beneath an impossibly large funeral director’s top hat,
its satin coal-black band smudged with sugared fingerprints.
Maniacal mascara fronts resigned satisfaction
from sunken, gaunt poached egg eyes,
an undertaker safe in the perfect knowledge
that another corpse will soon arrive.
This washed out charcoal drawing, mute
propped on awkward spindle stalks, that
disappear to laceless boots, sits low
astride an empty doughnut box.

© Graham Sherwood 5/2010

Port Isaac

The milk blue swell with silver crowns
breathes a heavy sigh, to
nudge the reef of Varley Head,
beer foam swamps the Shillingstones
and roars into its craggy gugs.

Three skiffs lie beached on dog leash chains
whilst unleashed dogs, seek
piddle smells to sniff,
bored grockles peer in tiny trinket shops
and follow pasty smells around the lanes.

These silent streets keep echoes warm
The Bark House nets, the Dolphin’s ale
and ghosts of shanties whispered low
swirl around old salted stones
like chimney smoke,

© Graham Sherwood 5/2011

School Sports 1966

We young boys wait for our events,
and let our nostrils flare to breathe
the herbaceous tang of fresh mown grass.
Our hormones in an altogether different race
watch beautiful Rosemary lounging there,
her endless limbs lead to a neat seersucker hem
drawn right up to torment our cocks;
we are keen spectators for that flash of blue.
Along the lane lines powder white in distant parallel
our eyes are fixed on Susan’s perfect breasts,
soft cotton curves in tantalizing aertex rhythms
they rise and fall serenely as she hurdles by.
Then for a moment Leslie flies upon the Tuesday breeze
and plummets to the sand, her perfect bottom dusted brown,
her bottle knickers having disappeared somewhere,
we boys gasp as one and roll onto our stomachs.

© Graham Sherwood 4/2011

Goodwill

As you bathe in this infectious faux adulation,
the city streets awash with cheering faces,
remember mother.
Sold into the royalty trade, like some gentry slave,
a frightened rabbit set with the hounds,
always destined to be quarry.
But you have snared a fox, a wily spirit too,
whose diamond eyes are chiselled stones
that yearn for what?
And do you truly love her?

© Graham Sherwood 4/2011

Friendsbook

What strangely distant friends we are?
having never seen each others face,
heard a voice, touched the hand, shared a kiss.
Is your name real?
or just a clever camouflage, to hide your sex,
your home, your spouse, your life.
What is it that you wish to hide?
Then little pieces of your self slip through
in comments, questions, quips and thoughts
that slowly pull away the painted veil
to let me see the friend unmasked
by clever words, those very clever words

© Graham Sherwood 4/2011

Face to Face

My cheeks hang uncomfortably, side by side,
the uninvited guests who didn’t ring ahead
and now stand on the doorstep
with teetering embarrassment.
Under his impassive, gentle patient stare.
I gently grate my teeth,
the bottom lip pushed right up tight,
to a winsome grimace, my father’s face
with crooked lines of cobblers’ tacks, dangling there.
Am I unwittingly becoming him?
In sorrow, with a tear about to seep,
a buried sob-sigh draws it back
to the safety of the duct unseen.
His unsatisfactory, saddened, helpless gape.
And with the helpless concentration of next doors’ cat
himself transfixed by the staccato baton
of a squirrel’s tail,
I find myself remembering him,
Amongst the pink white gauze of hawthorn bloom

© Graham Sherwood 3/2011

Harbour Wave

You birthed me, fed me, warmed me.
For years I held your hand and you guided me.
As I grew you let me go, to walk alone,
to forget your voice, to change my clothes,
become a man.
I began to gouge, to rape and burn,
in avaricious oblivion, shrugging
at the weary grimace on your face,
passive, pained and desolate.
So back you turned,
without warning and in magnificent retaliation
to chide me, as an irritating flea,
shaken from the wet dog’s tail
to teach me once again, humility
respect and sense of place.

© Graham Sherwood 3/2011

Mood

(Just an observation of dreary days).

Within twenty minutes the sky had thickened
from piercing blue to murderous slate,
the night cloth over a parrot’s cage.
Clouds, dense and blurred, draped and folded
as silk sliding down the bars.
We both look up as birds might do.
Apprehensive,
before settling down to the resignation
of another uninspiring day.
On terra firma we aimlessly prowl,
no contact but aware,
and having circled like frightened pugilists
both take a place.
Me to read,
you to scowl.

© Graham Sherwood 1/11