POEM - Alone But Beset

As clocks clocked

and doom loomed

when all around me

felt shrill with fear

little flurries of meaning

trickled like a half forgotten stream

silent yet reproachful

beneath my sockless feet

across the marble contrivance

of linoleum in a bathroom

immaculately conceived

I stepped into the shower

and from that one moment 

could believe it was raining

divinity upon my sleepy lethargy

a body finally awoken

to an unminted morning

before the coffee percolated

perhaps I should stay here

bricked in like an anchorite

behind a crystal clear screen

hermetically sealed

in this damply insufficient realm

that I call home 

alone but beset 

by one niggling question

Did I love them 

enough?

Stephen Lumb

Written October 2026

POEM - The Tawdry Reaping

In a time requiring judgement

for it to end in profanity, 

is a defect of my soul-searching 

but these are the cracks 

in the crazed pavements 

we walk upon

this is a time that is deluded

about its own delusion

it is the smelly slime

from a pond, aggressive jack boots

have stamped in, dredged out, 

then renamed it clarity, 

I swear, I do swear, it is the swearing, 

that I do, in order to release the constraints 

upon my tongue, the nervousness of lips

out of a charitable need for my mind

to speak free of polity, off message,

frankly, I cry out fuuuuck, far too loudly,

too often, with a rage ignored

by the la la la of eardrums

so I doubt these caustic words, 

their construct and cognisance

their sentences, can they ever match the mood

or capture the collective geist 

of a succulent stupidity 

already presenting itself for crowning 

what is it, that we think we are doing

hunting down the scent of a putrid lure

across wild clawed countryside?

nothing as laudable 

as an altruistic urge exists here,

I am left smoldering in regret

for we will be so double crossed

by the mean spiritedness

of their tinfoil minds, 

dressed soberly in pastel blue suits

those arsonists who point

at the fires they've ignited

then shake their moralising heads 

at the descent of England

as though they themselves

had nothing to do with the inflammatory fury

that they are merely pointing at

all destruction prefaces a future creature

and I fear the beast now being let loose 

to ethnically poison then cleanse the soil

preparing this land for the tawdry reaping

of a mutant political harvest.

Written June 2026
by Stephen Lumb 

POEM - And What Is This?

What is it we want

That I can offer my

thumbs and thoughts too?

What is that?

And what is this?

What is the faith

That neither brutalises truth

Nor sugar coats the sting?

What is that?

And what is this?

What is pride

When overburdened 

With apathy or bile?

What is that?

And what is this?

What sort of question

Brings answers 

That do not feed the hunger?

What is that?

And what is this?

What colour of life is it

That spins away from

The hollow holes of glory?

What is that?

And what is this?

What is it thunders

Before the smell of rain

is conjured in my mind?

What is that?

And what is this?

What is it that remains silent

When baying wolves

Demand sacrificial victims?

What is that?

And what is this?

What is it that survives

A civilisational collapsing

That only a poet mourns?

What is that?

And what is this?

What is it I resist

As my throat is arrested 

On the cusp of words

What is that?

And what is this?

What is it I am seeking

In these long drawn

Alleys of allegory 

What is that?

And what is this?

What is it?

I am dreaming of

That I do not really wish to know?

What is that?

And what is this?

