HITLER’S DAFFODILS

Wonderful proud clusters,

Quiet in green shirts on the bank,

Standing tall to herald the inoffensive Spring,

Your shiny golden best is breathtaking.

Nurtured by the nihilistic darkness,

Bulbous in blunt armoured love,

Life is unfolding in floods of sap,

Soaring to parade.

Such unquestioned lemon brightness,

Unbidden in the wicked wilderness,

And the staring little man passes,

Distorted, distracted:

Grotesque reflection

Of horror and light.

You remain oblivious,

Uniformly erect in your single pleasure.

Colin Morgan  

WHERE

I imagine running with you on golden sand
Pressed between toes
Laughing to the laughing blue water
To swim free
To run and taste the wind
To lie in the dusty warmth

To see green, hear gentle summer sounds
On days so long that they wrap around
and fingers on clock time stick in the afternoon

To gently tease away the edges of the mind
leaving a flood of calm

Taking in real life on an island



Colin Morgan 
  

OUTSIDE SPACETIME

Let me out - freedom spirits august reason
Sending each thought with passion

Think of here as bent from time
The objects fickle as young love

Think of soul as forever bent away from time
To stand spired through reality forever

Think of body as ruled by rules
Subject to a cliff top fall

Think of love - love beyond reason
As lasting outside the universal all

Meeting souls meld in fever
Allowing the dot forever to fuse

As death removes us from clock world
This moment - it can never close


Colin Morgan  

MY COMA, MY WORLD

The news of my demise is premature, but I cannot refute it.

The machine I occupy knows the date and time, but not I.

The radio may speak, sing and dance, but I pay no heed.

My Facebook page is a lasting memorial I cannot see.

I am still sixteen and unformed, but old as a Pharaoh,

And like them, I lie hidden away for an age.

In this place there is no darkness, but my eyes are closed.

There is a chink in my doom, but no light penetrates.

The game is a plan filled with waiting, hope and stillness.

Those that love me are holding me close, far scattered as they are.

Those I love are hovering around me, and though I am so heavy in them,

They reside as bubbles that float and bump above my bed.

The clock on the wall, watching, makes no comment.

My months are rolls of the Moon, yet the Earth is still.

Medicine may be my true friend, but not just yet.

As I lie here on this threshold, in sight of the Light, live on for me.

Take each day you are granted, with me inside you,

And let my love play in the sunlit fields of your mind.

Colin Morgan

The Nazis and Us

Lest we forget the hands and eyes

That plundered lives -

Those Fascist hands and eyes

That freely plucked the lives

In a formal casual administrated abomination

Churlish in decadence and carelessness

With the hats and badges and nothing else fathomable.

Lest we forget:  This hand and eye

Writes and reads - 

This free hand and stern eye

That recalls and tells

How the formal administration casually served up

With relish, a hope of a final solution

A universal death in neat typewritten lists.

Lest we forget this hand and eye

That might turn upon us all -

This hand to twist and eye to glaze

Turned to the Fascist way

Grim reaping and treading through the living world

Closed and charging with blackened might

Pushing death to succeed with a blazing distorted right.

Lest we forget the hands and eyes

That are blown away -

Those child’s hands and eyes

Blasted and plucked

In the blind indifference of the rocket blast

Sent by the boiling blood of a Fascist heart

Against the boiling blood of Fascist hearts.

Lest we forget our hands and eyes

That are led and fed by Grace -

These our own hands and eyes

Treasuring all lives

Those we cannot see linked small and large

In families wrapped precious along the land

In our world of life where we are taught to be free.

Colin Morgan

FOCUS

That tune in my head again - “Golliwogg's Cake-walk”.

Marching men and machines to the horizon.

Beams of sunlight flicker off the brass.

Dour politicians, inflated by loathing, drink-in their might - their generous expense.

Shrinking...

Turning down a side street,

Where cafés, ranged empty like theatres in mourning, await -

Their lone monochrome waiters humming, tapping feet.

Eyes follow me as I am quietly detained.

Collapsing in again...

Looking across my cell: Six feet.

A chink of tortured light arrives from nowhere.

Same year, same concrete.

Same Nile Delta stain weeping down the ghost-graffitied wall.

Colin Morgan  

AND THEN NO MORE

It is not that there was a sudden rush of wind,

A change in the breeze,

A breath.

Like a Pharaoh’s mouth

The gape was silent,

There was no expectation,

No beckoning;

A black hole

with the desert sand a film on the parched lips.

It is not that there was a light of joy,

A glint of promise,

A spark.

