If I sent you a million pounds

You would complain about the envelope.

Love for you is not giving

Nor even having.

It is wanting.

Love, in you, is wanting.

There was never anything.

It was useful – briefly.

I opened a few doors

That’s all – nothing more.

Very little

As you now know.

And – anyway – past.

Gone, over with,

Yesterday, a memory.

Already my face fades

The occasional, half-hearted

Nostalgic effort

To stay in touch

Is a chore.

Don’t smile at me

Don’t look at me

Don’t speak to me

Don’t humour me

Don’t make an effort

Don’t bother to come

Don’t try to help

Don’t make allowances

Don’t think of me

Don’t stay as long with me

Keep walking away from me

Look over your shoulder less often

Soon I shall be out of sight

My voice lost on the wind

The path back to me

Impossible to find

Do not fear –

The quicksands of time

Will embrace me.

I would not love except our love be giving

Not just between ourselves – but all the living.

All other ways will leave us sad and grieving

That path alone, the path of true receiving.

————————————————————-

This love came uninvited, free and uncontrived.

Nor could I stem its flood when once it had arrived.

Just as the light of dawn bids darkness rise and fly,

So love with its bright beams fills all my inward sky.

————————————————————-

If not incidental music to the play of love,

Passion is parade.

But if a vista from the mountain walk of love,

The heavens invade.

If not sown and nurtured in the fields of love

No growth, no flower.

But if a towering roller in the seas of love,

Then life, then power.

We pause briefly, for twenty years,

In mid-sentence.

Interrupted by two sons, a mortgage,

An Open University degree,

A hernia and early retirement.

Then, in the same breath (but in the past perfect!)

Complete it..

Chronic internal haemorrhage.

Here words can slip the leash of sound

And speak from soul to soul.

Though thoughts be vast, yet can the eye

Encapsulate the whole.

    Oh England! England, may you be forgiven

    By all the poor, the weak and the distressed.

    You yielded to the blandishments of Mammon

    And stoney-cold the heart within your breast.

B sharp, B flat,

It matters not a joteral.

Don’t be A prat,

B natural.

Sometimes I lean against a wall,

Weary with longing.

Closing my eyes, I go inside

Where thoughts are racing,

Slowly to elbow them all aside

Till you I’m facing.

Then, eye to eye, with hearts’ low call,

We smile, belonging.