Stephen Lumb
Written October 2026

POEM - Borrowed Words

I'm seeing myself through 

childhood's eyes my toys

cast across the bedroom floor

with the accompanying magical

folklore from my errant dreaming

my rolling chassis is still

as unsure as a newborn babes

for what appears purposeful 

and godlike has assumed this gate 

from the rubble I stumbled upon

the words that I say are 

half beliefs half cut with

bluster a type of blagging

obtained cheaply imbibed

from the erudition of libraries

this mind stuffed with pocketed

borrowings that I will leave behind 

as a trail of cellophane wrappers 

from around my humbugs

the legacy of having once eaten 

far more than was needed to survive by

Written by Stephen Lumb
March-April 2026

POEM - Collating Pebbles

I hear popular 

invidious distinctions 

made on the pages
of books and rhymes

reformulating history

as though belonging

a sense of place were a matter 

of the purity of its ingredients 

cooked in a mythic ancestral soup

selecting only the whitest pebbles 

from a beach of mixed aggregates 

wilfully ignoring the continental drift

the gravelled tides 

that brought everyone to an island

you really have to want to get too

our shingled beaches 

ever shifting in their formation

with each lunar cycle 

carry whatever flotsam 

the waves throw up

for we remain 

as ever we were

a resolutely mongrel nation 
our noble destiny our right of birth 

is to be cross bred 

via our estuaries and ecstasies 

by glorious virtue of evolutionary jism

with Neanderthal pebbles, 

Celtic pebbles, 

Roman pebbles, 

Scandinavian pebbles, 

Angle, Saxon and Jute pebbles, 

Norman French, Dutch and Andalucian

and any other exotic gene pebble 

we might pocket through our travails

through the gravel 

of this washed up lineage we have

absorbed cultures 

with the insatiableness of blotting paper

adventuring across seas

migrated seeking fortunes in 

foreign climes, 

conquered, quelled and capitalised

on the achievements of countless

civilisations whilst

we forged then forgot an Empire

that we ethnically cleansed 

of our sins and repainted beneficent 

should you chose to

though why ever should you 

define our nation by the narrowest alley 

travelled between one street and the next

then we all become foreigners, immigrants and refugees 

by virtue of crossing a road

become prey for territorial street gangs

lurking on the other side of an

invisible boundary line

someone thought up

on the back of a fag packet

we are all in a world wild search 

for a destination sublime

to find whatever our true home is 

and wherever we choose to land

humankind makes that 

into the flesh and bones of a nation

collated out of the inconspicuous ruins 

of our collective vagrancy 

our primary homelessness

we wander arrive

we settle 

and conjure

a less muddied destiny for ourselves 

with whoever we are with 

wherever it is that we are

nothing about a nation is eternal

nor sacrosanct 

we briefly share genetic time

together on a river

that floats us downstream

into a vast encompassing sea

into which we all become 

indistinguishable 

from water

in the end.

Written by Stephen Lumb 

February/March 2026

POEM - Shaking Our Superior Head

It appears we have presumed
the importance
of bringing to them a name 
to state there deviation
from acceptable to
castigate to the abhorrent core

the fault lines in their beliefs
being more important still not
to be listened too
to care for how they arrived here
what circuitous routes they took to
turning a deaf ear to our wisdom

nor can we allow one
free finger of thought
to touch upon the reasons
for bleaching their hair roots
lest accidentally to stumble upon a
need for stability and belonging

of a very similar cast
to your own to what
you demand and possess
for sure they are 
clinging to clearly
unconscionable conclusions

but all desires run hungry
for a clear cut gypsy globe
to gaze through for omens
to dispel the persistent misting
of tired rationales
cracked frameworks

and caged mindscapes
however incorrect we
conclude these to be
in the wrong they stain humanity with
a compromised existence squeezes tightly
around the neck of them

emerging from this murkier
less familiar end
of the shallowest income bracket
to be found near our neighbourhood
seeks favourable conditions beyond
the insecurity of plasterwork 

the surface mould on their
turned out to be
trashed horizons
and the ever advancing
pollution haze of grim prospects
and career potholes

they want what you want
to have what you have
even looking at
the same photographs
they perceive them in negative
with all faces blackened

teeth erased and backlit
skies thunderous in
a petri dish culture of grim
all moral prognosis
biologically dipped in fixative
declared superior via slogans

gestures and sounds that bite those
purely English apples of prejudice
tattooed upon their flexed arms
affinities cable tied to lamposts
that brings to them a pride
that puts all bread and

ambivalence to bed we fear
the fouling of fossil fueled ideals
seeping into our eco-cleaned carpets
because all this has seemingly
got far too difficult
for us to encompass to continue

being eminently reasonable about so
we slap a name upon them
and shaking our superior head
walk back to the car
fearing for our lifestyle sanctified through
our better taste and choice in shoes

 


