Broken Hands and Bottled Moonlight—- by Henry C Smith

Time turned into lies
As the belly pop of their greed
Combusted simple symbols
Into swollen leaden dreams.

Now the muse is drowning as
The city dance of alley cats consumes us,
It’s flames fed by avarice and lust.

This is the age of cold grey burning,
The age of paper churning, tribes collapsing
And men slapped flat like broken hands.

We are the soldiers in the belly of the blood pit,
The grid-racked soul hungry on the march
Beaten for bread rolls whilst searching for failure.

But soon their golden towers will fall like ashen stakes
And the silence which has always hung like bottled moonlight
Will fold back their swarming to an ancient fecund peace.

Another London Morning Fading to Circles Henry C Smith

Words
hanging like mirrors
over
trodden ground,
years
like rotting leaves
sifting the silt
of your star crossed
core.

A thousand sighs
in a dawn
ramsacked by silent knives,
fed by the gulls
of fear,
days beseiged
by grinning mouths,
licking tongues.

what a day
to die,
cold
hard
and wet
down in the sweat,
past the black lines
glistening,
lacking empathy
in spades,
amongst the hooded oddities
of people.

what a day
to live or love.

sometimes
i just can’t see
the brilliance
of thought
in this
opaque waste,
this
lifeless
fish eye torpor
fading to circles of stone.