
THREE SECRETS
The first tremor:
July 1974.
It’s been 3 months.
Sat on granite breakwater,
Peering out to the horizon.
Sun sallow
Ripped from the sky.
Gloom.
Sea Sniggers
in whispers…
Seen it all before,
but this is the first…
And now is
Not then…
Then was a fear,
Knowledge a gasp!
Nothing will come
of this age.
The second tremor:
July 1982.
one month away.
The tree is gone.
Just a stump.
I’m close to the edge…
A headlong fall through time!
Stolen years :
Thirty, count them,
lost by mistake,
a space-walk,
untethered…
and fall towards
the brutal sun.
No escape
Just waiting, watching…
The promise is
worth the waiting!
The third tremor:
April 2010.
A party surrounds.
It comes out of the blue,
out of context,
in amongst family…
She loves me!
I have always Loved her.
It takes a toll.
Months of hidden hopes
and stolen kisses.
So long the wait
so deep the need,
And the tremors…
Foretold in the first
denied in the second
and the third affirmed.
Thanks be on high!
Copyright Dale Beck 2018
AT MY MOST BEAUTIFUL
I am only beautiful in your eyes,
You take the ugly out of my psyche
Your grace gives me a sense of purity
A sense of the eternal godliness
Which exists just beyond understanding.
My only blissful moments are all yours
There can never be another because
You fill my heart to the brim beloved
My soul is salved by your proximity…
So this is faith, so this is believing
My world begins and centres in your eyes
There is no end because we are now one…
this is not a flower but a prayer
Because God only presents through your Grace.
Love, the only way to live, in your grace…
You are my cipher to the heavenly…
You are my love and one love til the end.
Copyright Dale beck 2018
BITTER TEARS
How many bitter tears must fall
Into the stream of your life?
How often must the deluge flood
The meadow lands of content ?
Such is nature…
Bitter in blood, tooth and claw
Harsh is the sirocco blown
By jealous continents.
This is the Lore of society…
With each kind deed
An equally harsh.
The alternative is
an isolate.
We dream of perfection, but as God only knows…
This is not a perfect place…
We live on an incline,
but the top has long gone…
We are careering down
And hoping vehemently,
Someone will catch us.
Who’s got a net?
Copyright Dale Beck 2018
BLEACHED
Washed out wrung out
dried to a crisp
crumbling in texture
crumbling in fact.
Towering intellect
reflecting
refracting
obsidian mirror
pathways lost to the ocean,
forcing all colour
to drain.
Cracked like an old master
drawn out like an extruded wire…
Taut and over taught
And the thought is not of polemic
but expedience
Of making a small step
from room to room
in my fathers mansion,
calling his name…
but no answer comes
that I can hear.
Copyright Dale Beck 2018.
BLESSINGS
Bless my forever girls…
Bless the lady of the lump, my only daughter
Bless the lump and the world which she will become
Bless my beloved and give me grace to give her my soul
Bless my mother, constant and forever, my stalwart friend
Bless my surrogate babies, Freya and Ellie
Bless you all for what you give to me.
Bless my boys so clever and sharp
Bless my brother for all he has done
Bless my father for he is an older version…
Bless the friends old and new,
May your God or Icon give you blessings too.
Copyright Dale Beck 2018
ABOUT THE BOY
The poet is the boy inside,
Bright with naivety and brash,
He wills a perfect world.
He knows nothing…
But Dreams.
The writer is the old man,
He writes of decadence
Of loss and sorrows
So many sorrows
He could float a boat.
The artist is a girl,
Plays with form to find
Beauty and hope
Colours flow and ferment
A lethe tincture of love.
The musician is a dwarf
Unable to form from the formless
He tries, bless him.
He conjures with sounds
But no symphony comes.
The actor is the youth,
thrusting and audacious
In control he holds
The audience Rapt.
Such artifice.
The sculptor is them all,
Finding the character within,
Happy hands mold clay to dimension
With tactile dexterity.
Until the joints creak…
Copyright dale beck 2018.
CHASING CLOUDS
Blue remembered days
navy shorts and grey socks long
rolled down over black pumps…
A brisk but honey time
Clouds rushing headlong
Up the street,
Like a drunk racing for the bar
At opening time.
But Then drunks didn’t enter the lexicon!
Then I would chase the cloud shadow up the street,
Headstrong and headlong…
One slip a toe trip
To a scuffed bleeding knee
Oh to have such problems
Oh to have such worries…
Nothing to keep you from sleep…
Nothing but the hedonistic chase
For no reason other than fun.
