China

A flicker of stealth

No more,

A shimmer in the dark

Was it more?

The smug, glowing edifice

Now in night’s shapeless orifice;

The long, paved drives,

Finally free

From envoys and their wives;

The wrought iron gates

Had long seen off

The last of the motorcades.

The copious cellars

Drained,

Polite goodbyes

Feigned.

As the marble hallways emptied,

And boudoir-doors were shut;

The masks slithered off, unhurried

And treacherous coats were cut.

The waters had changed colour

And they swam deep,

And as the night settled around

The charade was laid to sleep.

Dragonflies

On a warm summer’s day,

They rode on a lazy breeze;

Floating, gliding, darting, banking,

Diving, spinning with ease.

Their soothing buzz filled my ears

As I drifted off to sleep;

Steadily the afternoon ebbed,

And dusk began to creep.

I woke with heavy eyes,

To the murmurs of the dark;

And alone in the night so stark,

I missed the dragonflies.

Crystals of Sugar

Crystals of sugar in their asymmetry

Lay scattered on the table,

It seemed to me like divine geometry

The foundation of our fable.

Like kite-strings they tugged on the sun rays

That crept in through the window,

A twinkle leapt off a crystal edge

Another shinnied up from below.

It suddenly seemed that summer

Was a charade for their appeasement,

It seemed the sky they lay framed against

Was in fact their stately raiment.

Thoughts began to coax me

Of the gentle harshness of the crystal plane,

Somehow the story of eternity

Lay in that miniature domain.

I brushed my fingers along their grain

And felt the roughness of our creation,

Overcome by a cool shiver of curiosity

I had to look within.

I felt certain I would unearth

An unforeseen but expected veracity,

But a stark white wall suffused

And I found a strange opacity.

They clung to that turbid mystery

As the day progressed,

The hunt for our history

Would have to be laid to rest.

And I was left to wonder

How many such worlds pass beneath the eye

How many loiter out of sight?

And then the crystals took their secrets

And dissolved in the light.

Apsolunius

Apathy, solitude, lunacy and genius

Stealthily prey on a chosen few;

How wickedly they deny them

The vindication of their worldview.