Poem Raven

Raven

I knew a man whose face was set as rock

Those crags I climbed for tears in near darkness.

My father worked and worshipped at the clock.

His wife her inhibitions lost, her dress

Became a giveaway advertisement a crest

Attracting Gods, strangers to her life-long swim

Upstream with which to mate elude be pressed.

So bright your lives so more to make mine dim.

Presage Raven come sing to me in tones

to raise my bloods my vital signs my shroud.

Give me a mole to scurry for his bones

Exhume him blame him name Him in a crowd.

I dreamt she held me taught me how to feel

Inside me put a girder eye of steel

Poem - Cromer Beach

Cromer beach

 

First the clack of the flint skulls then

the scratch of the gravel displaced

finally obedient sand

where we walked easily together.

Behind I watched your steps compress

sand, pushing the water aside

the earth lighting your step lifting

you just my hand tethering you.

 

There at a boundary of blue

we watched a metallic mist come

I knew then you would be taken;

Tides are a clock counting down, up.

Our hands entwined a godless joke.

Our clambering children grown, gone.

Do not look for solace in this;

Do not look, back, forth, do not look.

 

 

James A Bullion September 2014

Poem - Just make it stop

Just make it stop

 

I am lost

My focus gone

Held like a spade

Earth coated tongue

Concrete blocking the way

Veins of my arms stiff brush strokes

 

Gin loosed pen

Musical sevenths

What gives when she

(patient as a snake), speaks lovingly?

I want my eyes out (my inner eye to see)

If I could just make it stop, tell the world

evenly

 

James A Bullion, September 14

Poem - The Edge

The Edge

I went beyond my boundary

into territory edging mine.

I crept through to leave no trace

to feel present, be primed.

 

Midnight called my 49^th year.

The trigger clicked back, I

Waited for your arrival here.

Crouched, breathing, in the black.

 

I need to lift a fever now

Having lived with it too long.

Comfort, hands in my pants, my

thumb in my mouth, pen gone.

 

A creature nears pearl eyes

serene on the woodland mist

Edging into the night a white paw.

With stoic dread I feed it wishes.

 

I am ready for first grey light

 

 

James A Bullion, June 2014

Poem - Quarry

Quarry

 

There is concrete and coal moving

The yellow trucks you had as a child

The air, birdless is choked on it

The sound is a grind of gears, a shriek

Of suspension, a doublet of knocking

As the unstoppable trucks lumber by.

 

Nearby a woman lays offered to the sky

Every part of her exposed and open on

The fertile earth. Naked on the green and

Gravel land where people walk on her

Strolling the path of her arms, her legs

To her womb where the sit and shelter

 

And hold fast to reach her eyes by stairs

And to her head finally to comprehend the

World from her prone prison below the sky

Ears choked with sound, burnt orange to

her smell and her mouth pressed closed

with chalk and rubble and a wire muzzle.

 

There is a lull of eerie expectant quiet

Before a sharp crackle and thud in the pit

Explodes the rock, raining fresh stones

Smoke rising and dust offering even cover,

People and the endless trucks still

Waiting for the dust to settle.

 

James A Bullion, May 2014

Poem - Summer Storm

Summer Storm

We lay together uncovered for the storm

Neither did we two confess our wakeful state

Heat pressed the silence gathered throughout the day

 

The pulse of light revealed the outline of forms

in love enough to incline and then to wait

for the growl boom accusing rattle of pane

 

slowly it builds, seizes the time and leaves us

morning comes, refreshed we two emerge its guests

 

James A Bullion, July 2014

Poem 2014 Centenary of War

2014 Centenary of War

I took a prayer candle from the church stained
with colour to the bright still evening and
made offering at the foot of a tree.
Veneration of a soldier and oak

Who can outlive the lives of men?

This tree.
What can shatter, splinter and still live?
Trees.
What aids platoon advancing?
Grove of trees.
Depicts men arms pleading to God?
Bare trees.
A temple for the fallen?
Thicket thorns.

I could kneel here for a thousand years bone
becoming stone decay, while the trees draw
sap, seed, and fall.  Men will still roam and fight
and tend and build in temporary steel
and stone and sorrowfully remember
the shelter of this wood where I sought life.

James A Bullion 4^th August 2014

Poem - Funeral

Funeral

For Alan Mackim

The arrival of the coffin is workmanlike

The breaking halting tribute voices hold

I look somewhere and see, really try.

The green vibrant moss

alive in the wood outside

bare branches, birdsong, nest, chatter.

At this gathering, connection

Hopping memory to mood.

A Draught of anger at life's achievement

As if we could rise above

this precise tightening futility

He was a man, real, regular, one.

Eulogy shaped a notice

to the difference he made, rehearsed

moving on, uplifted, without God.

Amongst the restless leaves,

cloying moss, damp, glistening, bacteria.

His furious energy his crucible

Man is water, gristle, sugar, electricity, no less.

At the gathering's end a surer voice

Not hope though, more measured

The bitter bark sits in the still squirrel’s mouth

I mark him, he me, together

we write the lines which will follow.

James Bullion v2 September 2013

Poem - Song for Harvest

Song for Harvest

 

My mother carries silence badly

What have I to say?

Desperate to bury this absurd poem

Words unearthing churn of hurt

Stitched from pieces of page scattered

in long since dormant notebooks.

 

Love is in the tender broad beans picked

plump as little kids.

Renewal rests in the rubbing off of garlic skins.

Dangers live in the dumb steel prongs

of the clumsy fork bayonetting spuds.

Chance will determine who comes out whole.

 

These are words written in the autumn

A song shared for the harvest. A thought

for the sprackle of dry-brown foliage

on the breeze, stronger than you imagined.

She is coming through the soil again, overwintering.

She’ll be there frozen in the new year for me to tend.

 

James A Bullion, July 2014

Poem - Man at a Window

Man at a window

His forehead resting on his forearm

Morning autumn sky leaking blue, pink

Trails of the high planes, silver lines

A perfect picture has been scored

With a knife

There are men in those machines

Where are they going?

What is it like for them, precisely?

The curled leaves on the grass, dead

Despite the effort of the dew,

Conjure fallen birds who can never unfold

Never prosper, being beyond fear and fall.

His fear is to turn around, face the life

Of the house, the war

Still in him allowed to pan back

Pushing him on, weaponless

James Bullion 14^th October 2012

Poem - Friend

Friend

To conclude I think this;

He is caught and guards himself

until he escapes into the dark,

grabbing his keys from the table.

But everywhere you go you hear memory.

So he flees but cannot go far

so he writes a note. To me I’m afraid.

The note from him contains a CD made for me

which I puzzle in my pocket on the way to work.

Driving late and fast I fizz it in. I overtake and listen.

Is that The Only Cowboy in Sweden –

singing about the rain?

Slowing, I remember to love him. Because I can.

They washed Roman soldiers outside the cities

when they came back bloodied and dirty from war.

They bathed them. Not their wives. Low women.

On behalf of the people. Before dawn.

What did Diocletian say to his crowd of men?

The waited, newly home, for the born sun to dry their skin.

I looked it up. It is this. ‘Now you have completed the unforgivable

for me, forgive yourselves. Do not wait for the enemy’s wounds to heal’.

I have left four messages for him. On the same lines.

James Bullion 28^th March 2013