Alan Morrison being discursive...

With Alan Morrison's kind permission, Poet-in-Residence presents an extract from the lengthy poem 'Daddy-Long-Thoughts'. This poem, like 'Miss Discombobulated' (sidebar) is from Morrison's book 'The Mansion Gardens' (Paula Brown Publishing - 2006)

from Daddy-Long-Thoughts

In the musty existing room of my parents,
crammed full with family mementos, books,
photographs, Styx's toll-fare tokens
or the hold of a Pharaoh's morbid tomb,
crouch Eden's forgotten descendants, once giants
now shrivelled into earthly, miniature size
like two toy-scale figures in a rented dolls' house
sandwiched between a struggling back garden
and windowed partition to the outside world -
ghosts haunting progress's tumbleweeding suburbs,
eyes seamed with crow's-feet, stitched under-shadows
stewed-tea grey, old-shoe-brown pupils
glistening tiredness, penetrating as nerves
jarred between contrapuntal cogs
of thought, strung out by crippling
preoccupations of the moment,
terror's cryptic puzzles, silent shouts
skirting-board-shrunk inversley in size
to towering effect; nerves' stretched piano wires
creaking lost chords, lost notes, lost times;
eyes strained as recycled tea-bags, marbled
as milk-swirling tea, or egg-whites
bubbling in a frying pan shrapnelled with shell-
splinters; ancestral tut-tut of out
-of-kilter clock stuck forever at Six -
tea-time to startch-scented Edwardians -
illustrates to etiquetteless ear
what on some other plane struggles to be heard
in deafening, daytime, stuffy lounge silence,
dins of the taxidermist's inner-ear:
cork-creaking minutes, stone-scraping seconds -
Time is fed up, it's fretting, it's biting
its nails, until the next train comes.

c)- Alan Morrison 2006

P-i-R has a useful link to Alan Morrison's Recusant website. There you can read some amazing poems; not least the Gwilym Williams poem 'On the Feldherrenhalle Steps', Poet-in-Residence humbly adds.