Turquoise Monster

A sound
A colour
A sensation
Golden dust
Iridescence
Candescance
Shimmer

Beer in these places
Bronze stags
Burnished metal
Chain link as fat as yer arm
Wood chunky
Pragmatic
Blackened and scared with age

Beer in glass barrels
Indented in windows
Handle reassuring and thick
Mine has a big head
Yours does not
You laugh and say it’s cider

They say they have hearts of stone
Or they are as hard as rock
But watch the chalk powder
Soft and obliterated
It is stone, It is rock
In water, soft as butter

Clay is rock
Rock that is malleable
You can form it to any shape
These people so impenetrable
Are vulnerable just like us

Even heavy basalt
Dark and heavy
May fracture
with the easiest of blows
Hard but brittle

Strength in some axes
Not in all

They say they have
Mountains of strength
Or that they are immovable
But watch the slate quarry
Welsh Mountains
Split and eroded
By the smallest creatures
Making nests
Split and eroded by the miner
Split and eroded by curious children

Every Mountain will wash to the sea
It is only a question of time
Look for the signs, the cracks
And be kind
We are all
Hard as rock

Beautiful rainbow
Garden of the sea
Looped around itself
Flowers bloom
Purple-blue
Intricacies of colour
Entwined
White sands
Azure-Turquoise
Clear and pure
The above world
A mirror
Clouded with reflected colour
Shimmer and ripple

Creakings of the mind
Send shivers down my spine
In this place
In this place
Rainbow colour shard
Memories will not be marred
In this place
In this place

I blush
And sip
Mine’s not even beer
tangy citrus malt
Shandy for me
And cider for you

Beer in the others hands
Bitter for him
Lager for her
Ale, Stout
And many exotic liquids
And the biggest of them all?
A mixer with a mixer
in a thimble glass
We laugh
We joke

Little transparencies hide
Ghosts amongst the anemones
Hiding in tentacles
That massacre

Predator in the Coral Jungle
Abundant, hungry
Always hungry
Prey in the Coral Jungle
Scared, in fear
Always in fear
A paradise of perpetual hell
An edge world
Finely balanced
Between the starving
And the eaten

Make it paradise true
Shift the paradigm
Remove the predator
Remove the hunger
Remove the fear
Remove the edge
The prey rejoice
No longer scared
No longer hunted
Rainbow flashes
Flitting everywhere
And killing
They kill
This Uneasy Eden

Bleached to the bone
Rainbow seas
White skeletons
Ghosts of what was before
No hunger
No fear
No lie
In this Uneasy Eden

Glittering skin, the sun screen sheen
Bronze torso, firm and trim
Can this be England?

In the summer time
Youth strutting
Well groomed, showing their prim

Parisian cafe sprawl
Across Albion’s pavement
Shoppers in bright colours
Flit from shop to shop

Lazily stroll beneath azure skies
If it wasn’t for those little clouds
And buskers busking out of tune
Would I believe I was home?

My mind is swimming in alphabet soup
Letters clog the synapses
And punctuation tears at my lobes
Syntax is setting down roots between the hemispheres
Hard curved consonants fill the ventricles
Soft airy vowels stuff the cortex
Metric metre measures all the gaps
Structure breaks the blood brain barrier
Shooting me through with toxins
Plot devices prize the axons loose
Verbs block the sodium pumps
Nouns hook the cytoplasm with protein strings
Adjectives pour water on the myogenic pulse
Similes smiles full of teeth at the hypothalamus
Metaphor morphs grey matter
So that I may not think clear distinct thoughts
Now I am drowning in alphabet soup
Now I am the alphabet soup
And now I am eating the alphabet soup
My mind is swimming in alphabet soup