Written by Stephen Lumb
January 2026

POEM - The Gardening Of Time

I am not finished yet
I declare as I wash down
the path in the garden
the old arthritic man in me
gently fiddles ineffectively
with weeds
trims errant bushes
clears mounds of leaves things
that need attending to
are added to the
purposeful small garden of tasks
seemingly so I cannot say
this job is done
yet

and through these
insufficient deeds
the hours into days well
they pass peacefully enough
with only this gaggle of
humble activities of note
though there are days 
where I can't be arsed with
even this,
that or the other
luxuriating in my age
and indolence
because I can
and will given the time
lounge around sheepishly

deaf to plaintive echoes of my Mother
incanting disparaging phrases
of any notion that I
could sit around all day
doing nothing
when nothing can be
so delightful a frisson of freedom
from care about any
inculcated remonstrance
too old yes too bloody old
for any of that
I puff up some cushions to
let body mind and purpose
find some shut eye

existing can that really
be redacted to an exercise
in the time
and productivity
of a neat garden in winter
or did I miss some salient point
or sagacity along the way in
the meaning of meaning
is it in the doing 
or the endgame that
life is at its best isn't life normally a job
left incomplete abandoned to
the accompaniment of some tune
filched from Thomas Tallis
to activate all the tear ducts
of mourners in the perfectly
manicured garden 
of remembrance

Written by Stephen Lumb
November 2025

POEM - I Know I Am Here

I see me every morning
as the setting moon of my face
stares backwards through the mirror

I see the refracted spheres of me
as the water ripples sloshing
in the bottom of a bucket

I see myself in rain gathered gutters
the passing cast of my existence
skipping across the road in puddled steps

I see as mine these holographed echoes
in dormer windows, glazed arches, car windscreens
the floating glare in darkened shopfronts.

I see that I am multifaceted, glimpsed
through countless distorted reflections
conforming to the shapely curve of any surface

I see how I appear in wide angles 
via the sentient lens of borrowed eyes
and their psycho-gothic projections

I know I am here, only fleetingly
caught in the gossamer light weft
of my own story and weaving

Written by Stephen Lumb -September 2025

POEM - No More Need

Do you need

to hear this,
to follow blithely
its particular poetic trail of crumbs?
does the world really need more intricate phrases
formed around a dysfunctional
shifting
sentence construction?
does it need to hear
any more from me or from you?
hmm, when does it ever!
what utility does this need possess?

could you easily do without it?
what would you cluster around
and be about then?
what is this urge anyway?
where does this need - lead
other then to another need,
a whole wagon train of successive needs
where does all this grasping get you?
whence does it take you?
dragging yourself to some far off hill
where imaginative fulfillment 

owns a big house, no doubt 

when was all that ever realistic?
tangible to your present senses
another fantasy flourish
among many
filling up the vacant spaces in time and life?
quickly buried beneath sorrow
and all sorts of other excremental refuse
that you produced, but discarded
do you recognise that here, 

that this is the nexus of your pain?
concealed inside
this self enveloping pit 

of unrequited desires
that this is where your promiscuous muse 

ends up?

Has there ever been a time, an emotion, one sequence of language
that does not need to be shed of its secretive shell
given an internet airing, a publicity shot face,
shamelessly prostituting its need
to be seen and heard and sold
out on the streets?
will there ever be a time of
no more need?

no more need for lucre?
no more need to find expression?
no more need to buy pleasure?
no more need to buy an indulgence
no more need to buy useless stuff?
no more need to keep being busy?
no more need to please?
no more need to blame others?

no more need to hate - them?
no more need to be productive?
no more need to control the daily agenda?
no more need to worry and fret about your needs?
no more need to feel concerned about your future?

no more need to run scared of not existing?
no more need to demand attention?
no more need to optimise each and every
bloody moment
for maximum enjoyment and fulfillment?
there will always be this momentum
and then that momentum
followed by further momentum
circling out like lonely satellites
multiple hands waving madly at the cosmos
to get their attention
sending your message out into the universe
for the approval of another indifferent nebula of stars
when will all this grasping
for those freak moments of attention
exhaust itself of all propulsion?
of all future possibility and direction of travel?
to have no more need  
of all of that? 

only when our need cracks itself apart
might it feel no longer frightening
to fall very quiet, 

to become anonymous
to be intellectually still

to inhabit the silence of a new born day
and those needs calmly will vanish 

slink off into the aura of what is past
then no more need
can give birth
to peace of mind.

