To love the beauty of the world:

How such a beast as this could live.

The nightingales and orange groves:

Beneath them all the fear and loss.

To love the mystery and the space:

The measurement of prison walls.

The moorland tops where skylarks rise

Above economies of death.

To love the way we grasp at truth:

Its horns are sharp and black with blood.

The only day we have is this.

The gods have made these memories strong.

The sun will rise beneath the earth.

The daily horrors count our worth.

In every pit there waits a beast

To break your will and snap your back,

To feast on every fear you bring:

And fears you’ll bring, and feast it will.

Just take the rope and lower away

And go in search of horns and snout,

And breath the stench of mustard gas,

And primal stew of sacrifice.

You need that beast to drag you on,

To shake you from the placid ways.

Its monstrous and divided lusts

Compel you to prepare for life.

For round the next uncertain bend

It just might be that this will end.

These Minotaurs: the lost and sad,

The broken bodied, buried, burnt.

These fragments of tales and fears

Scattered over ancients’ seas.

These Minotaurs: so full of pride,

Of lust, of frail and short-lived reign.

These horrors spawned which rise and hate

And tear the spirit from the heart.

These Minotaurs: the innocent

Chthonic children, bursting free.

The gods of tunnels, formed and planned.

The gods of monsters yet to be.

These Minotaurs which question us.

These Minotaurs betrayed by us.

The town wore dust as some wear skies,

Its buildings barely stood on props.

The crumbling had been centuries long.

A rootless people drifted through.

Around the town the maquis spread

Obscuring tablets pressed with tales,

And ancient bricks which burnt and broke:

The merest trace of palace walls.

Its stories scattered through the world,

With sails for wings and widening eyes.

They drifted off beyond the earth,

Became a breath, became a fear.

The truth lies lost beneath the scrub:

A pile of bones reduced to chalk.

(The title is from Seneca: Phaedra, 173ff)

From off the moors I’ve heard your moans,

And seen the blood stains on the stones,

The howl of fearful winter storms:

Above the doors I’ve seen the charms.

But were you ever any more

Than breath exhaled in voiceless awe?

A thought which lingered on too long,

And left the anguish clinging on?

And did you taste the cavern’s air:

The dampness, rock and trapped despair?

Your monstrous counting of the space:

The skeletal wrecks through which you pace.

And did the living curse your name,

And weep as lovers fed your shame?

The moon sits by her dancing maze

And spins her thread like spider’s silk.

She speaks of heroes, dreams of death,

And shows the dancers where to tread.

The planets one by one step up

And take the thread and dance the maze.

They face the sky and vault him high:

His horns are sharp and stained with blood.

The dancers keep a pounding beat,

They feel the earth beneath them groan.

The sky demands his sacrifice:

He tastes the pulse within them flow.

The golden crown of Thetis glints.

The moon will weep to feel its weight.

Around the corner deep within,

Where rocks and flames are drawn to life,

With flint and bone the beast was raised.

In words and fear its lust was craved.

In metal times its cave was shame.

Above its world the shields and swords

Could glint and glitter in the sun.

Down there its monstrous form was shunned.

Below the glories forged from trade

Its pit became a lead-mill floor.

The monster’s greed stretched out for more:

More lead, more coal, more steam, more blood.

And now beneath our nothing age

Its abstract grip grows stronger still.

The seam runs through the field, beneath

The wall, beneath the house, beneath

The fear of darkness and of loss.

The seam is deep and rich and wide.

Around the Earth, throughout our time

The seam is dredged and scraped and blown.

The fires it lights explode the night.

The dressing floors are never still.

Beneath the moor the tunnelling spins,

Beneath the wilds made wilder still,

Beneath the need to feed the fires,

The need to feed the landlord’s will.

It merges, weights and drags us down,

Malformed we’re trapped: part beast, part god.

It’s just the same wherever cast,

The skeletal remains of beasts,

The broken doors, and backs, and will,

And eyes which shine at thoughts of death.

