I am a fall-guy, spent tithes of time

Building barns and stocking farms

I built a sense of life left wanting

Set on a shelf for mending

But I can’t do it

Flattery is small beer.

What, in this latter-day, I’ve seen is

Good form nor as-per-norm forfend a sexton’s worms

Broad doors and reputations sidetrack, stretch out branch-line stations.

That the years’ occasions are right good cheer physicians

Wears fairly at the time

Heart hears the altercations running counter nonetheless

But are stopped against the skull

Where neurones hit, pick out, and pluck, say, ‘skip it’.

A confluence of victories;

To such forgets I have concurred, and many times

Since games must entertain a purpose for the present

Their object not to know the cluttered undergrowths

The nexus of our actions implicates them cover-ups.

Are sycamores our deeds, their seeds, fly wide and

Sideways

To settle, to be trodden-down; left crushed, forgotten

Bags, hauls, and fancy lanyards fill us up with surplus matters

Barnacles rich attach, are sere old salted comforters

Barricades form from musings, minds at dusk are bitter

Their tales rear walls

The spot one spots such implications is a half-light place

Met in an armchair crime-cell at the crack of dawn

Bringing in acres legacy of bugbears; gripes and follies

Scourings from little battles, but the eye that’s eagle

Cannot settle

Nor let them go, dispose these stowed, serrated, antique bothers

“As long as I keep these”, one’s wits defy, make statement

“None other’s rules; my own”

I hang, am trussed, beat-up in quarantine

Opposing - which I self-impose - at windmills hurling cushions

Bolsters whereon upholstered are my Pyrrhic spears

...here’s close to the seams, I swear, a tiny hitch...

An old-time hand-machine, its movement lightly knocking

And maybe I can, sitting here, get the thing going,

Start it, and set this business right again

Have draw thread running?

And sew, and so make close; though no-one else makes holes

On my patch.