A life has something personal going for it

There’s something personal about each day of life

The public politicians have a husband or a wife,

Or mother, daughter; seek their pleasant sheltered quarters

From freak and feral, intimate ills, besides

We are tied by the feet to the ground; whether it’s

By anthracite or gold we’re digging; whether

You star in a million movies or your job’s

Clean out the pigs.

One’s star - it lives one’s own - our time’s a wind soon blown

We are perishable descendants through a line

From Adam’s rib

Stairways and ladders always start with one small step

Jacob’s as far as heaven; and yet when winding gear

Draws on apace

The welcome doors stand open in our elevator race

Atop the lofty rise of nations, arrived as Head of State

Or in a car on cable raised against the heady flights

Of storied stairs where mutual millionaires would be

Contesting, hauling-up their freights, to top

Whereat a stop - the escalator jerks -

Irks whether your ascent was motive-powered or got

Fiercely by works; one step and then another, and,

Nowhere to go

The bathroom shelves, the dance-cards for ablutions,

They’re still full

Dispelled, the swell impressionable delinquent daisy dream

The crooked lottery ticket scheme,

Earth will not change, remains, goes airily on round

With just one moon

The crud between the toes keeps forming; wormings

For pets

Continue, and your shoes wear out as quickly

Even at a half a grand a shot

There’s no getting off, on rum and rollerskates

This planet

No skyborne cycle rides, no Federation ships

Are keeping up a landing page wherein you write yourself

The story of our lives derives to coffee spoons.

Only a lonely child designs on crowns and thrones

A beaten-up hope projects for clover meadows

The guy in a scrape or the girl in a contretemps

Of bothers

Sinking on tired tears because fate’s amulet is broken

Pining on fired desires, which were, but never spoken

A bow on a silver cloud is lifted, as suffering interns;

Places up hired ladders, stairways, to the hectic ledges

Where amphetamine is touted, or, as last preserve, a fall

Lustre in Day-Glo lives in gutters; there are care’s

Infatuations

Incentives to bust-out, cleave through captive circle

A timber and a truss, you lean your heavy stock upon

Merely a rose, dearly-supposed, but only ornamental tree

The seed aims to be free, away from actuality

On a chair set in a garden, as with ads for holidays

An unaccounted route of last resort on any map

And X the spot where no solution sits; so sapped

And withered

Invented bel-ami round-rumoured afternoons

Clutch, rig, to rob reality’s essential bone;

One’s conscious presence

Of being

Right here and now, awake, aware... which of tomorrows tells

---

Gather up now resources you have; think

Account appoint them

Bring in just everything your drowning semaphore

Might seize on

God has a special scope which sees the foundering lamb astray

Has a clippie ticket grateful as a Sunday’s riding planned

On a Blackpool’s seaside trams

Your boot-ties, glorious sunrise, alligators,

Wet Welsh Pontrhydfendigaid; all here, they shall remain;

All stares in solid matter as a consternation,

Impediment as dense as thunderstorm blocked drains

The tyranny of the present lives uncompromising

The sitting tenancy of place – intrudes completely

Being is physicality - and inescapable;

Will not be shifted, lifted - ours to own it -

And accommodate

New air from somewhere clear, unjaded, undegraded; needed

To spirit your dry carried hang-down lungs

Commissioning extension, presenting novas further polar,

Than corporeal, usual, broken-up, lead-lined, retainders

Our ending’s resting-rooms……..

So to a poor and forked humanity’s best-renowmed

Most-sound illustrious Name