Martin Jenkins Poetry

Monument.

I am a derelict ghost tower

Full, with memory shadows

That flitter like the fluttering bats

Echoing, in my dank, empty sepulchral depths.

Once life and laughter

Burned inside my walls.

Now hopes, like years have past

To fade into the gloom that is strewn

By cobwebbed tears, around what might have been……

Your House.

I called at your house today,

Your house where we had that first deep kiss

Where we loved, caressed and found elysian bliss.

Your house that reaches into my coloured dreams

Of red silver and gold, in which echoes of pain sweep,

With an aching current, from my own depths

To foam and crash in the most cataclysmic waves.

I called at your house today,

Only you don’t live there any more.

I’m years too late.

Fascism.

A noble ideal: that only the Aristos should rule,

A society Strong, Ordered: Hierarchical

Yet paradoxical.

The denial of freedom, criticism and exchange

Strangles life and narrows its range.

So that not the best but the stupid, the sycophantic

The docile, the unimaginative mediocrecracy

Rule,

Paradoxically.

Dawn Chorus.

Dawn chorus,

Birds. Rhapsody:

Such tones are the architecture of another world pure.

I wish you were here with me,

We could both share the rapture.

But you are not here.

That is why sleep has flown

And I’m awake here alone,

With the dawn chorus.

Love.

Love is a double-edged sword,

It can cut down the dead wood

To let the luscious light shine

That brings forth feelings warm and good,

It can break open barrels of intoxication fine.

Or it can slash and break,

Cut out your heart and leave an empty ache.

Love is a double-edged sword.

Free.

Today a decision was made,

And all restrictions allayed.

No more haunting by ghosts from the past,

No more being strangled by dreams iron cast.

Chained to a situation for so long,

Now free to laugh, dance and sing in life’s song.

Freedom in Rapture.

Rapture in Freedom.

Sky.

I embrace the sky,

And you ask Why?

It is because it is like my life:

Rich, affirmative and happy. Reaching

To ward’s the horizon of unwritten future,

Different Weather as so many experiences

None of which I deny or regret,

But each and all, I love.

The Wheel Turns.

My spring emerged in the autumn,

When I awoke from a hibernating sleeping

To the final days of the summer sun,

With yellow wasps and mellow fruit seeping,

Leaves rusting beneath grey skies of revealing silence

Rotting fruit thru which the seeds of life commence.

My past history is autumn but I am the spring.

The spring we had together I toast with red wine

To affirm wholeheartedly, a time now past,

Now awake I see the particular and all: divine

This my harvest after my long summer fast.

I have recovered; I am the universe that affirms,

Being is becoming for the Wheel turns.

Eight and Nine.(August and September).

Between the last quarter of the eighth

And the hour of nine,

The dark descends enveloping all

For the nights are becoming in – drawn.

Between the last quarter of the eighth

And the month of nine,

Being announces atrophy and Fall.

Autumn returns, again.

Unrequited.

I simmered so long for you,

For your shoulders, breasts, neck

For your mouth and more,

Yet it was never requited.

Do pans of water simmer forever and more?

No, the energy sublates

From water into steam.

I no longer dream,

About you.

Immanence.

My feet are the soil,

My legs the becoming of being,

My loins the fertility of the wheel of life,

My heart is the vitality,

My shoulders the horizon,

My eyes are the sky,

And my Mind is the meaning of it all.