Work Haikus

1.

New Century Place
With shrubs slashed and bushes bare
Where now the green shoots?

2.

Reading in spring frost
Sunshine on cool water
Silent Oracle

Fox Moon Sugar

The clearing.
Circled by leering trees,
lit by the dappled glow of a baleful moon,
casts new shapes
Arcane and twisted
that grasp at the sky.

A bright dusting, then a coating
of tasteless icing
drifts,
banking mutely around the black trunks
in a chill and loveless embrace.

A silent visitor emerges
and sniffs the glass-frozen air.
He is a streak of burnt orange
rendered dazzling
stark against the endless white,
and endless black
like a stranded sun.

From the shadowed tree line,
a muffled crunch of snow underfoot
then a breath,
a fleeting ghost.

As the flakes hang from eyelash and melt on skin
the gun is levelled
and cracking the night
like thunder
a new colour is born.

Commuters

The steel lines follow and stop,
no argument breached
in the vague animosity of stale air
attended with aimless glance and slick gloss
of shoe, raincoat, case, umbrella.

To a fanfare of lurching creaks
I am born, birthed inelegant
to a churning crowd, hive mind,
that is skating hither and thither.
A frenzied nest
At the centre
of a black cathedral.

I crouch, sick and flinching
inside
clawing the shrinking walls
begging some fell apocalypse
to empty the trammelled lines these blank maps slide over
and take them away forever.

Or for me to cradle myself
foetal, shaking, weeping darkly in some cold corner
far from these crowding phantoms
that purring, tolerate by cycle and rote
that which jars so wildly
and throws me into disarray and aching panic
weighing my soul a little lighter with each new day.

And until that time,
Until horizons scatter them on ever walking paths
Away, away from me
Cowed, wan and silent
I can scarce breathe.