Twisting and turning
Into whirlpools of babbling blood
Leaving
Her bloodstained dress
To balloon into white froths of blasphemous blood

Sinking

Shrinking
Into a steaming stream of babbling baptism
Submerged
Into a brewing babble of bubbling blood
Savaged
Sheared into shreds
Her serrated flesh started to separate
From her bludgeoned torso
The head dripped with tears of blood
As it hung onto a threaded tissue of sallow skin
Were it flagellated
Into an absolving stream of dissolving blood
Ripped
And raped
Pillaged with cold clawing currents
The ghastly head sheared away from its host
Dropping off
The deathly body

Decapitated

The torso was washed away
Leaving
The deathless head
In a dampen shroud of brackish black bramble
Detached
The grotesque head
Spins and rinses
Into a whipping foam of cherry blood
Dislodged
The severed head is carried
Down stream
In a moonlit tureen of muddied water

Heading

Towards Walton Hall Manor

Richard
Mounts his fretful horse
And gallops into the cursing night

A Tombstone Curse

Shrilled
Tombed and scripted
Into
The frightful Manner
In the fifteenth century
Roger de Walton
Male heir
The last of the male ancestral line
Cursed the dour Walton Hall on his death bed
That no male shall be born in this Manor
And that the apocalyptic sprig shall inherit the meadow
To this day
The curse has come true

The original manor was torn down
While the second one became haunted
By the Bogart
Who
According to William Wakefield Heaton
A recorder of collected manuscripts
In 1880
A group of locals
Saw an apparition
On several occasions
The headless specter
Could be seen around the Walton Hall estate
Blanched
In a sacked torso body
It had long frenetic arms
That would flagellate into the night damp air
With flights of frenzy
The fleeting hands
Would claw into the darkness with its frantic feline fingers

One morning

A group of locals discovered three dead bodies
They were the landlords of Walton Hall Manor
Scratched and clawed to death
Mr. Thomas Leyland and his wife and his young nephew
Richard

After that
Looking at her grandchildren
As she freshens up her white frock
She says with a comforting smile
I need a drink
Lets all go to the Rice House Pub
As grandma takes a sip from her own suds

Cheers

To the Rice House Pub

Established in the eighteenth century
Andre Rice
Proprietor
Politics
To the public
House
Bedfellows
To the town
Hall
Meetings would stagger
Next door into Walton’s Town Hall
Meetings would stagger
Next door into the Rice House Pub
Politics
Poured from drafts
Into tanked up tankards
You could hear

The War Cry

Would echo with tamborine jingles
Drummed with salvation
The black army departed with a copper
The War Cry
Echoed into a parade
To Church Street
Across the road from the Rice House Pub

To the Brown Cow Pub

Shaking
And striking cymbals of Christ
Tally-ho
Symbols of tannery
Banging their jingles
Drumming their hides to the Brown Cow Pub
As patrons grazed in a Tantalus of barley
Spirits
Sallied into Salivation
Jingled
With Jesus

Christ

Thank God
The black army has departed
Cheers
Burped the patrons
And by the way

Who was the fuck who farted

In the dark corner

Jack

Sat
Shrugging his shoulders
The snoop-nosed gentlemen sipped
Sarsaparilla
With sophistry
He would sit in solitary
A sacrosanct sermonizer
Like a solipsist
A sop of society
Socializing
With a sorbet
Satiating you
With his sectarian sermon
He would sing
His synchronous song
To all the skeptics
He wanted to save

The Remnants of Walton’s Town Hall

Pours water
From its pitcher of welled up memories
Resting like a tombstone
Its coat of arms
Is walled
Into a capsule of captivity
Lost
Into the changeable echoes of time
Rice Lanes
Landmarks
Lie under the shadow
Of a gray concreted motor way crossing
Now

A Flyover

Echoes
With cheers
Posted
To the transient sky
Keylara and Shu
Salute their muted wings
With a winding cry

Accelerando

Their path
Gets higher
And higher
As they scale the sky
On a clavichord of clouds
Rising
Falling
And surging upward

Pianissimo

Two notes
Flecked
Like motes
On sheets of blue
Quaver
In a cadence of quietude
Lost
For a moment
Notes
Puff into fluted clouds
Were they sail
And swell into a crescendo of white waves
Nocturnes
Keyed in a melodic sea of harmony
Strumming the skies
Onto sheets of white
Pitching
Side to side
In a metronome of flight
Charting
The sky with a scroll of delight
Leaving
The melodious winds
To orchestrate their flight