Fun?
Natural fun.
Pause.
I like that.
Copyright Dale Beck 2018
CREEP & CRAWL
What is this thrall?
The unseen peering into the inner space…
He stands in darkness
or is he crouching low?
Maybe he is in a window
opposite…
His space in darkness
His eyes saucers
Dilated like a junkie…
Is this his Junk?
This watching…
This waiting…
This wanting?
Is it a want or need…
Is it a sexual desire?
Or is it a power?
Knowing what should not be known?
Stealing the safety of interior space?
When breached there is no further groin for the sands
Of your solitary existence
The viewer just by watching has violated
the inviolate.
copyright Dale beck 2018
DAY
To relive just one day,
Just one cycle of
Twenty-four hours.
What would you choose?
Would it be a magical day?
A day when you made love
And it was like the first time?
Or maybe it was the first time.
A day of pride validictory?
A culmination of all your hard work?
A day in gown and cap?
Aglow with that dayglow pride.
A day of unbounded joy?
When your child was born?
Perfect in miniature,
Cherished from inception?
A miraculous wonder.
And all of these would be fine,
Days to hang in a line
But in your heart you know…
There is only one day.
The day your brother died,
And you fought just before…
And all was lost when
There came that knock on the door.
Copyright Dale Beck 2018
TAOIST ROCK
Your face the rock of ages,
Beauty unchained
Prometheus bound
against the surge of ages.
Like a gilded gelding you pranced
linnet caged in stardust
robed in satin and tat
clownish saviour machine.
You spoke of the outside
beyond the real
siren to the lost
your lament froze time.
Our bedrooms your altar,
you altered time
stopped clocks
for another grinning soul.
Creationist in theory,
you opened gates
to worlds serene
and the firmament flayed.
The tidal wave was spurned
As you surfed
the tempest wild
and sang to the stars.
A universe you gave,
cold and warm
hot and frozen
but the shimmer has gone.
A lad in vain,sane,
but sadly missing,
and aching hole,
The black star vacated.
COPYRIGHT DALE BECK 2018
DISSOLUTION OF TRUST
I used to envy the young
oh the future that they would have
you see this was the promise they gave:
toppermost of the poppermost
every day would be better than the last…
I would look at the young
and think… oh to have their future!
IT WAS A LIE!
The future they promised shimmered
like the emerald city
like the mole’s crystal castles
before he got glasses…
But we all got glasses…
the illusion of a glowing future
became ashes snowing down
across the Big Apple sun drenched sky.
I look at children with pity now…
pity poor tom…
the future hangs like a black cloud
over the blameless young,
the biscuit on the tongue
stale and inedible,
and every day as it gets worse,
they will sing hallelujah!
Copyright Dale Beck 2018
DISTANT SOBS
You caught me sobbing,
Deep heaving, heart tugging
Sobs from the solar plexus!
Soul draining tears…
“For a dog on the t.v.?”
You asked incredulously,
“The dog… yes the dog…
but no not just the dog…
The girl tugged at her hair…
Just like you used to
When you were a girl…
The girl you were before…
Before the interminable wait,
before the thirty three years went missing,
And… And I could hold you then
as I hold you now…
I sob for what I missed,
A yearning nostalgia
For the ages in between!”
Copyright Dale Beck 2018
HEAVEN – A RECONSTRUCTION
It was an afterthought, a confection…
A promise of a perfect place,
But it was a bugger to build.
The castles in the air,
Ephemeral and ethereal,
Would just disappear.
A turn of the head would
Shift the focus and blur the edges.
He needed help.
His son tried a different approach,
Make the earth a heaven
Its corporeal reality,
Would hold fast.
And for a while it seemed to work,
but the son was lost
And the Father despaired,
for no matter how hard he tried
To offer the man heaven,
Too soon, the elders would crush it!
“We don’t want perfection,
Imperfection allows us a space,
To exploit our differences.
copyright Dale Beck 2018
IMAGINE
imagine this:
Not still a boy
but a man:
Taken from home
Taken from work
Dressed in Khaki
Given a rifle and boots.
Turned back into:
A child,
scolded and scorned.
Screamed at an inch
distance.
YOU ARE A DISGRACE!
Hold your rifle right…
Left right left right…
And you, a man
Treated as a man
since you were fourteen…
Working as a man from that age.
And now your back to the remove.
