ENFIELD SONNETS   PAGE 1  (PAGE 2)  (PAGE 3)  (PAGE 4)
	20 October 1964 1   It is thirty-six years since the night you Died and every day of that time I have Tried to forget you, etched, echoing through The silence and darkness since then.  I have Lost more than I could remember, yet rain Is falling, resounding through October, Igniting every surface once again With a low sound of distance left over And a space left behind where I have failed In everything I tried to do, only An arc of silence where the dark stars trailed Too far out to see.  In the memory Of the living and still startled, I read That there lives on the spirit of the dead.   20 October 2000   2   I have tried to resurrect you in rhyme And with the vowel sounds of your voice, trace The reality of another time The wasted lineaments of a face Which I have seen every year disappear. And the syllable count was an order Out of chaos a blueprint always near At hand in the mute despair left after An unforeseen precipitant ending, A vision of the spirit in a dream Trapped between night and the day’s beginning, Lost among echoes, in shadows that seem. Rhythm came as falling rain, as the pain Then that I would not see her face again.   21 October 2000   3   All night I have listened to the far rain, Remembering the anniversary Of your end, so long ago now, the main Drift of its re-enacted history Has gone, there is nothing left but the rain Falling wildly in the wind, the open Wide October night fanning its own flame Backward to the utmost stars of Eden. I seemed to exist only in that hour As though I had to live again for you And to follow in the footsteps of our Night, fugitive and as though pursued through To the end of time.  Each day an unstill Echo unanswerable saps my will.   21 October 2000   4   There was nothing that could be overturned And yet I was always afraid to speak And to think and now as then I have learned Nothing but how to replicate, to seek For a way out in the way you had done And only by going as far as you, Could I understand what you had begun And enough to turn away in time.  Through The long years of illness you hardly spoke About anything oppressing your mind, My life was at an end when I awoke To the fact that you left us all behind, And for years I could not face it this side Of life, the end was your own suicide.   21 October 2000   Dismantling Fordwych House   I am forced to begin a long goodbye, There is nowhere to go with my sorrow, The days are just another reason why Everything that is nurturing must go. It has sustained me and been a bulwark Against the world more so a place to be, Somewhere somehow I was able to work Drawing pathways into my poetry, All this will be lost but the fire I drew Never burnt out, a closed unfolded fan Yet high enough to reach into the blue Sky still whispering of how it began. There is nowhere else to go to from here There is nothing I can do with my fear.     I shall be abandoned by everyone With no one to know what is happening, Left to manage reality alone Without anything to keep me going. Most of the time I exist in complete Despair and hardly able to leave my Home, the world lies before me at my feet The past is an echo answering why, Trapped always between these extremes I need To draw, the finished picture is no more Than a poultice to draw out pain, to bleed Into colour again from a far core In the monochrome region of the mind, All this will cease and just be left behind.     And the end is already as a blue Print now unfolding in its paradigm, There is nothing that any one can do, The dismantling is a matter of time. And everything I have known will be swept Away like a carbon copy of my Life, the fugitive garden which I kept To will not remain however hard I Try to keep it from fading forever In my mind and the world that was the Art Room filtering colours tears and laughter Lost, a left over echo in my heart, With new lamps for old there will not be time To recall whatever I claimed as mine.   A resurfacing of a yob culture I thought to have left forever behind, An assembly line is the new structure Based on a working model of a kind, Allowing respite from extremity For a single hour only, everything Else must wait on hold and preferably With no exception outside the building, Casual barbarity that never Should have been allowed through, yet existing Unopposed without regard for danger, A regime permitting no resisting. It is all in vain I have tried to say Art therapy will not work in this way.     What is on offer as a replacement Is just a smoking room in a Drop In With a pool table that was never meant To be anything more than a passing Remedy for people to sit around Somehow trying to console each other. Even that will go with not enough ground Space to move in and accepted after Without a sound for nothing can be done, We are ill and therefore disenfranchised And with nothing to lose or to be won. Is there anyone to have recognised That this is a proposal that will kill The most meek and the most vulnerable.     