The red-gold glow

of stormy autumn

leafy-mist lights this late

October dawn recalling him,

curiously,

to the design hidden in words,

which swirl like smoke

rising from a fire, from a pipe,

tended by an old man in a black suit

the front of which is bedecked with medals

time-ridden, he is missing, gone  missing in 1913;

this fleeting meeting with the present

holds the lid, for a time, on his nightmare images

of the war and of what hot metal does to human flesh 

life, now, is just something else that does not matter

hidden in these words

aberrant, obsessed, selfish,

are sorry-wisps of cogitation, which coagulate,

then coagulate again fusing the light of another October dawn into his troubled mind

still the old friendly moon haunts the sky of

dawn,

deranged time,

passes strange

lines of time

over him:

time fades

into the unquiet music of rhyme

leaves such and such shrines for us to remember

the unaccompanied boys stuck forever-more in the deluge of the western front

as leaves cling to trees

so, too, does he cling, just for a time before the wind in his mind

causes everything to tumble

kicking through the  leaves 

there is a passing stillness,

as before a barrage,

a silent reckoning...of what is to come

that will still the moon as bird song scatters memories

and the winds of change fling us all into this unholy future.