And you have signed up for this,
by free will you are sectioned…
In a long cold hut,
with a row of cold cots
and clown cuts…
Barbered by butchery.
Prepared for butchery.
And you with a baby at home.
The reason you signed on.
To save the world from
Savagery and cant.
No neither can I.
Imagination only takes you so far…
Copyright Dale Beck 2018
THIS LETTER
As I write this letter,
send my love to you,
my blood runs from my veins,
silken threads of crimson
I feel no pain, but heart-ache
You have left me adrift…
In this inverse boat…
The blood quickened by the heat
Of the water, and the wine…
Is just for light relief.
I cannot go back to the half-life,
The tick tock of seconds
Turning into hours.
I’m not that brave,
Can’t take the stage again.
Its not your fault,
I would like to say,
But it is… I am your unbidden burden,
You never sought to be my Judge
Or jury.
The truth is I tried myself,
I’m guilty of over-investing,
In a sure thing,
But nobody is ever a sure thing…
I know that now.
I tried , you tried and now you have gone…
Don’t worry baby, I’m on my way.
Copyright Dale Beck 2018
POST-MODERN SLEAZE
And there is no alternative.
The well of imagination
is dry…
no not dry,
but fetid with the decadent detritus
of a thousand layers.
Images used and re-used,
laminating synonyms
of the original thought.
The knowing and unknowing
fracture of image,sound and word
post Duchamp ready-mades,
already shards
style without content,
visceral but meaningless
artifice without art.
Copyright Dale Beck 2018
LOVER’S TALE
Now in this moment,
Which is all time,
The essence of being.
A chemical bonding,
Alchemical touchstone,
Minds into mind.
Of one skin,
A cauldron mix,
Bewitched and beloved
Spell-bound and ionised
Body becomes lionised…
Held as a godhead,
In this moment
Are all moments.
Fused and confused,
It’s like life?
It’s like all life.
It is All life.
It is alchemy.
Copyright Dale Beck 2018
MONEY
You talk about money as if it was real…
It is not.
It is an abstract realisation of work.
like tokens?
It is no more real than an old barter stick
or i.o.u.
It’s the way of stealing labour by the Man.
Suckling Pigs!
They wave paper in your face, a magic wand,
and you bow.
Do you not feel this a mighty injustice?
Travesty?
Marx would recoil in horror at this torpor,
Lethargy.
The fact is we are too tired to create a fuss…
They have won.
Copyright Dale Beck 2018.
IN THE SHADOW OF THE MOUNTAIN
Tomorrow I arrive at the base of the mountain.
I don’t know what to expect…
Something or nothing.
Either way I shall look to the peak of that particular mountain,
face the summit and say I will climb over it.
Which ever way it lies, I shall fly.
I’m tired. So very tired.
Given the choice … I would sleep.
A perfect blissful sleep.
A rebirth.
A body reborn. A Phoenix.
Born of the ashes.
Born out of pain into light.
Let the mountain fed waterfall
Wash the aches away.
Refreshed and renewed.
God Willing.
God willing.
Copyright Dale Beck 2018.
ORANGE SUN
The sun brushed blood orange
In a dry parchment sky…
A scroll carrying a wanton wish,
A whisper for the desert’s kiss.
Come play across my auburn heights,
And toe tip your rays in the windswept sands.
Come speak of Atlas and Heracles’ chores…
Cool your flame on the mediterranean shores.
Sahara offers her ferocious kiss
Smarting eyes and chapping lips…
Such ardour takes away his breath,
And tears his chromosphere to death.
We watched aghast the lover’s tryst…
as Sun and Sand merged from the mist,
We do not flower in yellow veils,
Nor in Vein-tracked chem-trails,
Which billows out across the vast and
leaden skies, loaded with laudinum,
And Lord know’s what…
And the soothsayer’s still call:
We Are The Dead!
Dale Beck copyright 2018
WHEN PANDORA’S BOX IS OPENED
It’s not so bad… You face change.
And it’s liberating. Nothing stops.
And it’s good. So good… You fear how good,
because acknowledging how good could hex it.
You stop cynically stepping on cracks
like a godless goon biologist…
No fairies must be risked!
I’m in a space, a self-inflated reality,
which a pin might pop.
Creation is so arduous…
Concentrating on one fixed point…
Whereas reactionism is easy.
And so banal!
I hold her box tight shut,
and maintain Hope for all.
copyright Dale Beck 2018.
PEELING THE ONION
The fake is faked.
