Being their livings, Homer, Shakespeare, Joyce,

Distrusted words, distressed them oftentimes,

And played them down, their fecklessness villainies

Congenial mineral, vegetable, animal, all

Grand luxury of bluster

Deprecation taints their lustres, soaring spirits,

As to outdo themselves, they preached hypocrisy

Feted their works create word-waves atomic,

They irradiate ages, store frissons yet to factor

Out of this box of paradox, who might redeem them

As Plato the poet strictured all verse from his

Perfected Peace

And those who prefer themselves an injured innocent

Too often protest too much?

Wrought words great powerful deeds of God; thus are they

Holy things; as is that Word conceived for us

In Mary; our dear Light

And like his sword which flames at Eden’s closed off

Fallen Gates

That Angel wields, and handles twisting, burning,

Turns both ways

Dividing the heart by penetration, piercing good

And searching evil; so revealing, to our bitter shames

And our chastisement, how our deeds devolve

By them are writ indelible calls fashioning our names:

The work of worthy words

Making and stating is one thing; a test assayed

Best single-eyed

One trained on, even strained upon, the dark and

Demon earth

In consonance, connection; fettered tethered ‘in the feet’

As Nietzsche saw that music has its pungent draw

Words served do fasten foremost working meaning:

Eased-out as lavish-sounding things, high chimes, breath-

Massaged coos,

Light payloads ranging waywardly, adrift and wandering

Or as caprice; a pomander, or lightly squandered dole

Cast impostures; impressions butter-over honey-lovers

Fold sumptuous covers

Cellophane shields from substance, styptic lotions spoon-devised

To slow the bloods with temporising foils

Brave words and battlings bathe-in - from a cosy chair

Mustard and gunpowder announce a flare to leisured hearts:

Action!  - less squalid traction to unrest tenured streams

Inured assured complaisance nothing concrete’s going to rock

The sweet charade

Words disengaged, detached, from works, enfranchise words unholy

Come out from the other place; promised fabrications

Refrains whose retainers make to meddle with officiously

Winding mange tout results, as though albeit innocuously

Detour the floor

Thrusting and cleaving, the sword of human tongue decides,

Either for pith and marrow, elsewise a seaside pony ride

Locked into ‘Yea or Nay’, besets the Evil One gainsayed

Or torn for a swirl of colour, maugre odour his nosegays