More than fifty places will be reduced To only fifteen, a day hospital Razed to the ground, uncertainty unloosed Where once there was hope and a new level Of care yet wholly unacceptable Where the most desperately ill may not Be allowed to get through, suicidal Despair may well be turned away with what Could be termed after as not enough proof. For some of us the refuge of a ward Is not possible, a traumatic truth Experienced once is there as a sword In the heart while the mind left to cower Is too afraid even to remember.     I came to Fordwych House when my own life Had collapsed and was left in jeopardy In the past, I lived each day on a knife Edge of existence with my family Around me or gone from me and always In disarray.  I knew panic and fear Again as I had done in the deep maze Of time and I came when no one was near Me, left to a fate of insanity, For me this place was the end of the line. My first day was the anniversary Of a poet’s death, I felt it was mine, That the place stood between me and my own Suicide, I felt no longer alone.     The kindness of strangers, this was something I was experiencing for the first Time but I could only see the ending Of things, even my shadow was accursed And I was a fugitive from my own History, still unable to fit in Anywhere yet I belonged there alone As I was and unable to begin. And for weeks paralysed before empty Paper I suddenly began to draw From a dream under fathoms of the sea Great stones were grounded on an ocean floor Gradually releasing moving free In rhythms surging continuously.     Five years ago, by then discharged as an Out Patient, I was allowed to return For one day a week and slowly began To draw scenes from my childhood and to learn From a different angle what the pain Was like then, the drawings became windows Each with its own view and I saw again As though for the first time. An echo throws A sound from its first source that ricochets Outward from every surface and forces Even the silence to listen, the days After are left without answer, night sees Another way to apprehend a far Sound as it draws around a single star.     Sometimes only art therapy got me Through and for two years after I hardly Left my flat, nothing worked, I was to be Marooned and holed up for nine weeks every Time, leaving mainly out of an utmost Terror that art could be taken away If I left it any longer, and lost And bewildered I would go on thursday For three or more weeks until the same thing Started all over again. I got through In this way and then everything crashed in, Vestiges of a family I knew Were gone for ever and I was alone And left unable to be on my own.     For six months I attended every day, A growing and unmanageable fear Encompassed me and nothing could allay Or halt the course of mental nuclear Meltdown, I was unable to live or Die, there was nowhere else to go, even Silence such as I had not heard before Had pushed me over right to the end. When I was admitted to a ward I felt That the future was over, time after Had come to a standstill and days were dealt Out to me that hardly seemed to matter Any more than Fordwych House, where for five More months I remained more dead than alive.     I tried for twenty months to keep going, An infrequent Out Patient once again, I was left outside within a ruin Inexplicable trying to explain Without words but the meaning would not come. I existed in an isolated World yet unable to trust any one, The life I had known was devastated And not a stone was left to stand or rest Upon another and there was nothing Left within, an empty space that oppressed Me in the dark, a place no scaffolding Could lean on to, a hollow vacuum Empty as the days I was lost among.     There is nothing to salvage from those days, I was on autopilot pretending, Even reality was a black haze A smoke engulfing buildings covering The sky’s rim with an infinite burnt pall, Each night was a shadow of the unlit Day in dreams full of clamouring people Yet indistinct at the furthest limit Of time where past and future seem to merge And the mind is trapped in the interval Between forced to the precipitous verge Of silence and echoes inaudible Reverberating round an arena And an unreachable amnesia.     Poetry had lost its meaning for me, It had become a weight and a pressure Which I could not bear or carry any More for my mind was ill and beyond cure, What remained from the years was left behind As something unknown I turned away from Suddenly without looking back, my mind Was magnified by its own vacuum And drawn towards the fixed point of the end I was alone and out on a far reach Of time, a one way journey that happened Almost without my knowing without search Or rescue I was beyond horizon, Turning back was not within my reason.     I could not go back the way I had come And I could not comprehend the reason For the journey into the future, some Remaining knowledge that I was alone With night coming on and the end before Me inexorably there beckoning Luring me away from the extinct core Of the day into the light darkening. How I wanted to be done with it all Just to escape from time coiled around me After like a tightened spring, to free fall Into the timelessness of memory, An unknown an inextricable black Shadow from which there was no turning back.     