Justin and Veronica on our engagement to be married

George Street- for Justin

Soft upon a winter's night when cats tread on carpets of ice
you laid your hand upon my brow and whispered ornaments
of filigree silver, a diadem of such fine metal that sunlight
fell where moonlight should have flowed
the shattered corridors coalesced to mirrored halls
in which we walked to ordinary streets
past glitzy windows, department stores, a fairyland
of have-it-all dissolved and shivered, each time you whispered
I felt a thousand soft white cats stepping softly,
their small round footprints making winter thaw.


You may like to know what Justin did for me. He was so kind when I needed a friend he was there, and when I was ready for love- he was there.

2008 AD- a christmas poem

2008 AD

this month strips the twigs to black bifurcating spears
each bears a gravitational drop of water at its tip
Christmas looms and shoppers plunder cut price
sales, the shops closing down now the bankers have won
and MP3s and x-boxes teeter on the topmost shelves
as if the moon were not important any more
the lack of moon, under those dark wet clouds
the mindless metallic lodestone of the stars
their glorious loveless spaciousness of space
that dim enchanted internet we ape.

baby P- a poem

Baby P


Such times for broken flower-
by the riverside, the forget me not
of his awareness hardly open
the joy of the breath in his body
filling his lungs as if the delicate
veining of his new hatched life
was never extinguishable,
so miraculous is his very being,
his very soul hungry for seeing
and knowing, his eyes a coda
for all the heavy worldful
of miraculous smiling tigers and soft breasts
Let him live, we cry,
our mouths as open
as the future,
let him live!
knowing all too well
that he has already passed.

The fact that you seem very important, but you are not.

Dessicated ghost , can you remember
how pliant the days where when you stole across my vision
your stain on retina, I was undone, and still I talk to you
even though you are no longer a viable proposition.
Do you remember me? Or do the winds
blow across the marsh to meet only a wisp of seagrass
drying remotely on the shore?
I want to ask you about unkindness:
specifically the need for it, and whether
love cancels it out ?
I might bring a priest flapping across the dunes
or a bureaucrat's sealed files upon my head
dropped from a supersonic aircraft.


An armillary sphere blocks my vision
and the tick-tock clack of mechanised
institutionalised misuse.
Love, can you change the elected government?
The betrayal and the use of power against the woman
clad in rags with the child against her slackening breast?
Love! It couldn't even bring me to you.

The Shadows of Birds

The shadows of birds


Between red buildings, bright blue flies its kite
the eyeful seeded with flurries of uncertain birds;
Only this is relevant, choppy as a newsreel
unfolding a story which never sticks around or yet quite fades
Extending beyond the brain into some coalescing pool
of nothing mattering/ mattering very much.
As if two children playing on different continents
glance upward at the same faint shimmering movement,
As though this October day, this sun, this broken thought
is all that marks us out us human, this recognition
of the absence of light where light briefly fails to pass.
We mark the choreography and its notation
the trajectory of miraculous and ordinary birds,
Some dim lobe marked out for remembering then forgetting
how some things end, are endless, how long they last.

Super 8 Poem -Veronica Aldous

Super 8

I gain no admittance here
even though I remember the colour
of each blanket in the bedrooms
the parlour filled with uncertain light
blinking turns the sun off and on.

I want to run down the stairs
to the kitchen and out into the garden
feeling the naked step over carpet, lino
wood and grass, to be received;
a welcome visitor to the summerhouse.
The creamy purring corner
of tea and animals and fading traycloths
I want to talk to those tired and snoozing
holograms who know the family tongue,
the meaningful interstices, the vowels
a metaphor for love,.Dare I mention, love
again, and once more love-
I want to run the old film one more time-
Its final title bleaching on the minds eye

Oh we are a broken clan.

Autumn Photographs Riddlesdown Croydon