Written by Stephen Lumb July 2025

POEM - Parchment Days

This day, of all the days

ought not to wear a mournful frown
and yet, though
it's sky bears a virgin blue
it's sun lifts its golden face
and all its shadows
form brief but shifting halos
scuttling around my feet
like faithful lap dogs
in the cupped hands of my mind
sits this weightier anniversary
that sports a phosphorescent
yet darkly walking scar,
it was a summers day
exactly like this one
the promenade struck out along the cliff
with its usual provocative invitation to walk it
my body felt much heavier
than was usual
chest pressed in upon itself
as though it were an orange
being tightly squeezed
this presentiment, this estranged oracle
has etched a long long shadow since
and makes any day
a year later, feel all the more portentous
when placed in the shade of its recollection,
the story, is hence, carefully written out on parchment
in the thick strokes of a gothic hand
what runs through it, is desperately mortal
in the way it chooses to paint itself
more needy perhaps than is its due
pushing gratitude to one side
and saying, just wait your turn
you sunny faith-filled boy
for goodness sake
will you let me grieve first
for the end
of my being carefree and spontaneous
and flip and ….open-ended
where every action now
when it ventures a step into the future
has this contractual obligation to
mention the distinct possibility of death
of there being a bus terminus
life is now stretched out against
cut according to
the limit of a fabric tape measure
with its tiny brass sunset
every day, has now to be ‘blessed’
with life, it can no longer be forgetful
or mindlessly at ease with itself, nor flagrantly casual
simply just living, has become this precious princess
to be carried across uneven stony ground
with care, and love,
but also with sadness in its tow
for the loss of its naivety, is gross
one year on
that I feel grateful to be alive
still doesn't quite cut the full mustard
as a description
its a bit fucking weak.



Written by Stephen Lumb
10/07/2025

POEM - A Plea To Whatever Is Transcendent

Whatever exists
beyond the corporeal
beyond
whatever the outstretched arms
of my imagination
can inadequately touch upon
whether 'you' can even be you'd
or gendered fluidly
I prey upon this with my mind
pray for it with my heart
and this minor souls bereft nature
pleads, like a starving man
surrounded only by pictures
of bread and wine
for one vivid experience
of it
so the ache
with which this hiatus
bores into the side of my stomach
might finally be settled
and be soothed
to at last
feel at ease
with the inherent
human state of aloneness
for whatever I do
whatever I chose to believe
whatever picture I wish to paint
of the transcendent
feels a few sketchy lines
skimmed across a page
a cartoon version
of divinity
of omnipotent original cause
conceptually aloof
and alien to feeling
all arising
out of a personal inadequacy
from base greed
a craving need
to fill the gaping hole
in my fragile belief
with a conveniently shaped
plug
which when bedraggled in doubt
can never be adequately filled
anyway
no wishes can be complied with
intuitive sense informs
me to not demand intervention
advance order a response
through arrogant temper
just align or not align
whilst staying calmly benign
if any of this is indeed true
and no delusion
then help me dream of it better
if this desire will be of benefit
transform my senses
transform my vision
transform my mind and heart
to be a fit receptacle
for small jewels
the golden amulets
to bedeck my shrine with
perfumed incense
to adorn the air with smokey swirls
light transient candles
to display
the present way forward with
for my arms they are open
and receptive for
whatever can be offered
in a kind act of reciprocity
do not remain hidden
any longer
before my human time
and hence opportunity
for comprehension
finally escapes
the cup of my fingers.

Written by Stephen Lumb
17th April 2025

POEM - Harvesting Couch Grass

Dawn was an apricot moose

this morning 

of the pinched shoulder 

if you read the outward signs

there was nothing wrong

nothing to bare being written

home about

but behind that sensationless 

'nothing to be seen here'

was one taught strung muscle

pulling at one's well being like

a child tugging at the seams of clothes 

it wanted attention

a sweet to be sucked on

more likely

a healing hand to smooth

it all away, and

though I am an elder

my Mother long long gone

I'm holding out just in case

she'll turn up 

unexpectedly 

knowing what to do

what salve to use

to make it go away

and if she found she'd reached 

the end of her knowledge 

would walk me down the hill 

to Doctor Lister's

surgery, and deal with it

her prolonged abandoning 

of that Motherly space

means I wallow

in a distinctly male strategem

of misapplied stoicism

as though bearing with it

was the tried 

and trusted cure all

for every bodily ailment

known to mankind, so

the impingement continues

the need to embody care 

for who I am

instead fertilises a harvest 

of couch grass

that no one can reap

pivoting into an

unfiltered masochism

whose feeble integrity lies

in an illusory fit

of will to power 

theosophy

Written by Stephen Lumb
January 2025

POEM - Seed

SEED

The returning seed of sycamore

twirls to the ground

a soul arriving via helicopter

fresh from the highest blue 

the conclave of heaven.

