MERDDIN WYLLT BY THE FIRESIDE ( from Book of Voices)
I wear my clothes counterclockwise.
My shoes on backwards.
I know the squint.
The footprints, sprait and scent
Of demons and angels,
Know the words for weed and herb.
I tread with care, can recite
The tree of ancestors, the cries of beasts,
The line unbroken back
To warrior gods and giants.
And yet I cannot cast from me
The dream of endless cities,
The cantankerous clamour
Of the multitude, dull and deceitful.
I am good and bad with art and skill
Yet cannot unpeel from eyes this
Pall of paltry appeasements,
The children of lack walking
Endless square desolation
Who know too much,
But in the wrong ordering;
Whose priests draw paper gold
And silver dust
From bellies disbelieving and gnawed;
Whose bones grate chalk and sleepless;
Whose days neat piled and numbered,
A clarity of vast apathy, bright coloured
In flicker cold fires.
Stumbling through floods,
Warring ever the wrong foes,
Unbelieved, unbelieving,
A roaring tumble to consensual void.
We shall slam, it seems, to senselessness,
Yard by yard, ungrow, untend, untread,
Grow slim and thin and lustreless;
Leafless in Spring, sapless in dawn,
Know neither sun nor moon;
Shun light, fear dark, ignore warnings.
The stories new and feckless
Repeated endlessly, a lullaby
Of excuse.
Eaten up, burnt, gagged on smoke,
A scum of oil, a bitter silence,
A wormwood of tears.
—
( The Book of Voices will be a work of pieces arrived at by chance, words floated insistently at random times, other voices, mine or from elsewhere, who can say…)
simonhlilly 