Shadows

We peer into the shadows
where yesterday’s sunlight glows,
trying to capture and hold
yesterday’s sunlit gold.

We peer into tomorrow
to predict and plot
where that sun will likely go
(but where, perhaps, it will not) .

Today’s sunshine still blazes
its disc ever overhead.
Past and future are autumn hazes
that drift through the land of the Dead.

The land of the Dead.
Dead.

Remember the Light;
the Light

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poem by Brian Taylor
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Margaret Thatcher

Ethics detached from intelligence
(a dangerous thing in woman) .
She abused her education
by sunbathing her ego
in every passing neon light.

Because of this, in later years
she succumbed to a hoarse belligerence
(a dangerous thing in woman) .
This led to premature decline
and loss of the key to her precious memories
which was all she had salvaged from her good years
before her sycophants turned against her
in favour of a council estate boy.

poem by Brian Taylor
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I Eat Therefore I Am

The medical profession
has not been kicking its heels.
Faced with a spreading obsession
with eating and an explosion
in obesity,
it offers a solution
of Cartesian simplicity.
SNACKING BETWEEN MEALS!

This reduces your appetite at mealtimes
and helps you compensate
by EATING your way to losing weight.
Today Cornmarket is full
of the well-insulated
with heads enturbulated
by nutritional dyslexia,
munching their way to anorexia.

EDO ERGO SUM

poem by Brian Taylor
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The Notebook and The Pen

Register the birth.
Now register the death.
All unfinished business
ends with the breath.

Ends. But then again begins
as we all come back for more.
Even though we long forgot
what it is we come back for.

Only while the breath continues
to feed the brain
and work the sinews,
can we put an end to pain
and stop it coming back again.

Keep a record of what's needed
to be done (or else undone) :
to be planted (to be weeded)
to be finished (or begun) .

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poem by Brian Taylor
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The Rudder

A smoking cloud of thoughts
blots out the sun;
swirls in ever-changing
imaginative shapes.

Vast and pervasive
it billows throughout space.

What is this phantasmagoria?
Tiny specks of soot.

While this is still our daily bread
from the ovens
of our senses,
we have not yet
gone beyond.

Stumbling
in this darkness;
fuelled

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poem by Brian Taylor
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Gurdjieff

“You are both a wolf
and a lamb.
If you do not stay awake
the wolf will devour
the lamb.”

Oh you, the Living and the Dead!
Both those who earn
and you who claim by right
your daily bread.
Encourage the few
they will become the many.
Encourage the poor
they will reach out for more.
Encourage the young
they will fail to grow up.
Encourage the old
they will grow older.

Why do so many

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poem by Brian Taylor
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Weekend People

Though the weekend people
leave it all behind,
when they sit down quietly
it’s all there in their mind.

And though they leave their footprints
to commemorate their stay,
when the cosmic tide comes in,
it washes them away.

The sand, the rocks, the buildings
though private (and insured) ,
the pictures, frames and gildings
-nothing has endured.

The cosmic tide has taken them
and their owners too.
(And when they sit down quietly
it’s all there in their mind.)

poem by Brian Taylor
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Cut Into The Human Wood

Cut into the human wood
chop; pare;
to find what is already there.
Will the knife reveal
what we have outgrown?
Or does the sculptor feel
along the veins and in the bone
the shape already in the stone
and gently, where the stone is brittle,
cut only not too much and not too little?

Or there again,
you might be just the wall,
my favourite picture on its hook;
behind (if I should ever look) ,
nothing at all.

Like sea
with sky reflected
deceiving me,

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poem by Brian Taylor
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Freedom To Or Freedom From?

Power aims
at Freedom To;
finds itself
on a collision course
with all the other Freedoms To
that inhabit gods and men and beast;
storm and drought and pestilence;
sickness, old age and death.

Wisdom aims
for Freedom From
discovers that all the competing Freedom To's
struggle within the stadium of life
and win and lose and win and lose
and lose at last at the gates
of old age and death.
Discovers that he who enters not
the arena of the breath
suffers no loss and dies no death.

poem by Brian Taylor
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Mid-September Sun

Dry and ripening:
sea flat and shining
like burning glass.

Gulls floating
like ducks on a giant's pond.

Small Coppers, Blues and Hairstreaks
playing
like blown leaves
in parched grass.

Victoria plums,
blackberries.

This is the turning
of the year
when all that is thought of as ‘there'
is found to be ‘here',
when harvests are collected,

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poem by Brian Taylor
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