Walking out Embraced by soft morning chill No sounds To cloud the chorus That had greeted The recent dawning No comfort in A familiar convoy of buses Full of light And nothing else A world not strange to hearts and thoughts That will never match The received insane wisdom of the unwise Listening to the words Of the sacrificial genius On the dishonoured roll of the dead Soon to be lost in our past ‘ Isolation’ copyright Geoff Francis 2020 ‘Raptor’s Plight’ copyright Geoff Francis 2018
The blade drew across his throat And the choking began Then the drowning His crime The gradual seduction Of a princess Then a queen How he longed for his bed To close around him In its sheets To sweep him Into a dream of sorts Downgrey light That should hold so much Promise Rising against a welling storm To quieten the sea To millpond safety And below Easy elegance Sliding silver Death at its lips Armed with technology Beyond any human endeavour The Blade copyright Geoff Francis 2020 Still Life copyright Geoff Francis 1997
If you don’t want to play That’s fine by me But please don’t try to change the rules Of the game If you don’t want to play copyright Geoff Francis 2012 Image created by Paul Windridge for spirit of the game by Geoff Francis Copyright Paul Windridge 2010
A dream from the night before Held her in its arms A ballerina Tripping each key That played his life The waters Seduced and sucked His uncertain step Towards The precipice Luring him close Into a time When no morning star Would rise A stolen spring A lost summer Victims of Destructive distraction A dream from the night before Copyright Geoff Francis 2020 Hunters bed Copyright Geoff Francis 2001
Throughout Our lives Without questioning We have been the prey Of so many things The dreams of others Their nightmares too The love The hate The fears Their actions Our actions What we did and they did not Things we should not have done and things should The unquestioning copyright Geoff Francis 2020 21st-century crucifixion copyright Geoff Francis 2000
Vacuum That has displaced All the air To breathe inside A victim Of thoughtless experiment Goaded on by the fallacious wisdom of the crowd No fragile threads of humanity No truth li If ever it did The breath is gone from it Leaving a child Fashioned from artificial fabric Divine And Defiyng what should be Perfection should not be The enemy of good The Enemy of Good Copyright Geoff Francis 2020 Drowning the Butterfly copyright Geoff Francis 2001
some time each day often in each cheating hour she is lost drifts further away from him from all she knew and wanted unstoppable like the waters they watch and all the love he gives is not enough
on Their bench his wife beside him in Her wheelchair together they watch the river’s flow and feel the water’s freshness as a gift in the sunshine and the shadows some time A Breath Before Dying copyright Geoff Francis 2019
There they were Too many to erase Too many to resist Any more Inside they lay In every thought and perception So righteous was their anger Chanting in a language Foreign to his ear And beyond his comprehension What filled his eyes Were lost faces What touched his fingers Were electric memories Ghosts 2 copyright Geoff Francis 2020 Bagged rhinoceros Copyright Geoff Francis 2018
Ghosts crowded in Around the door Queueing up clambering For his return to Those parts of their lives He had taken Not conceding their shared ownership Of those moments Pointing him towards a time to leave As if he had relinquished that call In some betrayal of himself By his refusal To believe in the places Where they now stood simply to exist In abandoning This place He was abandoning them all To a never-being Ghosts copyright Geoff Francis 2020
Love is the thread by which we hold onto and are held by life The quality of that thread determines whether ours is an existence of delight or misery of indifference or celebration Like dolphins at play You are delight we are celebration Copyright Geoff Francis 1985 This poem opens my collection “unNatural Heart” published March 2020