Beauty

You curse me with your limpid smile
and I, wishing you a statue,
desire to move about your perfect alabaster form
from nape to heel,
chin to toe,
fashioning with closed eyes
the stolen long departed days
when youth meant nought,
and beauty lay meaningless
with our discarded clothes.


© Graham Sherwood 8/2014

Age Old

We drink fine wines, kissed by the craft of many ages
and without words tell each other of their riches.
Our eyes, themselves having matured through much-troubled times,
now surrender helplessly to this potent chemistry,
a knowing look replacing a thousand care-worn words.

Thus when our prophets are unmasked as mere charlatans
and our dreamtime chaos of smoke and mirrors clears,
the golden age of our aspirations completes,
and like fine wines we will lie together
silently, to gather the dust of a thousand perfect reveries.


© Graham Sherwood 8/2014

82-All Out

We bade farewell to a man today.
He, in a sea grass box that will burn well,
us doleful and dressed to the nines,
unsure of etiquette, embarrassed,
surreptitiously seeking out old faces long unseen.

His children, in their forties, dutifully calm
try hard to grow up in thirty minutes.
A witty cricket poem that deserved a clap
but no one dared,
the worried looking funeral DJ
tasked to manage the three chosen tunes,
the pause before Glenn Miller a tad too long.

Fine words, done and dusted
and the rosemary sprigs are sniffed,
then gently laid upon the dead man’s chest,
his freshly minted widow sobs,
flushed and flustered in her grief,
a broken husk, hunched in her pew
obliged to greet us one by one
our condolences cutting welts
like forty lashes of the cat.

Then to our man’s favourite pub
a sausage roll, samosas, chips,
such curious grub.
Old men stare, glazed and ponderous into space
to wonder where the short straw will flutter next.



© Graham Sherwood 6/2014

Fortnight

I stole your perfect halo
and those pretty silver wings,
tarnishing them with a darker love,
a barbed lust
that I knew would be my undoing.

As you tried to clean me,
with velvet, silken oils and chocolate,
my eyes, fired by brilliant pokers
and bristling like icicles,
stared at your vacant heaven.


© Graham Sherwood 6/2014

Future Past

Alabaster wrists
lost on pure white cotton
garnet penknife runes
your anguish, mapped,
etched, left for me to decipher,
these are the hands I hold, I kiss,
conduit for all emotions,
so why was I not to know of this,
this butchery,
your final act of supplication?
My guilt now hangs heavy,
separating hope from harsher eventualities,
a Libran scale that teeters
precariously between oblivion
and loss.

© Graham Sherwood 5/2014

Seirene

Lured here and lost,
I hit the craggy rocks
and spill into the foaming waters,
transfixed,
your pure beguiling beauty
still busy in its song.

I scan for paths around me,
footprints fade in sodden sand
return implausible
if ever I have the will,
seduced,
amongst the foment's revelry

You hold a bloodied mirror shard
to show a sorry broken man
unrecognisable, unkempt, undone
who's wide eyes,
milky as dead fish
stare panting at your ivory feet


Graham Sherwood 05/2014

Outlines

If I peer hard enough
I can still see the impression of your body
a ghost amid the tumbled cushions,
and in the woven pattern of a table lamp
I imagine your shadowy features in profile.
An empty wine glass waits patiently,
I leave it there on purpose
and the shapeless knitting bag
wedged between the legs of the table,
like Bagpuss I used to say.
Your clothes and your scent
still hang and linger in the bedroom,
but it is here on this sofa
that your image rests.
I can see you, I make myself see you,
but I cannot hear the bells.


© Graham Sherwood 4/2014