Hide
Shhh…let’s lie low here for a while
And let our camouflage do its thing –
Let’s watch the daily rank-and-file
As it passes by on the wing.
Birds or people, far or near,
They flock till they part their ways.
If we keep still, we’ll dissapear
As they chase their busy days.
It’s good to sometimes sit and think
With a patient air and a weather eye –
Let’s slow our breaths and barely blink,
And watch the world go by.
Dig
Turning the soil is Autumn work,
Ploughing, forking, hoeing the loam,
Breaking it up before it freezes,
Driving the moles from their home.
Airing the worms out, harvesting stones,
And mining the black to bury the brown,
Dredging the roots up, combing the waves in,
Leaving the fields quite upside-down.
Undreamt
I’ve heard there’s folk who sleep but never dream –
That seems like a waste of a night,
When I think how my mind is a-gleam with delight.
But point of fact, they do alright,
Just shutting down for hours on end
Affording them the time to mend,
While not distracted by the random streams
That dreamers love to wend.
I know a girl who never dreams a wink,
She simply goes to sleep.
Her nights, she says, are always dark and quiet,
Hosting not a peep.
She’s heard, of course, about our world of maybe
And of brooding guilt,
But has never spent a single night within
The fantasies we’ve built.
I’ve heard there’s folk who sleep but never fly,
They wake like a minute has passed
A third of their life slips by so fast,
But they can’t well miss what they never amassed.
Some say they dream, but then never recall –
But how do they know they’re forgetting it all ?
Perhaps an echo that won’t quite die,
A shadow of the evenfall ?
I know a girl who feels no loss,
She’s done just fine with what she has,
With her endless deep and silent nights
Without the freeform jazz.
What matters, she says, is not what happens
In our nightly world of fake,
But rather what we do and who we are
While we’re awake.
Rockflower
Coral, that was her name –
Not Carol or Cora, but Coral del Mar.
Dressed in yellowy-pink, she came,
As if from an attic trunk or bizarre.
Prickly brittle, broken free,
Yet often shrinking into her shell –
She loved to watch the shallow sea
As if in want of a diving bell.
Traps
The books call this an igneous province,
As if a country of lava –
They also call these rocks an intrusion,
So more of an empire, rather.
But due to the terraces up the plateau,
They mostly call them traps –
Like a very slow escalator,
Till the warring flanks collapse.
Or are they prisoners to their nature,
Locked beneath the land ?
Heaving, layering, underpinning,
Mountains raised from sand –
Pushing-up from underneath
By stealth or by explosion,
To reinforce the battle
With the forces of erosion.
The books call these the flood basalts
That roll across the shield
Unstoppable, a stony horde
That sweep the battlefield.
To Boldly & Beyond
Strap in, guys, and hold on tight,
It’s gonna be a bumpy flight –
Heartbeats thump and circuits hum,
As heavens here we come.
Countdown into single figures,
One last breath and pull the triggers –
Engines fire and thrusters thrust,
And Jupiter or bust.
We’re up, we’re up-and-away !
Too late to pray,
Too late for anything but on.
The course is set,
But don’t blink yet –
Don’t want to miss the great beyond…
We’ve slipped the bounds,
But don’t look down,
Look straight ahead into the future –
Feel its kick
In spine and rib,
And don’t be sick when coming to, yeah ?
And after all that smoke and fury,
All that science, all that glory –
Now it’s all so strangely still
Atop the highest hill.
But oh, the view is worth the trip !,
As earthly problems loose their grip.
Cast off and sail the weightless sky,
Till the hydrazine runs dry.
And yes, that line is meant to say loose and not lose.
Outpost
Out here, we see them all come by,
All those that come this way, that is –
The trails round here are sparsely-spread,
And we are kind-of hard to miss.
There may be horses, may be camels,
Or shanks’ ponies – all depends –
And dogs, who have to earn their keep
As guards or hunters, or as friends.
There’s a wall to offer shelter,
Because winds and tigers can’t be tamed –
And then there are the soldiers,
For even barren parts are claimed.
So is it lonely ? Not as lonely
As the eagles overhead –
And all will come this way in time,
There’s nowhere else to go instead.
Armour
Beetles, tortoises, and nuts,
Pearls in shells and wasps in galls,
Hermit crabs in disused huts,
Rolled-up armadillo balls,
Frogs in mud and chicks in eggs,
Goods in crates and crates in hulls,
Drinks in bottles, bones in legs,
Feet in shoes and brains in skulls.
Dune
The desert is a beach
That has never known the sea,
A desiccated ocean
Where the bed has broken free,
A long-abandoned ruin
Where the rainclouds never play,
A once-abundant jungle
Where the trees have drained away.
The heat above, the cold below,
The sand will flood, the sand will flow,
And the waves are high, but the tide is slow,
And the haze is a shimmering spray.
Bio-Radio
Telepathy – could it be radio ?
Could we ever evolve to receive it ?
You’d better believe it !
Pigeon already can, you know,
Or at least, the magnetic field,
So science has revealed.
And then there’s electricity,
Made by the platypus and eel
To help them stun or feel.
And, for sheer simplicity,
We all see visible light, or course –
Well, that’s the self-same force !
But could we ever transmit ?
Even bio-luminescence,
Is a rare and gloomy presence,
Though it looks like it might fit –
Lengthening the waves it sends,
Detected only by its friends
Who see much deeper in the red –
Though still strictly line-of-sight,
And not exactly bright.
So next – a wire inside the head,
An aerial – but what does it solve ?
And how could it ever evolve ?
And the energy required
To beam-out further than a voice
Will never make it nature’s choice.
No, we’ll never be wired,
We’ll never buzz with secret speech –
At least, not till we’re cyborgs each…
Rhyming Couplets 