Written by Stephen Lumb
November 2024

POEM - An Irreparable Separation

I bear a face that would not want to recognise itself it is not pleasing nor pleasant it can no longer smile nor laugh at your jokes cry along with your suffering my cheeks once jocular are now bereft of colour cold hearted to the affectionate brush of a hand for a while on the surface I look exactly the same but slowly their is an altered state there is a smell about me of a form being eaten away from within a body corrupted inside to out slowly breaching the chill flesh drained of blood translucent and whitening all the signifiers of my former essence these deserted portraits of what was once a gratified soul I am not the face you'd wish to recognise the body the mind the heart and spirit that you may have once romanced that face is now impassively a loveless one a joyless one distressing to be onlooker of one you would not take a selfie of unless you we're rather ghoulish with no respect for the dignity of repose of me ensconced upon my catafalque that final divorce from all affection all memory all you may have once associated with me given my former outline is erased like a chalk drawing in the rain that brief incident of weather when I still contained a vibrancy alive to the precious gift of it all, of friendship a bond to my present state that has been permanently sundered given up to who knows where from whence it can never be reclaimed or re-membered through the face for what you now see is and is not me it bears an unpalatable truth within the ruby cluster of bruises around the sunken sockets and the rictus grin of flaring lips what you imagine still as me always was this necessary fiction, a function of practicality, a useful baroque phantasm that got us through the unfolding exposition of a rather low key drama series where we once tried to ride bare back on the pure bright horse of love.

Written by Stephen Lumb 

June 2024

POEM - Too Far Out

In this instant of hope breaking its

bridges the ones that failed to be mended

previously return, they are here

providing immoral support because there

has become 

too far out of reach and tangled up in all
the swaddling coddling and attending to

the darker edges of what our self 

encumbered soul requests to be unseen

carrying on its existence off stage behind the

privacy of the dressing room door

balms cannot sooth it nor honey raise

the taste to be sweeter to sprinkle

meaning upon it or renovate its interior

decor back into a pristine light for

a heart malformed into a shrug

is insensate.

Written by Stephen Lumb

May 2024

POEM - Empty Premises

What use

are empty premises?

their damp air, filled up

with vacant potential

awaiting the much delayed arrival

of new dreams

pissing rays of optimism

beaming brightly, with a

pristine clarity unbecoming 

of an imperfect vision

for what this could be

in the future

meanwhile, left entirely abandoned, 

the psychic dust circulates

langorous sirrocos of emotional particles 

floating like dandruff

catching the light

of those past and gone, 

tiny momentos, casually dropped

lingering behind skirting boards 

in the skinned heads of carpet pile 

thoughts cast out into the time being

long since

lathered with lotions of regret

empty premises

bare an inherently despondent face

deeply scored 

with the dry and wrinkled strain of waiting

an atmosphere of loss

swathed in self doubt 

for the passing of joys into despond

hopes fulfilled, then trashed

the stress of dreams arising

and souring

before your eyes

as the heart's tenacity

and persistence

peters out

and the door becomes fully closed

on hope springing eternal.