Nothing else mattered and I sat for days At a time yet unable to amend An automatic reflex in the haze Of green and drifting leaf of an early Spring, the words had failed and I could not go On, for my mind was burnt out entirely, A rudimentary black smoke hollow With the sense of something distant and near With an impact of intangible fear. The unending planning of how to die Kept me alive for a little longer This was the only certainty and I Could not allow for anything other Than a last endless count down to the end.    June  2001     The Enfield Sonnets   How shall I justify my presence here Where there is nothing more for me to do Yet only by surrendering to sheer Unending time could I hope to come through, There is no ready answer that my mind Can seize on, to somehow allay the fall From memory suddenly left behind With nothing there to hold on to and all The hours and nights in a life unfolding, The airlessness and the nowhere of those Days, helpless in the currents of something I am unable to bring to a close, A future that was mapped out before me And mute with the silence of poetry.     Why am I unable to face my own Silence the mute words will not go away They assail in dreams in rhythms alone Left over from an unwritten text, they Light up the darkness of their own shadow As the flickering of fifties neon Off and on and trapped in the mind’s echo Unanswerable as a signal shone From the endless reach of a last Morse code, There is nothing left to light the way, fear Is foremost and its knowledge my far lode- Star, I hear the words slowly disappear. The line languishes and rhymes beneath my Feet as an unstifled unwritten cry.     Who am I that such a pain permeates The raw opened core of my existence, Somehow evening slowly evacuates As new oblivion from the sequence And unlit permanence of a full sky, Here there is no escape or refuge from The resonating emptiness in my Heart where I am only myself among Remnants and residual forgotten Starlight, yet have long since ceased to wonder How night breaks into marginal blue when Stars adhere to reality after As though imperceptibly remaining Below the surface of their vanishing.     Sleepless I have struggled in a protest Unable to manage somehow to make Up the hours and numbers that still oppressed Me in the dark and only for the sake Of time waiting could I haul myself out And simply lay insomnia aside. My mother’s anniversary without My knowing was suddenly revealed wide Open, calmly exposed to existence And the realization of a time And where before and after ever since Have converged in inseparable rhyme, In the margins of dreams awake something Sensed beyond then and now keeps me going.     This is not my ‘West Street Jail’ for I chose To be here and like Lowell I have made ‘My manic statement’ unable to close Or shut down something within myself laid Out in front of me before I was born, A trajectory left there to free-wheel From an open downward slope, I am torn By impact always and its head-on feel Yet cannot prevent an impassable Collision, paralysed besieged by fear, The end aligned and ineffaceable, My senses brace for night hurrying near, Where do I go from here only to trawl After shadows my back against the wall.     There occurs in silence and the effort Of thought a place beyond imagining, Somewhere other than this where I am caught In an angled street light just beginning, Why has it always got to be this way Why has there never been any other Choice, somehow darkness on the surface lay And held me fast to its shadow after. And there was no escape from an empty Page seen in dreams and written long before I could begin, while looking back at me From the furthest region of a mirror In the dark was someone I did not know, Trapped with the distance of my own echo.     Something hidden within me is trying To break free lost as I am in a full Blue and oblique afternoon progressing Casually to incalculable Starlight unsure of how to relinquish Its hold or helplessly retreat before, Left unfalteringly to extinguish Over evening’s darkened neon glare or Magnified just surrender into night. My spirit hesitates somewhere nearby Keeping to the shadows as though in flight Quietly watching, waiting and awry In darkness and distilled disparity, Unwilling even to contend with me.     Like a dream and its journey the poem Unfolds and the rest is beyond control And too far out to reach, only rhythm At its source dictates the ending, the whole Course and beginning being dependent On rhyme and stemming from an undertow A single premonitory current Formed in the depths with nowhere else to go. Yet so much without sleep how to retrieve Even a syllable from an echo In the dark where unquiet vowels weave From unvisited dreams enough to show How memory recurring and its rhyme Are an inconsolable paradigm.     The first line exists somewhere just below The surface sensed and near and taking me Far out on an endless current as though The tidal force of an incoming sea Could ever pull me back again, I fail And never come within reach, a far shore With no harbour or mooring, while I trail The horizon seen from an open door. My life is ajar, continuously Pushed further than the edge of day and night To a sidewalk in between, silently Deciphering by a darkening light, From volume echoing out of hearing And clamouring beyond understanding.     