The red-gold glow of stormy autumn fades into winter
As  leafy-mist lights this mid-December dawn recalling me, 
in-curiously, to the design hidden in words. 
Words whirl like smoke signals rising from a fire, from a gun, 
from a life tended by an old man in a blacked out suit 
the front of which, bedecked with medals, is time-ridden.
 He is missing, gone missing, in 1914.

Before the dreadful daylight starts of unkept promises and broken hearts
This fleeting meeting with the past casts a shadow.
O! I can hold the line, for a time, these nightmare images tell of all that hot metal does to human flesh and bone. 
Hidden in these words: aberrant, obsessed, selfish, are sorry-wisps of cognition, which coagulate, fuse the light of yet another English dawn into his troubled mind of miine.

Still, the old and friendly moon haunts the sky of dawn, when this deranged mind of mine passes strange lines of time over me.
Times fade into the unquiet music of rhyme and yet leaves us no time to remember the unaccompanied boys stuck, forever-more, in the mud 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, a silent reckoning of what is to come in this unholy future of our deserving.