Like a Pharaoh’s eyes

The gaze was hollow,

There was nothing to see,

No welcoming;

The sockets shells

beneath a bandage of filth across the brow.

It is not that there was a sea of fragrance,

A waft of sweetness,

A scent.

Like a Pharaoh’s skin

The aroma was dust,

There was no tang,

Mere dry brittleness;

No taste but a soft bitterness

from the rasping snake’s skin shed three millennia ago.

It is not that there was a burst of song or wailing,

A cry in the dark,

A whimper.

Like a Pharaoh’s larynx

The cords were petrified,

There was no timbre,

No sound but oppression;

The ear felt no disturbance

from the silence trickling long in the tomb.

But there was an imperative,

A need to provide,  

To insist.

Like a Pharaoh’s life

Great power surged forth,

The piling of stone on stone,

A great monument rising;

Much adoration and dreaming

and a deep born incestuous love that lingers still.

Colin Morgan  

NIGHT JOURNEY

Once upon a long year, until it was begun,

A silence blankly reigned, we were devoid of fun.

And never did we realise, time was slipping by

As the TV yipped along, sapping all our sighs.

Then out from a corner, stepped a mystic beast,

Bowing but not smiling, with an invite to a feast.

Out into the night we flew, with all the lights a blur,

Eyes glistening with fear, on the beast with golden fur.

To a lazy mirror lake, where we set down on a boat,

With lights and dancing shadows, to spend the night afloat.

The eve was young and pretty, the revels just begun,

When out of the blackness, a terrific storm did come.

We tightened down the vessel, and cowered ‘neath the mast,

Sharing warmth snuggled up, whilst the night did last.

But come the raging morning, with no escape in sight,

Our mystic beast did rouse us, pressing us to flight.

So buffeted and blasted, we flung into the air,

And driving through the spray, soon arrived at its lair.

And there among the foul rocks, we passed some hours in fear,

Whilst the creature twitched and glowered, ‘til the storm began to clear.

Hungry as we were, we dared not hope for bread,

And the beast was clearly troubled, as it turned to us and said:

‘You have followed me too far, too far to make it home,

‘Now you become kin with me, and along with me will roam.

‘The boat is lost, the lights are gone,

‘We are the last, we shall be one.’

Then began our third flight, across the swollen lake,

Where the beast with her cries, did a powerful mantra make.

Now in this barren range, away from earth and you,

We see life broad and simple, fresh and full and new.

So any quiet evening, with nothing much to do

Look sharp, content and occupied, or we’ll come and visit you!

Colin Morgan  

NEEDS MUST

I took my love for you and drowned it like a kitten
But I will still talk to you now and then.
As the body rots inside, only the soft fur is left.
But I remember that look from those eyes;
The irretrievable flicker of life is remembered
But lost in the tight mouth and eyes of death.

Can we expect civility when cymbals crash in mind?
Why split open the wound sewn so tight?
When might a relaxed air rest between us?
How long can the anguish crush each move?
When are the embers too cold to be rekindled?

Who can resurrect my pretty soft drowned kitten love?


Colin Morgan  

IT’S EASY

Welcome, sundry Humans, to spaceship Enlightenment.

Your journey will take approximately two of your Earth minutes.

Please sit and relax a moment.

Now, look out forwards through the window at the space station centre point marker.

Close your eyes.

Imagine the length of the distance you have just seen, as you have been taught.

Now shrink yourself inside your head until you are a black dot.

Feel that you are weightless, tiny, out of space and time.

Now remember the distance to the marker and think of each one of your ten fingers.

Increase the distance in your head by ten times.

Hold it.

Think of your ten fingers and increase it again.

Hold this distance – the baseline of about ten kilometres is achieved

Imagine and increase again by ten.

Now imagine your line of ten in a cube of one thousand – ten by ten by ten.

Pull them in your mind and string them out row after row.

See the thousand and multiply your distance by this factor.

Hold the distance.

Think of the thousand dots in a cube again, line them up and multiply the distance again.

See the length of the line.

The distance you can see is the distance from your Sun to the Earth.

See the thousand and extend the line.

See 500 and extend the line.  Add ten more.

Good.

Hold it.

Now take your mind point and ‘step’ across to the other end.

Hold it.

Feel that you are complete.

Hold it.

If anyone is lost at the moment, please hold up your hand. Good.

Now you are ready - let go of the line from your head – feel the snap.

Good - open your eyes.

We have arrived in your solar system, your shuttle craft will be leaving shortly for Earth.

Please check your calendar has adjusted correctly:  Today is November 17th 2113.

Please take all your belongings with you as you leave the spacecraft.

Virgin Hops thanks you for your custom.