Against the fulcrum and pull of pressure I force a poem to its furthest hilt, My whole life about resisting the lure And siren song in a retreat from guilt, In a struggle about time without end And its legacy of oblivion, The inherited years I could not mend Lost in momentum with a commotion Of their own still disturbing the surface, Their echo carries across the distance In a circling ever widening trace In a pool of rain, and seen ever since At the marginal reach of night shadow As something still refusing to let go.     I am writing against time winding down And the never ending pressure to keep Afloat, to search without running aground, Trapped in the shallows of life without sleep And the hidden reef of insomnia Where I am entirely at the mercy Of memory and its amnesia And indistinct stars for reality, Flickering casually existing Random as the force of far circumstance And blue vacuity intervening, In ordinary insignificance How time grows into starlight from an arc That burns and throws no shadow in the dark.     A poem is about surrendering Not withstanding its equivocation About going all out for a meaning From existence even when there is none. Sometimes the effort and expense of time Seems only to defeat its own purpose And everything ends with a rehearsed mime A dumb show that brings the line to a close. For terror is born of uncertainty And words are buried alive somewhere deep Far-off in an unknown territory, A harvest after left to stand or reap Loosening the inexorable hold Of a life in the shadows left untold.     How do I begin or draw to the end? Life now unfolds itself only between These polarities nor can I amend Or make up for what has already been Weighed in the balance and there remaining Is found to be still wanting, and rather Than instalments on a sum outstanding, Words must take their place forever after. I hardly know myself or the poem Heading out towards while I keep behind At a distance yet I have known rhythm Its isolated impact on my mind Its irrevocable apology For a makeshift permanence yet to be.     There is a burden that is too heavy And nowhere for refuge along the way, To put it down and rest enough to see How much further there is to go, a day Or another year amount to nothing They hardly seem to matter anymore, An unwritten narrative converging On the end and all that I am here for. Memory’s first rhythm is my compass And the only instrument I possess Locked between before and after it has To align with time and yet coalesce, I walk in darkness with nothing to light The way the end is left within my sight     When I am tired and can go no further A poem veers off on its own accord Free-wheeling without reference after, Sometimes spending what I can ill afford And as though in a jest of its own kind Conjures a mockery of what is meant, Drawn out openly from a ransacked mind Waylaid and erring in an argument About reality and time without  End or yet whether meaning can be found To exist at all, interstices out Of which a heart reacting runs aground Or survives as rhythm undiminished, The end is the beginning unfinished.     Words begin to slip and there is nothing More that I can do just to keep them from Fading on a page, my mind is falling Into itself and imagination Has pulled back and is now beyond control And in lodgings in anonymity, As a jettisoned language takes its toll, An echo coming to nothing, empty In a vacuum of its own making, The lights are on red with nowhere to go And no room to turn round in listening, Sometimes silence is all there is to know. Memory’s structure widens and deepens, The future blurs and clouds across a lens.     Stranded at the fault line between night and Day I have yet to find out how to keep Going, with nothing aside or in hand Facing a harvest left waiting to reap Or fail, forever out of step with my Own kind, always too far out in front or Falling continually behind, I Can never be a part of the longed for Crowd or ever at the ordinary Distance of things, there in the dark alone In far low-watt starlight, and memory A fugitive with nothing to go on, Through the last grey to evening’s watermark Night’s first shadows are fleeing in the dark.     Great sycamore leaves are falling around Me, left to rest for a while ungathered, Softening reality with the sound Of their upturned undersurface, outspread Reversed with a pattern of casual Artifice at once random or aligned Scattered in upheaval and a wind, all Of them left to surrender in their kind, To drift endlessly downward spiralling Effortlessly turning as though falling Away from the light continually Facing the ground, to huddle where they lay Deep-veined downturned and preliminary And each a fan that will not fold away.      A poem will often go no further If it cannot ignite its beginning Enough to kick-start rhythm and alter Reality searching for an ending. There is nothing to go on and language Sometimes stammering towards a standstill Only exists to founder on a page, With the end coming to nothing until A word or a line gradually takes Hold and reluctantly out of chaos And infinite vacuity creates Truth from memory and unspoken loss And words which have somehow become derailed, Yet out of such things meaning is assailed.     