DULL DAYS INDEED
David Denny
Collected Works
2016
DULL DAYS INDEED is a compilation of work from
THE SIEGE OF BEACON HILL
The Siege of Beacon Hill is a collection, in the loosest sense, of poems written by me in the early 1990s. There are romantic poems, naturalistic poems, metaphysical poems and other philosophical stuff. There is the constant theme of time and its nature, threaded through this is an exploration of my own struggle with the concept of my mortality, amongst other things. Most poems where inspired by real events, or by odd thoughts and graphic dreams.
The vast majority of these poems were penned when I was a student at Staffs University. During the first year I studied English Literature so Heaney and Plath had a big influence alongside the Beckett and Joyce in the main.
Adjacent to the Stafford University site is Beacon Hill, the place which inspired the title poem about an isolated wood besieged by.arable land and the seemingly remorseless tractors and ploughs. It’s obviously a very ancient place and, for those who know, holds its place on a ley line stretching West through Stafford churches, Stafford castle and out to the old Iron Age fort at Berry Hill and possibly further to the West and the Welsh borders. It is a place of magic and power and mystery. I am still drawn to it and places like it.
When I edited the poems in this collection, many of which were written years ago, it displayed to me the magic of poetry in that emotions and feelings, felt at the time, flooded back.
From Incident at Congleton
This is a small selection of simplistic poems penned on a mobile phone and texted as an apology for late arrival at work, the number paints a dim picture of train punctuality on the Stoke to Manchester line!”
All that is Solid melts into Air’
(Karl Marx: The Communist Manifesto)
The Siege of Beacon Hill
The wild edge of the ancient forest,
Thrusting vanguard fern
At surrendered furrows,
Sighs in alliance with the autumn wind,
Drawing breath and demarcation lines,
In bloody ochre hues.
Breathing deep,
Poised high an ominous fortress
Above an arable patchwork sea,
It spins contempt From sycamores
and mines Margins with oak egg acorns.
It is relentless like the seasons,
Mocking the ploughs dulling edge,
Tracing its annual retreat,
Creeping inch outward
With fern ands skirmishing briar,
Securing slender bastions
For sapling wood,
And testing,
Always testing,
The human gall,
At its patient limits.
Milking the Void
At times like this,
When my visions of the world
Are obscured
By a million crawling tears around me,
My only company,
The tattoo of a rhythmic rain,
I feel hopelessly at one with my self,
Unsatisfied and Unstriving, Enlarging the gulf within,
Knowing that I can be no less than I am.
But now,
At this empty moment,
Even the faintest spark of light In this cavern is hope,
Un-subdued it will flare,
Fuelled on hopelessness,
And I would flow behind
Trailing blue irrational inks,
My footfalls silent in Nothingness.
For here in this lonely place
I could be
And am;
Inspired.
The Whirlpool
Trees like tall ushers
There’s shadow here
A place of myth
A place of fear
Children are warned
Of those before
Clutched in the shade
On the Valley floor.
Mist swirls like wraiths
On Summery nights
Sucked through the silence
A small noise is Fright
And the trees take shapes As they stare on
The flower wreathed slopes
The light slips from.
Here lurking deep Is a lurer of fools
A clutcher of braves
Warned of their fate In this watery grave
So sneak through the coppice
That is laden with fear
And brag to your friends
That you’ve been here.
So you threw in a log,
And watched it swirl,
Then ran home screaming
Little Boy Little Girl,
Now as your memories fade,
I return again
Seeking your story
With a poet’s pen.
The Greenhouse Effect
The flowers annoyed me,
So I threw them out,
The earths rank smell
Drew me from my Torpor,
So I laid a floor
Of cold, cruel concrete.
Now it is the light
That hurts my eyes,
And imprints upon
My perceptions of
What lies beyond.
So I painted my greenhouse black,
With long bold strokes
Of a senseless brush,
But it did no good at all.
So I sat on a stool in the darkness,
Meditating upon my blind existence.
Yet still the birds sang beyond The shadow glass,
As I sweated an ocean In the still heat Of a Summer sun.
So I plugged my ears with wax
And stripped to create
An imperfect silence,
In which my heart Tolled like a funeral bell,
And I felt my flesh crawl with meat flies.
This was the best I could do,
Short of fatal act
And all this accursed time
The world rolled within my head,
Each dark wave topped
With a white horse of hope; Anthansor, Shadowfax bridges built Back from where I retreat.
I am defeated; there is inside of me
This bright pool of hope,
Where the lost they dance,
On emerald banks amongst the Summer Forget-Me-Nots.
The Snare
An inexplicable awakening,
The slow glide to a window
To view a perfect picture painting,
Of crisp clean frozen clarity
Motionless strokes of reality,
Now coherent in residues
Of the tortured night.
The dawn chorus has failed
Its daily detonation,
The velvet beast of the night,
Retreating from its toils,
Casts a backward glance Into no mans land,
Paralyzing this godless place of halfway light
Where time has stalled
In the absence of the predawn overture,
That would herald the arrival of the Sun Coiled and ready,
Beneath the aastern horizon.
The day is dammed.
At this moment failing,
Leaving hammers cocked,
Trapdoors untriggered,
Pens poised, letters unwritten,
Plans enfolded, cauldrons unboiled,
Malignancies set to mutate;
In this thin slice of the day,
Where roads fork wreathed in infinite possibilities
Here I find
myself writhing in ecstasy,
In the Snare
At the Edge of the day.
Crunch
Life’s a drag isn’t it?
Who is the patron saint
Of snails anyway?
Tell me,
Have you seen out Shells?
