It was a wafting summer morning
A day when I was magic
So it must have had an ‘R’
Maybe Thursday

And the sailboat-decked horizon
Did not beckon
No, it glared
And an Alabama angel
So much like Susan T.

Sang up conjuring tricks
That minimised the pain

The jackdaw and the black rabbit
Shared a patch of brown-mown grass
With the corpse of something recent
And a sandwich dropped by bikers

I made music with a rock against a shell
The jackdaw imitated laryngitis
That blackbird suffered from
Last time we played.

We looked for closure
But the music rambled on

I listen while the headlines disabuse
my senses of how evil should have limit.
I seek (sad, giving up on reason) rhyme
which also hides its head at so much sorrow
leaving headless iambic lines mute, blank.

Until a jackdaw chortles. Springtime sun
casts shadows of old dragons in the bin
of banished, vanished nightmares, which, though real,
are balanced by the living season’s thrill.