You share too much
on Facebook –
that communicable disease –
With whom and where
you lay your bed
so everyone can see
They’ll envy
your immunity
from their own genetic shame –
you exude a happiness
as they nurse
their low disdain
Category: LOVE
Pompey Love
Always third in line –
never really intended
such was my birth –
I am long disinherited
Time is our slipway –
greased for each build
It is a steep incline
for those low on love’s skills
Champagne in ribbons
burst on the bow
and then a spunked wave
to please the crowd
‘How long will it float?’
is not to be whispered –
‘Don’t curse the crew
an’ all who sail on er’
Their shouldered terrace –
my parents’ first home
still waiting to slip
into the port’s lapped foam
Across that hinterland
a tide of just-weds –
the wives of submariners –
a choice none understood
One night of holding
before his boat steamed –
it was sweated and lugged
til he heard her scream
The rude gulls returned
when ships broke the Atlantic –
they pull from tipped bins
a seamen’s tossed prophylactic.
Inner
The intimacy of it
has been shelved –
I use the phrase
side-lined as well
The heat reduced
is also true –
I woke to the shunt
of a drunkard’s spew
A four AM throw up
of booze-necked shit –
the uniformed kids
will side step it
These hours are mine
before any one else –
No opened eyes
in my unslept house
Dents
Hide me away
with a tumble of words
and do not release
the briefest of hugs
Under thickening armour
that won’t be removed
you wear that breastplate
of hardening blood
And I picked the wound –
pulled back half scabs
which makes you flinch
at this offer of love
The slice across us
is deepest when drawn
by your quick furled edge
of blunted retorts.
GMT
I used to reset my watch
when flying over la Manche
An engineered engagement
of small clicks and twists –
spinning hours from the east
to Greenwich Mean Time
Our first rented house
was about a hundred yards
from that scientific mark
which cut a line through
my old school atlas
of blushed exaggerations
and empirical remains
This trip was a reset trick
of handheld smart devices
which knew the differences
and needed no fingernails
to lift the watch’s crown
and turn back lost time
Distances
We are existing on two shifting continents
still being dragged apart by the slow forces
of nature – her spiteful ways have set us asunder
through more than time differences and flights
This borrowed bed is without the weighted duvet
which you may have reclaimed in my absence –
I sleep under a single sheet and the turning fan –
I am woken on work days by tipping trucks
I am here to consider my place in the world
with the set distance fixed like a short sentence
from which I will be released – but still without
any solution to deal with my mounting crimes
A long call brings neither of us new insights –
only the confirmation that the future is foul
and my recent behaviour is another indicator
of everything that is wrong on our edged shores
I shall return weighted down by foreign gifts
to home soil – I will not step well across that space
which we cannot pull back together –
because the landmass drift still exists
Reader
If you wrote poetry
I would read it
because I need
to know more
But my typed words
are lost to you –
the one person
who should consume
these lines
of half-honest reflection
which are set out
for any browser’s eye
They will not reach
between heights
unless they are clicked
and read
The Shade
There is no word for this foreign heat
but under the dapple-shadow plantation
I find a ten minute retreat from our star
Here I sit and consider my options –
as a bead of sweat rolls from my chest
to track like an insect under my shirt
This is a playground for absent kids
with still swings and slides anchored
between picnic benches on which I rest
I consider my options with no haste –
for now relocated to this middle east
of loud relatives and small children
We are not sheltering in the same land
and I wonder if this half-turned separation
is my way of seeing the other side of the sun
Elicited
I have to measure my responses
and weigh the more foul energies
against those that lift me to you –
a conversion to a way with propriety
I should sacrifice for the lost dead
and keep their spirits at a burnt distance
and so find equilibrium in the overhead
tug and pull of ghosts and lost gods
but not give in to the religious fervour –
the lies of any other life but this one
Baht
That exotic coin
which sits on the sill
has no value here –
a measure of nothing
It has no function
now it is removed
from foreign change
for goods
for food
My recall of the heat
and sweated steps
have an equal value
being worth nothing
unless exchanged
The Winchester Goose
He would pay in cowry shells
and barter for love with time
as they exchanged such currency
the lies they laid made lines
She lay outside the liberty
of the clink and London’s wall
reducing down the value of
his late night wide-net hauls
The orders placed by princes
through their messengers and men
took her eyes from their line
and back to Bankside friends
Luna
‘Slumped’ would be a good description
of my state after the coffees were delivered
I cried as little as I could as we dissected lives
which crossed and recrossed around us –
like those thousand circling aircraft overhead
with thousands again also slumped in the sky
The restaurant was empty enough for tears
and for private speeches about why I cry
I am now the sad old man in this odd kinship
The Wedding Guest
Two contrails cross over Croydon
as a childish whispered kiss
a wedding party walks the aisle
of this train to London Bridge
The bride is dressed all in black
carrying a bunch of flowers
and her rich perfume fills the train
as she necks a bottle of cider
The twenty minute reception
of small talk
of drunken laughs
of the booze flowing as water
to her lips and to her heart
If On a Winter’s Night
Se una notte d’inverno
n viaggiatore
As disordered pages
I read back my life
until you as Ludmilla
entered mine
The creak of shined floorboards
from the weight of us
and of ten thousand books
under ten kilos of dust
You as Ludmilla
mark my book with your touch
your stroke of the spine
is a pleasure to watch
Coffee in Brighton
For LB
First the shuffled shopper’s fanfare
that rasp of chair feet on pavement
and then finding a place for my phone
whilst not spilling my lip-high coffee
which measures
like a spirit level
my ability to perform the simplest things
In that fifteen minutes of talk
your beautiful honesty made me admit
that I have been a slowed down fool
The loud gulls swept around us
as they have always done in Sussex
those opportune white vultures
which pick and steal the best bits
You said that girls had been feeding them
down in the Pavilion Gardens
I have been feeding mine for too long
Ghosts
They say that there is a ghost
in every old house
That frigorific forms will rise
to meet with warm blood
and damp bones
an attraction
almost a magnetism
It is beyond any control
Love is a heavy haunting
which we meet unexpectedly
in bars and dark bedrooms
The ghost I knew was cold
which I did not tell the kids
She troubled the shadows
of our chattering family home
Late in the night I would run
three flights of stairs
Yes
me
the adult
fucking scared
Hauntings
After beating
the brick shit
out of this tired
last-leg house
I met my ghost-set wife
on the steep stairs
of lost-love’s slough
but we did not embrace
because new rules say
we will not touch
less so each day
The Card
A cut up credit card
does not remove a debt
or explain missed payments
in these days of scores
It was shown as proof
that the imbalance
had been addressed
I saw him emasculated
his balls in your hand
that white-edged flesh
like sliced up fish
But the smell will remain
in your palm
no matter how scrubbed
of plastic and cuts
BST
British Summertime
day one
as seen from this flint field
high above the Winterbourne’s
estate-dictated course
above the rush of the bypass
that continuous inland tide
Here I listen for the reduced birds
as seagulls are distance summoned
by the hip-jiggered tractor’s
turn of furrow
You have walked on
with me left here
above this valley landscape
with an extra hour of light
as if the clocks had stopped
Mother’s Day
Our youngest watched
as his present was pulled
from the naively-wrapped package
knowing that this year he had done well
because his mother’s face mirrored his
more than on every other mother’s day
that had passed
this year