After extraordinary lightning strikes around the east and south coast of Ireland all Van Morrison's fairweather friends will expect me to avoid printing a few well turned poems for the Master of Deception...however, never daunted by the journalists in Dublin, I have retrieved some of his fans about whom I wrote in the past............

The Blue Guitar
He say: I got to have a lady
She's going to be blue, a rose
A blue rose guitar, a rose
I'm going to put in a bowl.
He say: My lady got to have long hair,
Shines like a bell rope
I'm going to pull,
Hey... I'll pull your hair
My lady.
He say: My lady, she's got to be thin,
As thin as a bone in my wrist,
I'm goin' to tie her on a chord,
I'm goin' to hang her round my neck
With a knot in a bootlace,
Then I can tug her,
My long haired blue rose,
My thin, long haired rose lady,
I'm goin to keep the thin one,
Give me that bowl now;
My rose will float forever,
She's so well lined...
My rose lady, my blue rose...
I'll hang you on my neck
With a knot in a bootlace
And tug ya, tug ya...
And play me some, my lady,
Some more tunes.
jbraddell©2002

THE RETURN

When the door opens early morning
He wakes the daylights
In all the hidden places of night.
Through crevices and dust laden
Windows, light flees.
Spiders gather their robes in,
Moths take a dive.
In the grain yards the acreage
Stirs, imagining its green
Stiff wheat cliff leaning
On the wind. The door bangs.
From his fist he throws sun's
Alders over the brown molten
Arms of the water.
Crushing the footsteps on the path
He runs, bruising the puddles,
Sucking from grass sticks the whistle.
Without knowing his store
He stretches out his arms
To the stone laden roads
Tracing their path through her body.
His face in the still light
Impassive, a weight of its own,
Calling her down to his mouth.
j.braddell©2002

HEALING OVER

Was it drying his feet with her hair
That aggravated her madness?
Or was it before that...
Trying to get his boots off,
The knot in the lace was like wire?
A horrified glance at his wrists revealed
His hands tied to a clean soft shirt
And within his arms the electric wire -
their knots tied to the blue veins -
"Just to confuse god,"he mutters...
She managed to laugh then at the chance
Of his divining while he was yet drunk
That the room was so small for a reason
As the Word was - remote.
Then his huge face, silk screen, fell on her,
His long tongue licked her face avid for tears.
He roared his joys so loudly she was tempted
To start screaming herself. His appetite
For her insanity in loving knows no limits.
The clockwork of the coincidence of these two
Is inevitable - it is a habit they've got
.j.braddell©2002

BETTER A WORD YOUR MISTRESS THROWS AT YOU IN A FRENZY THAN A JEWEL GIVEN YOU BY ANY OTHER WOMAN....Attar.

Queen of the Night!
The braggart! A woman raves
In the sandpit.....
She makes an avalanche
Of green glass
Congealing on every sound.
She makes...Panes for windows
Vessels for tears
Glass bullets
For the fusillade
Plummet of the heart.
The telescope lense
You lift to vision
reveals
her crazy dance
down your mirror
escalating
and blinding.
The dome
her voice has made;
your glass-eyed mare
swivels.
She yells,discarding lies,..the atomic
sounds
dislocating
syllables
forming one
for, yes, one
and all can
follow this
brazen pair.

Jocelyn Braddell©2002