Under the Rock Crags

Crabs scuttle there, lonely hearts of purblind pleasure

You yearn to scoop up with a child’s shovel,

Relishing the tingle of sand’s reanimated matter.

In the corkscrewed nexus of a god’s naked palm

You discover butts and unusable flotsam

Blackened by barnacle rust from history’s rime:

The timelessness where you bear witness

To a soggy past with these craggy sentinels

Watching marshmallow clouds slowly morph

Through hazy days of mist-ridden skies.

Rock becomes pillow to your nodding head,

For one cannot sleep under destiny’s rainbow

With scattered rain eclipsing the diurnal wend

Of conflicting elements?

Your lips bear a garlanded surprise, perhaps,

Of entwining seaweed still growing yet,

Into lungs of possibly pandemic rot

Where the airs of your humanity expire

Under the crags of dubious spiritual shelter;

You’re no longer witness to urban banality

Outside where a gross mechanised landscape

Looms in retinal configurations of cold dust.

You won’t have to breathe airborne droplets

Fastening a bleak curtain of acidic rain, either:

The grey confetti choking those homeless ones

Pushing shopping carts filled with dumpster leftovers,		

While sparrows with limpid wings descend

To peck at that detritus of rife, decaying flora.

Under the crags the helix of humanity crumbles

As you finally emerge to sit atop one,

Meditating as an outcast Buddha of sorts

On the inevitability of seasons forever

Eroding these basaltic, ocean thrones –

and the secrets beneath left to other sad beachcombers?



****



Under the crags you found an old cell phone

Ringing, and the voice said “under the crags

Hip crabby beachcombers live scuttling there,

And they forage under the littoral’s rocks

Of old volcanic upheaval beneath cloud-ridden skies

Where brave explorers once ruled the sea.

They mapped nearby landscapes, my friend,

As long-billed terns strutted gaily everywhere,

Pecking for food … (Under the crags of eternity,

Or boulders of outsized granite, with gemstone stanchions

Like god pebbles thrown there by Gulliver’s sturdy hand):

Until you’re meditating with the drowning Buddha today

On the inevitability of seasons eroding these ocean thrones

You sit like a beached saviour in silence beneath …”



Then I hung up –