We look forward to seeing you again soon.

Colin Morgan  

HELLO FROM 2040

I am the first baby Martian,

My parents as familiar in metal suits as dressing gowns,

My world a hemisphere of tech.

My head is light, my limbs slender - I am their Space Monkey.

I would bound around like a lemur, but there isn’t the space.

Oh, and your Earth is a star.

I can find you in the sky - a blue point of light against the cosmic pin pricks.

So many stories I have heard – open air, China, Pitcairn Island, camels, London, dragons. Oceans, flowers, rain. 

And people.

Should you ever fall out among yourselves and stop sending our cargo here

we will watch your silent star in the night,

until our eyes close too.

Colin Morgan  

500 Words on the Inside of a Ping Pong Ball

This is a space not often contemplated

but moved violently at our whim and to the rules of flight.

As I look, I can imagine the space in there where organic molecules fly,

Looking for a way out from a serious continuity.

Is it dark inside? During the day I think not.

There is a smooth light, whitened, dull as toothache.

It hovers.

At night there is a black stone within, powder soft.

It listens.

Travel round with me now on the inside, that eggshell curve so unnatural to a bird - nothing points the way.

Tap and try to escape, from our holy white blankness,

Into the roaring, jagged, fierceness of fractal space.

We are dimensionless in here

and bound as if by a forgotten treaty.

We are glum

and do not even nod to each other across the space within.

Wait.

There is a ridge, an equator.

We are of two halves,

sealed like lips of the grim.

This line, this circle of orientation, holds promise and fuels our fantasies

of outside glamorous disasters,

of luck, and of an end to anything.

We that are without end, salute you that are without.

This is harder than I thought.

There is a tiny space to describe.

It dwarfs an ant – an ant being its opposite;

all tiny edges, limbs, decisions, and work to carry a future.

The inside of the ball lacks a voice, like an extinct race.

The inside surface would offer resistance but cannot be accessed, just out of sight.

The inside is there now, but for all time?

No, it can and will be violated.

A stamping foot crushes a demon’s smile into the roundness.

A sharp probe penetrates into the space like a death seen from the inside.

The atmosphere of the ball so punctured becomes mingled with our crowded air.  Shouts and alarms reach the interior unbridled.

There is a new dawn with no separation.

This unnatural object has a manufactured odour.

An aromatic pong, acrid and alarming,

emanates from within a punctured ball.

There has been no escape since its capture

at the very moment of moulding

in that lightest of factories

in some unimagined distant land.

The world over, there are these little spaces, like in our hearts; so quiet.

Lying in drawers, out on tables, or somewhere and out of sight.

They are waiting to be taken and bounced around at our whim.

We need not be careful, there are plenty to go round:  We are in control.

In the course of time, the inside smoothness might give way to a coarse hairiness.  This would be so inappropriate.

It would make the ball heavier, darker, unreasonable, prone to violence, not to be trusted.

It will not happen.

There are no corners.

There is nowhere to hide.

I am running out of ideas and, looking in for inspiration, I find a small blank space behind my eyes.

I blink and we are done.

Colin Morgan  

NO SHIRT

Peeling off my anorak
underneath is skin

blistered and blotched
numbers tattooed in ranks

caved chest
breathing a little

human being
being concentrated here

concentration here
on skin

anorak back on
going, going on

Colin Morgan 

DEATH at my BIRTH averted

had i been allowed to die i
would have been there,
an extra at heaven's party,
pure, perhaps a little slow on the uptake,
but warm and cosy with you all.

but i lived by decanted blood and '60s tricks,
and becoming divided by trivia
am a lost dead soul among the living now,
committing crime in suburban banal precincts
and a blackness covers me.

so does fire await me on that
dawn when satisfying
the final
call?



Colin Morgan  

CAROUSEL

                                                                                                                       

When you contemplate ending it all – where do you see yourself?

Away on a rock with sea rising and the wind tugging at your clothes, sucking you over that edge?

Or perhaps you are sidling into a mirror lake, cold as fingers, slippery as phlegm, to slide from view - to gasp and heave to nought?

Or looking down the long, so long tracks, to that vanishing point, as a bright one-eyed mutant bears down blaring?

Or quietly in the bathroom, the door locked, the water brimming, the razor kind on the shroud white towel?

Or perhaps in the kitchen, the small bottle hard clicked open, the contents scoffed in fistfuls?

Or – I know - in your garage, with water on the floor and a screwdriver in the plug socket?

When you conjure a scenario to do yourself in – when do you see it?

At a brisk dawn, stretching and yawning to meet you half way?