A double negative
Lain like slabs
of prior knowledge…
denying, the denier
becomes victim
or aggressor
or both
or neither…
so truth is
beholden
tied down with gaffer tape.
Where is the hurt?
Where is the crime?
Obfuscated?
By sleight of hand
or word
or deed?
Who can say?
The screams are real!
The pain is sucked
the drama reels…
and the confusion is a bitter balm to wear.
Copyright Dale Beck 2018
POST-TRAUMATIC SLEAZE
And there is no alternative.
The well of imagination
is dry…
no not dry,
but fetid with the decadent detritus
of a thousand layers.
Images used and re-used,
laminating synonyms
of the original thought.
The knowing and unknowing
fracture of image,sound and word
post-Duchamp ready-mades,
already shards…
style without content,
visceral but meaningless
artifice without art.
Switch to sample, horns from Spector,
Bass a stolen discordant throb,
Etched from a reverb, no verb
Adjectively speaking to nothing…
Is original a print? A Fingerprint?
Multiformed in stark white light
Eyes bleached to the uniformity
don’t walk into the light!
Sing Hosannah… Sing!
Dale Beck copyright 2018
PULL THE TAPESTRY
And of this fabrication
Silks sown and woven tight,
Each loving line picked,
Carefully worked into
The fabrication of your life.
The tapestry is the lie
Heroic as Sir Gawain:
And as deeply fanciful…
Weft and warp,
Weft and warp,
Each memory
Becomes reality,
But only in your
tapestry…
Woven like a film script,
Spoken like a soliloquy…
Until a thread is pulled…
The stitches unravel
The knots fray …
And the tapestry of your life
Is tattered like an military standard,
All Battles and victories
Ring hollow…
Gashed by the scythe of time
C’est vraiment vrai…
Is a lost language?
Copyright Dale Beck 2018
RAINBOW
Rainbow swoops across the sky like a proscenium
Ordering the flash and bang of the front
yelling at your eyes a sodium swipe
grandiose like a grand duke of greenery
Belligerent and beautiful, a sky smile
Intemperate and loquacious as April
Vestal and virginal … ephemeral and awesome.
Copyright Dale Beck 2018
RELIC
With these bones and stones
And wood from the cross
And the truth and the or is it?
We pollute the now.
The now is the city we live in.
So why the relics?
We go back and forth
on the time-line…
As if it is real.
But what is real?
Reality is just a word now…
The ins and outs of the now,
The ins and outs of this time.
So why the relics?
The sphinx sits as a reminder…
And Easter Island heads walk
Down the hill to the plain.
To denote Times winged arrow
Flying back and forth.
A projection.
An abstract.
Time.
Now.
Then?
Copyright Dale Beck 2018
SHARD – JIGSAW PIECE
Suddenly, she said,”But I Don’t know any Russian poets!”
Yet there sat Pushkin, twirling his mustache to a point…
Quoting ‘I loved You’ with a rheumy tear in his bloodshot eye.
She pointed with a cigarette holder to a quiet shadow…
“You Boy, What is your last word”? He, the immortal He,
Ran blood-spattered fingers through his oil-black seal-backed hair…
An ode for the other He, Salvadore Dali…
“A rose in the high garden you desire.
A wheel in the pure syntax of steel.”
The Author cried. So sad the song he sang.
Lorca, You breathe forever with your words and deeds…
And they all circle round, and around, and around…
Ghosts in the machine, a routine of search and display,
This is the Tower of Babel.
Stevie Smith smiled or thought to smile but,
She was much further out than you thought
And not waving but drowning.
Sassoon arrived to say his piece,
Everyone suddenly burst out singing;. And I was filled with such delight.
And with this the most joyous point, poignant as it is
As a remembrance of the millions Dead…
I leave the the last to Rabindranath Tagore:
But I know a nicer game than that, mother.
I shall be the cloud and you the moon.
What nicer game can there be than to be a cloud
as a satellite to the mirror sun.
Copyright Dale Beck 2018
THE ART OF SILENCE
She can sit and stare at the nothing for hours
She needs no sounds to delve the depths
She needs no rosary to commune with her Godhead
She carries it all inside her head.
This is what she has taught me.
Me of the loud crashing bangs
Of The bluster and bravado
Of the effervescent effusiveness
Of the trinity, three things going at once…
Just to hold the silence at bay,
Because in the silence is all the pain.
And the pain is ignoble, it pulls no punches…
And I am a crybaby.