Leggiero

A duet
Of dance
Pirouetting the sky
In a wind of melody

Scorrendo

Sailing
In a breeze of blue
Soft winds
Blow in the reeds
Of floating clouds
Billowing
Into an ethereal cloud of ivory
Suspended
Into a bluesy sea of harmony
They glide above a coast of ebony
Moving
Along on the mellow winds of a melody
Sustained
Into a muted cloud of ecstasy

Scherzando

An upper wind
Picks up the tempo
Plucked
Into a chorus of clouds
Notes
Blast onto a woodwind stage
Of rolling clouds
Wings beat
As notes scale the sky
With their upbeat assent
Swinging
In a rhythm of blue
Bee-bopping
On a white horn cloud
That is trumpeting through

Affannoso

High
On speed
Spinning on
A vortex of wind
Caught
In an eddy of euphoria

Canabbandano

Blasting
Shooting
Onto the silver edge
Of boundless clouds
Skimming
Surfing
Onto the white waves
That taxi
To cloudless skies
Swinging
Rocking
Into jamming clouds of floating dust
High
In space
Flying high
Into sonic skies
Swelling and surging
In a fusion of metallic blue
Amplifying
The stars
With your clarion call
Caught
In a crescendo of vibration
Out of control
Pitched
Into decibels of deafness
Cumulative echoes
Echoes
Resonate into ascending voids
Of suspended descent
Lost

Rallentando

Intervals
Pause
Into space
Notes left
On a ledger line
Of infinite motionlessness

Prestissimo

Boreas
Boom
Pulls the notes
Down
Down
Down
Into a downdraft of blasting winds
Notes
Spiral
Into gusts
Of pitching air
Dropping
Dropping
Dropping
Into down winds
Of sinking descent

Decrescendo

Falling
Falling
Falling
Into spinnakers
Of drifting white clouds
Lulled into calmness
Sailing
On a song of lullabies
Cradled
Into the soft chords of blowing reeds
Suspended
In sleep
Descending in song
Gliding
Gliding
Onto a Zephyr
Of floating winds
Coasting
Coasting
Onto cumulus clouds
Of cultural change
Bellows
Of melodious winds
Blow and drone
Into a brushing breeze of resonance

Dolce

Notes
Rest on sheets
Of linen clouds
Adapting
To the currents of change
The metronome
Will arrange the tempo of their soul

Sin’al Fin

Notes
Flap into applause
As Keylara and Shu
Bow

To Port

Sprites
In flight
Darting
And diving
Into a petrified forest of vaporized mist
The whooshing Liver Birds cut across
The sighing sky
Like a laser
Eyes
Pierce the uncaring fog
Genuflecting
His powerful head
Shu gestured

Ahead

Towards the emerald sea
Eyes
Grime with cloudiness
Wings befoul
With filth
Nostrils foul up
With the mephitic stench that distills from the River Mersey
Streaked with swill
It smears with scum
With a scouring of slime
Sledge and shit
Besmeared
The unhallowed soiled sea
Wiped away
Its defilement
In it’s ululating tide

Scoured

The rancid river turns
Into a latrine of excrement
As its flatulent bowels
Bespatter and explode into a turbid tureen of honey-brown
Turds
Dissolve into a sea of salted diarrhea
Leaving
The soiled shorelines with brown skids of crusted land
An estuary
Of encrustation
Importing
Exporting
Excrement into its ulcerated river
Unwiped
Unclean
Back
And forth
It swills
And foams
Into a mouth of halitosis
Were it froths
Into the famished waters of the Irish Sea

The Liver Birds turned their backs
To the leavened sky
Looking to the landscape of a Lancashire

Seaport

It stands on sandstone
That sips up the suds of the sea
Carved with strength
It’s built on an estuary
Were it cocks up its leg
To piss into the Irish Sea
A seaport city
Farting onto the River Mersey
Two hundred and two miles north
West of a cockney

History 101

In a short breath
Of brevity
War
In brief
If war is ever brief
Its port piers peered on
On and on
As shards of shells
Fell
Onto the sand castle shores of shoreline shipyards
Were warlike waves waxed and waned
In the wake of war
Its piers
Shore up into sheltered sandbags of shoreline salvage
As shards of shells
Drop
On and on
Its piers prevailed
As British ruled the waves
The Scouse would shout
WE WILL NEVER BE SLAVES

History 202

In a short breath
Of brevity
Peace
In brief
If peace is ever brief
Shipping
Yards
Of yarn
String and twist
Strands
Of ships
Sail down the River Mersey
An abacus
Of beaded ships
Sail along a reverential river
Blessings counted
On a rosary
Of black and pearly cotton beads
Back and forth
Strung along
Into a channel of sweetness
Steaming
To the crystal blue sea
Under the sugar cane of industry

Over there

Keylara paused in flight
As grandma
Yelled out in delight

In Passing