The dark nights are returning

Swallows massing on trees on telegraph lines

There is something heart-warming in their collective endeavour

About to take flight

Despite the odds

A red faced root

Squirrel away at something to get

Through the end of the day

When your spent when its seems what now?

Cloud cover the stone tracks the pebbles then the dirt on them the microbes mud shit

Turn back outwardly inside imploded

Shudder awake brutal dreams make the body shake

Something dark and noxious patrols the liminal space

A thought commits gross misconduct running around the house at night inhabiting the dark corners or was it the cat

A blue green impure imp

Sits on the shoulder of a Technicolor devil

Wait

Now sprinkle thunder

Next add lightning far out at sea cracking the edge of a container ship on its way to China mainland

The critic sits in his bower of broken shells pulped leaves bristles perching

Tears of a sheet

Open on another day

With all the myriad joys and tragedies that unravel

Crashing metals collide cells divide

Destinies and coincidences chance meetings perhaps

The critic wails one eye twitches

Spare change/green parakeets against brown rusted leaves of this autumn now in full bloom

Perched on the park slope at dawn just a mat for a bed

To have full control of the sense that is the caveat

“Would you like to see my scones?”

A nuclear mistake that would be

Middle management print out frenzy

Bury yourself in a pointless job

Coordinating misery for the minimum wage

Play the game

Grown up children wander the street in a toxic haze

All the joy sucked out

The neglected child / the miserable adult

Cannot make connections the ones that need to be made

So that this leads to that leads to this and so on

The implications of which / rage / indignation / waste / fury

That sideways glance