LET ME make my intentions plain.

I want to plant images in your brain.

            steam rising from tea-cup

backlit by window

steam rising into light.

I AM a Showman, and, for your delight, will parade exotic animals,

display for your close attention,

the skeletons of mythical beasts, relics of FICT and FABLE.

Tout miracles,

perform acts of wanton magic. Titilate,

Horrify and Amuse.

I AM a Pedagouge, and a Moralist.

I will impart LESSONS, PRINCIPLES,

EQUATIONS.

Intone PARABLES, speak in tongues, posePARADOX, poesy,  PRAYER.

CREATE using Precise combinations of word units, a Compound to Transform Consciousess.

I AM a SCIENTIST, an

ALCHEMIST,

            PERVERTER OF NATURAL LAW!.

I summon Fellowship, Friendship, Love.

Slough off Personality. RECALL. Personality is the PAST.

Become PRESENT.

Every exchange contains something. Some secret which can be extracted like a pearl.

            REFLECT.

a divers head head emerges in a startled displacement of water

the diver had forgotten this

air, land, sky, sun

in this way, a hundred thousand deaths and rebirths

in the course of a single lifetime

over the course of several lifetimes.

Always forgetting and remembering, forgetting and remembering.

what is, what is-

sometimes here and sometimes there.

I was invisible then,

passing unseen along inward-looking streets,

under the high, gaunt trees, stripped of leaf.

Dark bark gleaming with rain damp.

            And the grey slates of the rooves-

gleaming with rain damp.

Wet wing of the Cormorant.

Inland now and fishing the canals

Black shapes swallowed by water,

ripples radiating around an absence.

Sky of forgiving grey.

Blocks of muted colour. Clouds low in the sky.

Haphazard arrangement of material and form,

planes

of brick and pebbledash

boundaries

of courragated iron and barbed wire.

Lichen on roof tiles.

Slow rivers of mud;

Industrial Effluent.

Tyres.

Shopping Trollies,

a landscape of light-industry, derelict warehouses,

rat warrens, buddliea bushes, gregarious birds.

The low marshland of the East.

Roads follow rivers

east to estuary,

The Wind is salty, carries

sea-birds with it, flapping

and squawking.

I uncovered gardens of wild weed and flower behind churches and railway tracks.

Alongside indolent rivers and neglected canals.

Gardens of brick and rubble.

Rust gardens. Knots of metal.

Dandelion and Crab apple,

bindweed and hawthorn.

Gravestones take root

in the shadow of Yew trees,

Flower Sporadically,