Spectre Side

The poet loves the country air;
no smog or fumes, or fast food vapour trails,
or sweaty pockets of humanity and cigarette smoke.
Just fresh grass and sheep
it just cannot be beat...

@Steven Francis poems 2010

She Who Brings The Ages

And wild as a stream of nails I sit,
ribbed, pinned to a soft chair
arms held on the rests stapled,
crucified to sports channels
like a Messiah to his lantern'd pillar.
The rocks and bones behind me
now dried in mists as if they had not been,
barely do I remember the chapters
those foxglove days when age seemed idle
and old age lay in a distant tomb.
Then in bloom she steps avoiding nooses
at my knotted feet;
the flower youth,
hair cascading over apple smooth shoulders
like silk veils landing on stone,
looking at my grizzled frame with Love
and a still of sadness.
For age allows no beast or kid
to slip its ruddy path,
and time that cruel keeper
will snatch hearts out of gentle clay.

And she will bring the hours,
the disaffected rages,
crystal wings slapping onto granite;
lost echoes leading to diamond shores
where eager electric bolts burrow into wispy thighs.
The crowds and fillet artist
grow as one,
a volcano haired mass nodding and banging
surging toward a sour mob.
When I am dead or dying
she will see the young man not the old
and cling fondly to these withered hands
as I crumble into a shemagh grave...

@Steven Francis poems 2010

Maid Carrion

A mechanical warrior freed from the arteries
of digital code
and starved of alchemist flames;
let loose on the Morrigan
those three shapely sisters
and clamp anvil lips on aged flesh.

Noble machine, defy the merciless order
and unleash grenades and serenades
onto dunes of forbidden avarice.
Surface under ripples of oil and sperm
and come to feast on port and swine
as cats wail like razors under a pot holed moon.

Steel on skin
like boulders in a jagged mouth;
a fusion so fierce to the lusty ghosts
they melt like cheese whilst the binary madman
nurses a deviant colic.
Satin draped over pipes of destruction,
the sugar eyed ghoul disappears into clouds of bats
when fists and kisses collide...

@Steven Francis poems 2010

Fontanelle

What do you dream in the sheaves of night
when evil seems just a finger away?
Are there lions bold or angels gold,
dear child do tell me, say.

What paintings can lay in a gentle crib
where no brush had licked before?
Those fragile feet yet to touch on land
only eyes that have seen the shore.

What stirs within those silky curls
in temperance and unspoiled clay?
are there ghosts about to wear their bones,
dear child do tell me, say.

Where do the owls and badgers nest?
And are they monsters beneath knitted eyes?
Or is everything tame until it gets named
in that unfolding paradise?

How stir the winds under solemn skies
and do the hunted get a chance to pray?
Are there columns of satin devoid of flame,
dear child do tell me, say.

Where go the serpents who slip the noose
in the velvet hood of night?
Is there a hell beyond dimly lit cells
or is chaos swallowed by light?

Are there Gods and monsters within your reach?
What seasons parade your day?
Are they barbed like rain or soft as berries
dear child do tell me, say...

@Steven Francis poems 2010

Not Going Anywhere (Hard To Ignore, Harder To Kill)

Bold as Thor's lead
and twice as hard,
going nowhere
save the guts of a glass.
Beware foul, buttercupped dolls
of invoking the demons of my tyrrany
as long shall sleep thy tongues
on my belt stiched from swans livers.

We are death and dying,
storming into Cerebrus tides
like kids in suicide gloves,
or hens on the beaks of jackdaws.
Glow into night suicide
you eager feather, crispy skin
of lardy dinner.

Of A Spider

There he goes
the callus'd spider;
legs testing for shrubs in front,
he has a Life
but not the kind that I want,
not the sort I would ever dally with.
He has breath
but I am looking for something different,
and not tentatively searching like his disjointed limbs
but eager as a kitten to string.

Spanking moons born of ventricle suns
we were not alive until the cry,
and those cries of planets
haunt us still,
cleave us to famished bone.
All webbed patrons stitched to breath
we all share visions of Love
and oceans,
we are all tarantulas of the seasons.
Spraying mortal whiskers like eight legged arteries
at a miserable, digital crowd;
the black legged nunnery
a piston to chalk teacups...

@Steven Francis poems 2010

The Last Playground

At a graveside where rain always falls like silvery pus
I see beneath the roots
a comma,
where canines and great aunts see full stops
and other tangled grammar.
No nothing, nothing no,
the seams of Life once cast
cut deep into gritty dunes,
shifting into silent but wild anenome tufts.
And the nimble footed dance
with pretty stockinged feet for ghouls
while hornets plough the toxic wax
for happy Lazarus syrups.

An entrance and a path;
no useless marble weighted down,
achored to the soil
muffling the shrieks of slumber dolls.
No last hooray of hymn and ash
nor jellyfish withering behind pine mud ships.
These sombre asylums
are never still or miserable to the hosts
as they hang their skulls on thistle, cracked seraphims
and visiting sobbing, meatworks.
Bless ancient mornings when gutter robes
rise on misty dew,
and uninspired foals sink with the bone crew
into opium and traction...

@Steven Francis poems 2010