Copyright Dale Beck 2018
SILVER SHIMMER
What alchemy this? What kindling touch the torch?
A silver shimmer, a slight phase discrepancy…
You.
Deja vu?
Nothing of the old world equated to this reality,
unprepared for the polar shift…
I played dead-pan.
I had no tools,
equipped to see the monochrome screen,
my eyes scorched in the technicolour of
Ave Maria!
Ave Maria?
So cool yet blazing, burnished from ice and fire,
You are the air, I’m the water
Quench your thirst my angel.
dale beck copyright 2018
SPREAD ACROSS THE UNIVERSE
It begins with the words:
The words are love, peace, and care.
Love is the most powerful;
Its effects are contagion
Spread by deed and hope
There are no barriers which can contain it.
It is the most virulent antidote
To war, bombs and hate.
Peace is less effective and more fragile,
It needs careful nourishment,
One false move can destroy it
Peace has to be cherished
Like a new-born child…
Care is easy,
It requires only an open heart,
An empathic sense of other’s hurts…
With care we can breed gentle peace
and love will spread across the universe.
Copyright Dale Beck 2018
STILL LIFE
Her bare shoulders are sheathed in a glow of sweat…
Night has yet to steal the latent heat from the day.
So still she sits intent only on the unbolted door,
Cigarette decorously dangling from slender fingers,
The grey pall of smoke curling into the twilight
The only movement the scene can take…
Does her crossed leg allow her foot to bob?
The slight edge reflected by this childish tick…
How long as she waited for the handle to turn?
How long the memory of his rugged jaw…
Of his thin harsh lips brusque against her own?
Of his cruel pale blue eyes pinning her…
Like a butterfly?
Does she think of escape?
Or does she still feel his hot breath against her neck?
What is this moment of stillness…
A paralysis of fear?
Like a rabbit held in headlights,
Or is it a desire?
A poignant wish to feel his strong arms around her…
His dark heart throbbing against her bird in a cage ?
Moment of stillness,
Dripping a longing
But what longing?
Desire or dread?
He becomes the isolated idol,
His absence builds his part.
And the threat of him is greater than the reality.
Copyright Dale Beck 2018
STOP THE WORLD
So many irrefutable truths are moot.
Great swathes of truth planed away
The big blue ball is flat…
shaving 500 years
Of progress
away
to
?
I
am
dumb
in this world
My truth has no currency
I can’t believe in mediocrity
Can’t hold on to two planes of reality
Where up is up and down simultaneously.
I don’t blame schrodinger but His cat
Live and Death is now a moot point.
And God is a cloud-faced Jesus…
Are we being played by the Elite?
Are we lost in a deliberated maze?
Will it all come good?
I don’t know what I know…
I don’t proclaim answers.
I just scratch my head,
and my arse.
copyright Dale Beck 2018
SWEVEN
The land between,
we fly
Like Dragons
We curl : ourobouros
Devouring ourselves
Inch by inch.
This land between,
we swim
like dolphins
We dive : Leviathan
Deep down deep.
This land between,
we love
like godheads
we trip : Dionysus
low down lust.
Copyright Dale Beck 2018
TAKE IT ALL
Take this blood from my veins,
Let It sustain you.
Take My breath for I breathe
Only by your Grace.
Take these words that crowd my head,
For without you I’m Mute.
Take my flesh in golden mounds
For You have my Soul!
Take all that I am And all
And all… I become.
Take me Into your body
and Of your body.
Take all you need… Because
All I Need is you.
copyright Dale Beck 2018
TEARS
The purple pelt of sadness soaked
In the statuesque solitude of sorrow.
Staring at the ceiling unseen
Through the veil.
Shouting: I will not do! I will not do…
An answer to Plath… Of Sorts.
We wear our feelings on the outside,
Like a hair-shirt
An Open display of dismay.
Flagellating our sores
In penitence…
Some will turn away in disgust,
But most will have to look
Having read the book.
We are the keepers of all
Sorrow, of all tears.
The emotional equivalence of the jester…
When none can wear callow
Despair…
Ours become legend.
I am legend,
I cry for all.
copyright Dale Beck 2018
THE TYRANNY OF OPHELIA
Ophelia slipped waif – like between the waves,
Clutching her garland of windswept leaves,
Her tell-tale tears become a torrent
A Maelstrom, spinning northwards,
Darkening with the loss of land…
Emboldened by the sea’s warm embrace.
