Red-gold glow of stormy autumn
oughter-fade into winter
as leafy-mist lights this late
November dawn recalling me,
incuriously from insomnia,
O! the design hidden in words,
like smoke signals
rising from a gun, from a fire  drawing fire.

Tended by an old man in a black suit
the front of which, bedecked with medals,
is time-ridden by an absence missing,
gone  missing, in 1916.

Before the dreadful daylight starts
of unkept promises and broken hearts..

Fleeting meetings with this past casts a shadow
O! I can hold the line,for a time,nightmare images
tell of all that hot metal does to human flesh and bone.

Hidden in these words:   
aberrant, obsessed, selfish,
 sorry-wisps of cognition, coagulate,
fusing the light of yet another
dawn into his troubling mind of mine.

Still, the old and friendly moon haunts the sky of dawn,
in this deranged mind
passes strange
lines of time
over me.
Times fade
in unquiet music of rhyme
time to remember
the unaccompanied boys
stuck, forever-more, in the mud and gore of the western front.

Just as leaves cling to winter trees
so, too, do these lost boys cling to me..
Kicking through the  leaves, 
there is a passing stillness,
a silence, as before a barrage,