written December 2023

by Stephen Lumb

POEM - The Passing Places

And, as is usual I reach out

I reach over

with the need to know

a need to believe 

to sense

that you are there

it is more than a comfort

more than a palliative to chaos

more important 

than an idle gesture, but an emotion 

the hands are but a flicker of,

a burnishing of the heart's

yearning to not feel alone

an aloneness 

prefigured in the etching

of a body into space

that is a life, my life

and within reach of it

is you, innumerable moments

of another body outside my own

another soul, traveling packed with 

the divisions of our solitude shared

along the traverse

of country roads, narrow as a badger run

with scraped out lay-bys, these arcs 

of passing places, 

then stopping places, 

those places that move me, move you,

that enliven me, that I love, 

that love me back, places painted

with reassuring faces,

places where I rest easier

places where being is not a grind,

an effort not to fall over

into negative spirals, for our time together

has this amorphous diaphanous quality

of appearing to effortlessly pass 

unnoticed, the space
where a ghost should be, but isn't,

cos there you are, alongside the catalogues 

of despondency, when we fly

catapulted back into love

then, I can cheer only you and I on

and on and on, until an imagined point
where the road ahead runs out, or
drives into an eternal passing place

where I lose my grasp of you, and you of I

reaching over with a hand for morning comfort,
an impulse barely awake,  

saying out of the dark 

are you there?
and feeling nothing but cold creases 

on an empty bed, 

perhaps

gone to the bathroom for a pee,

perhaps 

seeking comforts for insomnia,

underpin
these quiet rehearsals of incipient alarm, 

of grief nascent, a waiting place

in which to discover 

how temporary or not, your absence will be, 

til I hear a distant chuckle, your

in the room below

something is amusing you

whilst scrolling through Reddit, and I

cease interrogating the vaults of heaven.

Written November/December 2023

by Stephen Lumb

POEM - Preparing To Let Go

And on the hundredth blow

and on the two hundreth

and on and on and on and on and on

we have clung on

as if waiting for a sign

an oracle or a goddess

to turn up and say

its fine, you can let go now, of that thought,

of that ideal,

of that well polished desire now

hanging off an edge of cliff, well,

this is not a life strategy is it?

its survival of a sort

for which hope has no sustenance

the longer you cling

it reddens the face, its the whitener of knuckles,

the dangling of nethers

forestalling only what is inevitable

grim determination writing itself large

in scrawled handwriting across the forehead

'we are getting ready to let go, please give us sufficient time,

to adjust, to make clear plans ahead, to get our heads around

the possibilities, engage with our fear, and

to prepare for

the falling of failing'

to find for oneself, if we will have new feet

and firm ground beneath them

to locate where

the unmarked path of prophecy

may now be.

Written on 27th September 2023

by Stephen Lumb

POEM - Listening With The Ear Of The Heart

And the toes 

shall they speak of it

in long and weary tones, the callused sentences 

hard like leather, moaning

at the endless search, the walking 

across sand and mud, the broken shells of sounds, 

fracturing coastal dunes,
demolishing the mountains 

of loves unfettered dreamscapes

I am in the heart, they said 

I am the soul of things, and the soul, shall

hear everything, bear witness to all expressions, 

of existences past and not yet past

and so, when I rub my ears, 

I taste the bitterness in things, in being,

and within the brief flutter of birds 

these consume my active hours. 

I eat nature for breakfast

the daily wittering, feeds on my flesh

I feel it, to the end of my fingertips, 

I touch wings mid flight across the open fields

the earthy granular matter of worms, insects 

and the love of snails, 

the slow whittling of my senses

from individuated loyalties 

to exchangeable impressions, 

qualities I can luxuriate in

I taste the touch, touch what I can hear

I hear the smells, smell what it tasted of

I see the sounds, the sound of what it felt like

I sense everything

simultaneously as colours,

music, a multiplicity of textures

interchangeable, as one feeds on and into another

aggregating into being all of them simultaneously 

in one singular drift, as though

a forethought of space and time 

I cannot exist for long, in inseparable sensations, 

from the indivisible then back again

to the isolate existence

if I am disconnected

am I no longer alive?

if I am not fluid

then what am I?

is what the cornfield confided

in a private memo.

Written September 2023
by Stephen Lumb

POEM - Divination

In one long

continuous applause

a babbling stream

converses with itself

in a flurry to reach

the river, and on with

it's daemon, towards absorption

into the thinness of a vanishing horizon

far far away, seeping into

my imagination

a sense for the journey I am on

for the gabbling of my mind

and its self congratulatory

applause, that monologue 

with an interior realm, its

prim neatness and plague

is a continuous prayer

beseeching time

to call out the name

to form the place

to design its decor

to present a divination

for my own 

point of demise.

Stephen Lumb

written in June 2023