The innocent will take the blame.

The ones without will give it all:

The miners, herders, old folk, kids.

The shoeless walk the hardest path.

And deep below the brutal horns

Are gouging at another throat,

And taking yet another life,

And making yet another pound.

The creature knows the way of things,

It counts its truths and deems them fair.

To gods we are forgotten beasts

Whose only sacrifice is time.

We play, we suffer, pointlessly:

We know that look of weary rage.

If we were older, you and I,

A fight like this would seem absurd.

We’d sit together, spin our yarns,

And cling to deeds that once meant all.

I see the scars about your face,

The way you sway and hesitate.

You seem too heavy on your feet.

You don’t react, you hardly move.

No questions, cries or final words.

No mercy begged, no mercy shown.

I am a minotaur: I stand.

I am a minotaur: I crouch.

I am a minotaur: I hide.

I am a minotaur: I stride.

They’ll find a way to cut me down.

They’ll work their magic through the cracks

And soon they’ll have me by the throat

And drag me out to face their fear.

I am a minotaur: I cry.

I am a minotaur: I shake.

I am a minotaur: I bleed.

I am a minotaur: I know.

I hear his creeping, sandaled feet,

This death the gods have planned for me.

Up from the sickly flowers of lead -

Whose blueish petals pale and drooped

Are soaked in black and matted blood -

The horns of consecration rise.

A liminal state of recompense

For ancient slights in sacrifice:

A creature born to neither form

Is left to wander through the dark.

Galena glints and burns within.

The furnace tipped towards the south,

And molten metal flows through time:

The monster slips between two states.

The flowers are gathered up and crushed.

Amongst the mines a new bull reigns.

Amongst the marble and the wax

I sketched geometries of traps,

Created endless loops and chains.

I calibrated depths of fear.

I devised a maze exquisitely formed,

A stone philosophy of pain,

So subtle none could ever leave,

Its boundless horrors measured in.

And deeper down the screaming rooms,

Would echo all the terror out.

The final sacrificial cries

Would fill the golden palace nights.

Its heart became a dancing ground:

A bloodied chorus stamped with death.

I’ve heard the bunyip howl in swamps,

Its screams as loud as hurricanes.

I’ve seen the creatures crouch and hide,

As bunyip footsteps shake the earth.

I’ve felt the dread of moonless nights

In forests writhing, thick with snakes,

Majestics shrieking from the trees,

The sounds of death and feeding life.

I’ve woken in the dark of dawn,

My mind ablaze with wordless fears,

Anxieties dragging monsters out.

From every shadow: clashing teeth

And now I walk into the maze,

To find the beast and face it down.

Across the moors in evening mist

The keeper drifts by candlelight.

His coat as dark as sodden peat,

His eyes as empty as the stars.

The burning fires around the works

Can’t drown the moans from deep below.

The keeper traces Saturn’s path,

And whispers soft protection prayers.

He walks on by the shattered men.

Unseen his candle flickers on.

Three thousand years and more he’s been

The keeper of the fear beneath.

He looks at Taurus through the mist,

Its horns are hidden, the moans are stilled.

His jacket, buttoned tight and neat,

A face of honour, proud and true,

An air of quiet dignity:

A man for all that they might say.

He stands to face the hero’s sword.

He offers up his throat quite calm.

His death was written long before.

His life was made to take that thrust.

As Erskine Childers said “shoot true”.

He knew the world would judge him well -

Might even call this martyrdom.

He stares the man right in the eyes.

The monster’s death was not the end:

They severed his head, then spun their lies.

His blank façade was made for tales:

Where nothing lives the world exists

And meanings flood to fill the space.

Where monsters lurk we build our homes.

The venerated beast and man:

A test to all who leapt and prayed.

Then later he was hid away:

His appetites too close, too true.

