Look Forward

Look Forward

We look for laughter, happiness and life.
Don’t seek a husband, nor a wife.
Life alone can be such fun,
considering only ever one.

One’s own company can grow terse;
from tiny cradle to coal-black hearse.
Trying to find our own soul-mate,
just like waiting at the pearly gate.
Yet we seek to ever find
love to bring a peace of mind.

Long ago, another life.
She a husband, he a wife.
Issue from the unions grown,
one and one and two alone.

Her son and daughter bound in love,
his two sons from heaven above.
Life’s strange journey onward roamed,
each parent found themselves alone.

These children born of different love,
at once apart but not above
finding family in the other
children of a different mother.

Love, look forward; ever on.
Happiness and joy for Marie and Ron.

These Boys Have Never Really Grown Into Men

© Brian Patten

These boys have never really grown into men,
despite their disguises, despite their adult ways,
their sophistication, the camouflage of their kindly smiles.
They are still up to their old tricks,
still at the wing-plucking stage. Only now
their prey answers to women's names.
And the girls, likewise, despite their disguises,
despite their adult ways, their camouflage of need,
still twist love till its failure seems not of their making;
something grotesque migrates hourly
between our different needs,
and is in us all like a poison.
How strange I've not understood so clearly before
how liars and misers, the cruel and the arrogant
lie down and make love like all others,
how nothing is ever as expected, nothing is ever as stated.
Behind doors and windows nothing is ever as wanted.
The good have no monopoly on love.
All drink from it. All wear its absence like a shroud

Promenade Lovers

Tight as whelks that suck on rock,
hands locked like limpets,
they stroll in the wet dark
along the promenade.
Sides touching, flank to flank,
breaths flowing as one breath,
hearts berthing together
as their feet fall into step.
Mingling with the merely single
they sprout one umbrella not two,
a jellyfish cast on the seashore,
exotic – red, white and blue.
In the wet and dark they
twine in togetherness;
tenacious as barnacles they cling,
deep in a snug-as-seashells kiss