Spirals forever inward,
An Irish design
To be Sure,
To be Sure!
Crawling out for sustenance,
We reach and grab,
Then retreat back
Inside, Bleak, Slimy and Drab.
Where we ponder existence
And fondle our dreams
Hoping our skulls
Don’t split at the seams.
Slick, shiny trails
Shells evolved for defence?
But this giant snail
Could never climb a fence.
On bright Autumn mornings,
You can seen where we’ve been,
Yet if you seek us out - nowhere to be seen!
Only heard,
When crunched,
Underfoot.
Harvesters of the Night
Blind purses of leather Hung from oak rafters In warm roof spaces, Above shattered shells And discarded wing cases, Clutched in the senseless, Summer Night,
By sorting invalids, In finger-like flight.
With no scented touch Nor sighted line
They reap nights bounty So
Crunchingly fine.
Growing Pains
No harsh landscapes of
Speaking stone nor
Pregnant sectarian bog,
Only fading images
Suck me back searching.
My memories ride
The outermost ripple
In a temporal pool,
Always essentially outwards,
Escaping my flailing grasp.
Disfigured in concrete,
Trapped in tarmac tombs,
Rolled into the obscure,
That sought is concealed
Beneath cold patchworks.
Under these tumorous estates
Lies my lost light,
Distorted in a change consuming,
There a child growing
But lost in the here and now,
An adult deformed and disconnected.
Yearly I travel further From the centre of
This spreading malignancy,
Yearning for lost clarity, connection,
Which deprives and conceals my vitality.
Only green pools at extremities
Offer sustenance,
Lure and seduce with sights and smells.
Yet here others memories mingle,
Become confused and compressed,
Maddening Kaleidoscopes,
Which drive be back and inward, Inward toward brick centres
Where wellheads bulge and groan
With tortured links,
Lost beneath my feet.
Midnight Windows
Like the Digger and the Crowman,
I sit at a window,
But no Squat pen,
Aside for now,
Seeking what lies
Beyond the glass.
Yet there is Nothing
Except my refection,
In the inky well of the night;
Just me and him.
And he mocks me, Imitates my every move,
Our eyes forever locked,
I move closer my vaporous breath
Obscuring all but his eyes.
I stare back defiant and am hypnotised,
Then we become as One;
Then we cross.
Now I am ethereal, Outside looking in.
We laugh and our bridal veil dissolves, He shakes his head,
A soundless laughter ripples Across his ruddy features.
Our eyes now part
And his gaze reverts to paper, The pen rolls.
I laugh and elude the light,
Looking in from the Night,
Outside In,
Inside Out.
The Assassin
The word ricocheted like a bullet,
Around the stagnant room,
A door flew open,
The sweet, fragrant waft Of distant enchantments
Lightened her drab cell,
Forcing free the coils of Her own oppression,
Releasing the restrictions of a love.
She crossed her arms
And raised her knees
To her warming breast,
Protecting the suckling child
Fostered for so long
In a forbidden world.
Rebellion sparkled bravely In her eyes,
Subordination, the beast, retreated.
Images flew to her,
Released to an inner light,
Whilst he slept oblivious,
Wrapped in his own Dream,
In which, she played, no part.
I felt uneasy,
The blind assassin
Misfiring that Bullet Into a fragile union.
‘Do call again’ she smiled absently. I did,
But she was gone,
And he torn and alone,
A burning shadow
Surveying the ruins of his Kingdom,
Wrecked by a fairy tale, fantasy magic,
Contained in a word, a bullet,
Ambition.
17
Judgment Day?
Standing unsuspecting and innocent,
Upon a hillock thrown between roads Old and New,
I confronted an Apricot Sun,
Sinking slowly in a Summer Sky.
Upon this earth tumulus,
Cast aside by mechanical man
In the turning of tons
Of cold and sterile soil,
I stood astride a futile womb.
But under the fertile Mother Sun,
The Earth turned and warmed,
Now green, fertile,
Studded with a million
Pale anemic faces,
Smiling in reverence.
Then something somewhere,
Deep inside, turned and twisted,
Then turned again.
A dark, sinister disc
Scraped the Sun,
Which groaned hemorrhaging
Into toweling clouds.
Bloody darkness crept Across that vital disc,
Earth became bruised and swollen.
A distant bitch howled like a beaten child To a silent unhearing world.
I stood gaping as the Earth contracted
And the shifting clouds congealed,
Now exposed, where the roads spat and flowed,
In the shadow I shivered, eclipsed.
The Day After Forever
I hate the wheel,
The red eyed metal Locusts Race before me.
I hate the wheel,
Trapped in this coffin Of blood welded steel
This cold metal Pampered like a child,
Praised a ruling demi-god.
All praise to the Wheel!
It has hurled us to this point
And surely rolls forever;
Or the Day After;
When Dis shall rise
To poisoned worlds, Where men in Oil will burn
Yet even He,
Will spurn
The Ruins of Paradise.
All praise for the gift of the Wheel.
In His Wake
I would cry,
But it would release me,
Weep for an innocent Sleek and black,
Our shadow cast upon her.
I traced your funeral march,
Confused and without hope,
To a cleft in the rocks;
An oil lined crypt.
No more proud flight,
A weakened crawl,
Your world destroyed No provocation
No threat;
No defence,
Dependant on human blinkered, Conscience.
Poison man,
Unconscious of his inky footfalls
That crush you underfoot,
Soon forgotten,
Beneath the plumes of war
And the warped lens.
But I shall never forget
Your final flutters,
Because
Human corpses
Mean nothing to me.
Imperial Pleasures
There is a beast at work in our world,
Who withers the young and old,