Sometimes poetry is sabotaged from Within by a metre going nowhere, Memory’s involuntary rhythm Still incarcerated and arraigned there. Increasingly now a new beginning While faltering at the start, a tangent Comes to an end without ever having Reached the heart, devoid of any intent And languishing under scaffolding in A structure erected and collapsing Into nothing trapped in its origin, Yet hindered and held back by everything That falls short of language and what I lose Slowly from memory and its purpose.     I would like to quietly disappear Into another world where I am known And able to sleep awhile without fear, Not this feeling among a crowd alone, Here where there is nowhere to turn away From, hours without end when no one is near Except for shadows hurrying as they Lay, suddenly unceasingly to veer As distant fragmented inaudible Voices endlessly heard approaching yet Always falling away, unreachable As memory unable to forget, Effaced and subsumed under siren wail And aware it is all to no avail.     There is a region called oblivion Via a route in anonymity And its endless knowledge is my reason, A siren wail forever drawing me Into the lure of another ending, Its origin silently echoing Through interstices at the edge of fear Where I last saw my mother disappear, Drawn into interminable darkness And her life dismantled and left untold And only seen in dreams at an address That was beyond reach and out of this world. For me this place was left beyond compare And all my life I have tried to get there.     I am standing always at the crossroad Unable to decide which way to go And remembered as a last episode As the only path left open although I could not know, and in the dark alone Turning around in the deep disarray Of leaves heaped in the rain you must have known We were left there never to find the way Again, for you were already in your Last year yet drawn out and precipitate Hurrying suddenly as from the shore Of a world far behind you, left to wait Without end while searching for an answer Left echoing through the silence after.     Once again I have reached the halfway mark, Left to wonder how to conjure something From nothing and facing each day the stark Realisation that time is running Out and yet without anything to go On, but so much a part of poetry Still unwritten that I no longer know Myself, pushed towards the extremity Of dreams and language continually Spiralling downwards. What matters is truth, The undertow beneath reality Surging and receding offering proof, My heart is a stone thrown into water Rhythmically circular thereafter.     There is no way out except to go on I have come too far to think of turning Back but my mind fails me, the horizon Is too far-off to see, resonating Visible only in my memory Where the blind tap-tapping of the numbers Keeps me going, echoing, endlessly Augmenting what the stunned heart remembers Yet waylaying me in the agony Of identity, an empty mirror Where I exist in an anonymity, Artificial in a fading light or As a shadow before it is effaced Along an unlit day and left to waste.     For nineteen years I have tried to retrieve The unknown origin and momentum Of my first years using time as a sieve Through which to strain an airless vacuum, And have wandered trapped since in a night maze The shadows of its many passages, Unable to face the light of lost days And things of the heart nothing assuages, And turned about searching for an exit In mounting panic and delirium With my mind melting down in the unlit Space between reality and a dream, Where words became in the darkness a path, An echo in the silent aftermath.     Silence is the close constraint that holds me Fast whenever I attempt to begin, Unable to navigate the empty Reach where the mute words have their origin, And if I should try to make an approach Just to sojourn or moor at anchorage, A storm at sea presents enough to broach Against meaning and a scuttled language Falls back without having reached an ending, An outcome random as an echo thrown That ricochets in a dream, existing Incognito with a life of its own Along a premonitory pathway As a fugitive hiding from the day.     How is it possible to reach the end When I hardly know which way to go, near And left behind with time enough to tend A language again alone without fear, Reminding me how it used to be when I first began, when early memory Unravelling was able to open To the light, not as this transitory Skein of shadows thrown continually Entangled, fleeing from its own searing Origin and a darkened atrophy Of illusory low grey stars, veering On the narrow hollows of the future With the weight of unreachable pressure.   It is another life that is driving Me and yet leaving without letting go, How long can I go on for listening At unfathomable depths and with no Answer discernible or echoing But my own, then heard as though a sudden Forgotten song and illuminating An empty template in a dream, open Wide as a page leaving its trace behind Hidden in silence and lost memory The banks of an underground stream, to wind Through depths of uncharted terr