Lost in grief, her wailing winds are heard across the ocean,
Like a siren call to the suckling seals of Ramsey,
Who looked out across the horizon… helpless and hopeless!
Maybe their mothers called to them to follow their lead,
Tempting them beneath the wash of waves…
But too soon came the call , too young the offspring,
And the powdery white pups became further froth…
Fizzing through the awesome waves to crash, at last, on land.
Copyright Dale Beck 2018
TO THE FOREST
Bleak November, just the two of us…
Wednesday afternoon, sport and no resorts,
A charade of scrabble. Pick a letter…
S is for sin, and it is a sin,
R is redolent of reefer, smoke serene,
D is the drab thought of dinner or drink.
It was always going to be sin.
It had to be found out, what might have been?
S it was… did we linger?
Did we pause to recourse?
No we jumped up, minds set, set long ago, just to know…
You know. I laughed like a tickled choir-boy,
To the forest, maid Marion, to the forest green.
Hands held like Hansel and Gretel, we ran
Dr.Marten’s cloying and caulked in mud,
And the lake washed its hands of us…
Up against a tree, with back to me…
Jeans around knees. Leaning back hard.
And snowflakes fell, great big flakes of foolishness.
We felt foolish. But we knew, and we had to know.
You always have to know. Was this the one?
February. A brief relief from the overwhelming bleak winter.
A birthday surprise. I smoked a fat one. A treat. A bitch of a skunk.
Top-loaded and I was on thirty frames a second.
A spastic in time. Seconds stretched to millennia.
Space totally replaced from one moment to the next.
And you took me by the hand, led me back to the place,
the very tree. On this tree, we became an altar…
She told me that her other-half had been told, and retold.
It was nothing, we had to know, and now we knew.
He could not accept the verdict.
He ordered a pyre to our love,
And all your clothes… All your clothes were taken
To this spot. This very spot. Lost in the forest.
And with paraffin, came la fin, the end.
The curls of smoke, enraptured by the moment of
When we had to know.
Copyright Dale Beck 2018
TRY HARDER TRY BETTER
I was a boy when I met you,
You were a sophist…
Perfectly drawn, temptress!
So tall, so willow-whipped.
Gypsy heart and ten paces ahead.
You wanted me. I followed.
You took the boy, broke him, and
Made this man. Alchemist.
I came with baggage,
You came with a need,
Dark and sultry
Tamarind dusk…
With all-knowing, all unknown
I was not worthy of the opening,
But sought your soul to remake my own.
And when I was tempted, or feigned temptation,
You took another route
And left with all the light.
darkest dawn. I was resurrected as a shadow.
The shadow played across the landscape
The longest time lost in wilderness.
Latching on to suckling breeds,
Nurtured by nurturing others.
Soul-strained and spirit soaked.
Suddenly, it came back
The light rekindled.
You broke me and awoke me.
I am all new.
I love you
As no other.
As no other,
Retrained to savour each moment
Hand-fasted and entwined
This is the truth
I only ever sought truth…
You are my lexicon of truth
My lexicon of love.
My only one
My only one.
Copyright Dale Beck 2018
SPREAD ACROSS THE UNIVERSE
It begins with the words
Softly spoken – Maybe an accent
A soft Dublin brogue…
Perhaps.
The words are love, peace, and care.
Love is the most powerful;
Its effects are contagion
Spread by deed and hope
There are no barriers which can contain it.
It is the most virulent antidote
To war, bombs and hate.
Peace is less effective and more fragile,
It needs careful nourishment,
One false move can destroy it
Peace has to be cherished
Like a new-born child…
Care is easy,
It requires only an open heart,
An empathic sense of other’s hurts…
With care we can breed gentle peace
and love will spread across the universe.
Copyright Dale Beck 2018
YOUNG IDIOT
The boy is an idiot, two-tone black and tan,
Drunk on the need to live fast as a cheetah…
Hard-on life, thrust into it all and all…
Take no prisoners or passengers
Just the drink and the draw, speed and soar
and a one-night stand becomes four…
On all fours from the floor to ceiling
And it’s all so good and so right,
Until you wake in the middle of the night
Catching your breath in a brown paper bag
And your cheeks are sallow and sag
And the blackness sits in rings around your eyes
And even the party people look at you and sigh
I knew him once, when he was good and fun
Now he hides in shadows and stays out of the sun.
Youth dies before you do, ain’t that the truth.
And your candles flutters and splutters
And no matter how hard you try,
You falter and die… By degree, by design.
Copyright Dale Beck 2018