And in that inhumed form was left

The residue of lust and death,

The tales of innocents sacrificed,

The tales of writers, tales of pride.

Our monstrous elements abide

However many times we’re slain.

They built the halls and weighing rooms

Of millstone grit and avarice.

They birthed the monster, fed its spite,

Then hid it deep beneath the moors

The maze they dug stretched out for miles,

To Yorkshire mills and cotton fields,

To sugar cane and gold and slaves,

Through merchant men and ship-o-line.

And soon there lurked beneath it all

The monster’s barely human form:

The towns and cities bent in smoke,

The fenced and drained, the turned and choked.

Beneath the art the bullets forged,

Beneath the war the moneyed hoard.

They’re sacrificed to autumn flights.

Enslaved by time or caught in light,

They’re made to turn ten thousand times:

Reflections of the world below.

The distant skylarks trapped by song,

In endless spirals through the blue,

Must sing and sing and not be done.

Their songs mean nothing to the sun.

The tack and flick of wheatear’s white

Along the crumbling Yarnbury Dam,

Are calls of spirits bound in lead,

Compelled to fight their pointless fights.

And way off by the Grinding House,

A buzzard wheels above the waste.

They rattle in the slightest breeze

Like wooden kookaburra’s cries.

Their scent lays thick all through the rooms:

The eucalyptus pasts of home.

Another past: of lemon groves,

Of almonds, olives, perfumed blooms,

Of questions in a language lost,

Of hoopoes on the ruined walls.

Then deeper in the endless tombs:

The aura of a summer moor

Where heather pollen drifts with bees

And curlews mourn the passing years.

Between the halls, Ariadne’s twine:

Unwound from love to memory’s end.

The linnets gather on the ling

And watch the knitting party pass.

Another morning thick with dust,

The men and women click and cough.

The ponies start their circling trudge.

A pipit rises then is lost.

The children gather at the pit:

One spits his blood into the sedge.

And from within the moaning starts,

A roar so deep the slagheap shifts.

The children by the ladder shake.

The knitting party help them down.

Their sacrifice will never still

The Minotaur’s half-human lust.

Across its name are scattered stars

Which spiral round its buried heart,

And sear into its awful hide

The marks of its divided soul.

Its bellowed cries are heard for miles

Across the ruined moor-top mines

When twice a month the moon has horns,

And mocks the wreck which sobs beneath.

A hundred years they fed its lust

For sacrifice and poisoned blood,

Then left it trapped below the spoils

To howl as only monsters howl.

Although the stars which brand it shine,

Its fate is lived through buried shame.

In here the fields are lush and warmed,

The dew is soft, the light is gold,

In here, within this head of mine:

This wasted, wicked, murderous head.

I’m free to wander where I like,

To trace my family heritage,

Parade around the castle walls,

To fly: if egrets take my thoughts.

I’m cut adrift of time in here.

I sometimes think I hear the sea,

And other times the hooves and herds,

Then once a year I’m paid in blood.

The ones out there seem full of dread.

They seem so trapped, they’re better dead.

You get a single ball of twine,

A single sword, a single chance,

And every single step you take

Is one more step towards your fate.

Down there the air is thick as rock,

The cold is rotten, damp with slime.

The smell crawls through you,  coats your mind.

Down there your only friend is fear.

And in your hand that ball of twine -

A point of day imbued with flight -

Like air in lungs it has its time,

And step by step the ball unwinds.

You hear the breath and know it’s time.

You stop and wait for death’s red eyes.

They saw the beast and not the man,

Forever circling: hooves and feet.

And lowered down and round and deep

They heard the moans and not the grief.

They sucked the poisons from below,

The core of earth, the heart of rock,

The seams of endless, twisting stone.

They opened sluices, stoked the fires.

They built their world to last through time

On lungs of arsenic, fields of lead.

And in the galleries, banks and schools

They built their wall around the dead.

But now within the maze of mines,

The beast and man as one arise.