Crack  thunder over head

Flash crackle of lightning

The gods said:

Stretch your words across the sky

Illuminate the stark, skeletal

Trees of a northern winter

Some poor sod undoubtedly dead

Rumble roar-not-fled

Echo, reverberate,

All around my desperate head,

Hidden clouds drop hail-rain

Like soft stones pelting down

On a world turning wet and lonely

With a clown's frown

On a world turning 

Down the chances offered by the gods

The night sky wears a slnking-frown,

A clown's painted-on smile,

A curve of white grease paint,

A mile wide, eight miles high,

Definitely not heaven-sent,

Splashed all across black sky,

The moon offers respite

From interminable night

Light suffuses right through

To the tightness of a beating heart

Saturated, now, as the storm subsides:

Satiated with the blood and thunder

Infecting these lonesome, English eyes

With a lack of that mandatory fooling-disguise

Which hides what is really always there

Souls trapped in this thinnest of air..