Or as a lobster broiled in the heat of the sun at the noon of the day?

Or at the night’s gate where you fade together into the softest bed of dark?

Enough.

Enough.

All is sweetness now I hear your voice again.

Clear, and the lark is rising, the moon held still in her arc in blue.

The children are fed and abroad.

The river is deep but steady.

The fish are hiding.

Bring me a flower from the garden and I shall rest a while.

Colin Morgan  

How are we to remember?

The silence roars in every space

The cold

The abandoned relics of civilisation passed

The desert where the bloated corn ripened once

The river bed with bones where the spawned shoals wove their dance.

How are we to continue?

Our actions of our own bidding

The ease

The silence beckons but does not insist

The empty rooms collecting the unheeded light

The darkness of evening spreading into walled-in night.

How are we to love?

The distance has stretched the tendrils

The gaps

The goodbyes at train stations

The visits at the heavy points of the year

The tiny call from dots on the other side of the world.

How are we to settle?

The need has drained dry

The edge

The home waiting vast

The fridge stocked against an invasion

The beds sleeping undisturbed for a season.

How are we to grow old?

Anno domini is relentless

The clock

The lines creep ever deeper

The children approach their middle years

The body leans a little to the wind and tears.

How are we to be remembered?

The house was made a home

The days

The smell of bread

The piano and the clock ticking

The summer cat and the winter garden.  

How the family lives on

In the closeness of years

The blood

The additional loves

The new beginnings and growth

The long shared kinship of the precessing now.

Colin Morgan  

Discovery of a 1936 Riley in a Suffolk Garden

‘Even now there are places where a thought might grow...’  Derek Mahon

Behind the thickened yew hedge of an abandoned house,

among the skips and the scaffold poles,

a family of voles crowds inside the back seat of a 1936 Riley Merlin.

Their horsehair nests lie within a metallic world,

warm among the dripping toxins and rust.

Why should they crave more?

The generations weave among the jagged steel,

while far outside, wars roll on and civilisations rise.

Their tiny ways are honed to their dark deprivation,

held safe from the kestrels patrolling the morning sky.

Many are the generations, their small bodies mummify -

their home born of neglect in the Macmillan days,

when the slam of a door spelled the final departure

of the aged motorist and his veil of woodbine smoke.

He passed on that night, leaving all to slumber,

except for the voles biting through the leather, the stuffing crumbling.

Now woodworm and nettles prevail amid the general collapse,

as occasional sounds reach the dusky inside from afar -

a tractor’s throb in the field nearby, the tripping peel of wedding bells,

or the double crack of a shotgun in the distant wood.

Even now there are places where we can lose a treasure -

African wells, dried and neglected,

filled with death and dust,

a sharp smell lingering in the air, and wire grass

rustling fluid as fire on the dessicated banks;

In the village clearing, where sand trickles into tins,

a dry wall tumbles with a resigning sigh,

a hyena skull bakes dry in the sun,

a bottle winks half buried in the sand;

  - and a dilapidated motor car in Lawshall, Suffolk.

Forty years, undisturbed, without even starlight -

no expectation of the ripping back of the door -

until the sudden crack of timber.  Explorers, cameramen,

inhale the quiet remnants of pre-war peace.

With furious scurrying, like bullets through cobwebs

and holes, a culture shatters

in the sudden sunlight of discovery.

Meteoric boots land, dispersing these cloistered lives.

Grown away from the hedgerow, living free from fear of the hawk,

their eyes stare back level and expectant from pockets of gloom.

They would wish, of course, in their tiny hearts,

for us to leave them, to abandon them to their warmth,

to close the door and walk away.

Lost species - stuffed dodo and harpooned whale -

the silent island forests and the empty oceans.

‘Leave us be’ say their eyes. ‘Do not rip out our homes -

we that have lived here so many generations.

This is all we know.

Close back the door on our precious space

And let us prevail in our world of peace.’

Colin Morgan 

SEVENTEEN

I can feel in your presence the significance of the moment:
You are seventeen and engaged.
You read a childcare book,
Thinking of your man.

His ring, a recent addition to your pale finger,
Stirs admiration from you merry girl friends.
Its gold band and white glint promise a hard future,
Cold as the unknown, an unfolding of life.

Your young body is pale, pure, and soft as dawn light,
But warm.
Your eyes have in them the flecks of love.
Hope smoulders quietly within your breast.

An edge has been reached.
And your mother? Oh she doesn't mind,
For now you are the future, the warmth.

You are ready to carry the burdens of life,
Accept the brutality of truth, as any mother does.

Go in peace...



Colin Morgan