You will hear bird song in Brighton
as you walk the mile home on Eastern Road
with a belly of beer as your low ballast
There will be winking cabs but your gut
will steer you and your mate a slower route
because the clean up bill would be too much
And your ears will be thick with shouts and
laugh-rubbished conversations in places
which were loud and sticky underfoot
The bingo hall will be dark because the old
are too clever to stay up this late –
all except your mother who will wait
The curled grey hairs on my chest
are wrapped in a heavy gown
and hidden along with my old sags
Now I can negotiate the stairs
without forcing the shame of my flesh
upon any other eyes on that journey
The verges are the most obvious victims
of this summer’s unending dry torture –
as the skin on my legs flake with the heat
but then blister into zits under the rubbed oil
that I self-prescribe to calm my cruel itch
from which there is no natural relief
I lay on the bed – I wait for my tea to cool
as my stretched out bared legs prickle
and call for rape under my scraping nails
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
I let the cool air in over the parquet floor –
my temporary mistress for these few hours
before the sun fucks her rude heat
back into our brick and glass box
I said we’d need blinds to counter this
warming of the morning face of the house
But my pronouncements were stale –
like unpalatable coffee breath kisses
In the room without windows we had sheltered
from the fallout of this sky-dropped summer –
there for an evening of radiation off the TV
which in itself fed the ice-threatening heat
At this hour the bedooms are containers
of the sheet-shoved and half turned over –
where the poorly slept bodies simmer
and adjust to itched consciousness
It is only five o’clock but the sun has risen
at this point on the turned earth’s surface –
Soon there will be words about the weather
and requests to fix the sprinklers will be made
BN sweats under this carbonised heat
as hard-hatted men kick up coughed dust
among those lost floors of Hanningtons –
that now-gutted department store
I sit in Brighton Square where I hear
every nation parade as the coffee
cakes the inside of my mouth –
a bitter rake across my taste buds
Still the Italian girls chatter
in loud tongues – untroubled
Their volume drops when the jack hammer
is suffocated by the lunch hour
My eldest arrives from her office
for our lunchtime that is becoming
a regular retreat for me from Sussex
and her own escape from her desk.
Surface tension
gives water droplets
that almost
spherical shape
A sphere – I was told –
has the least
possible surface area
to volume ratio
My science lessons
were not elliptic –
the strains on the class
were uneven –
instead we received
rough instruction
from miserable teachers
on secondary pay
Biology lessons had a tang
of flesh
and chemistry
was a measured stench
A bare bulb hangs by two wires
over the bathroom mirror
as a reminder of his absence
with that unfinished fitting
I walked between the rooms he built
and am now that rare ghost
having flown back to my home
of other incomplete projects
The future is never reached
as we flounder with tools to build
our small palaces and shrines
in which we wander on our way to die
It has become a confusion
of charity store drop offs –
butted to trim nail bars
and empty estate agents –
and now this English town
has a gaudy tanning shop
The bench-rested watch
the parading mothers –
taking note of the too-bared
shoulders and legs –
the unnatural colour
of those buggy shovers –
these age-anchored repeat
their Daily Mail complaints
about floods of immigrants –
as the pale-faced punters book
to turn brown in the new salon
of not-very-English tans.
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.
I’ve relocated my drawing desk –
we lugged it to the front room
where it hogs the bay window
with the intended long view
I now spot parents and fat kids
off to retail therapists with bags –
I watch them plod down the slope
to then return – to ascend slacked
My foreground is neatly fenced
by neighbouring OAP purgatory
where septuagenarians snooze
in the blind-fitted conservatory
There none visit the anchored few
who shimmy on wheels and frames
to and from their short destinations
of bed to table and then board games
My own rest home is a slow torture
of afternoon sunlight through glass
but it is my now my preferred option –
I have a better canvas – of sorts.
The local lanes have been narrowed
by the thickening of nature’s ripeness
The scabbed tarmac routes are reduced
by the slow encroachments of greenery
Each blind corner is an increased fear
but still taken in third gear at over forty
as if TE Lawrence had never died
on such a cluttered route as this
Summer is an alien with her land grab –
her low leaf boughs weighty obstructions
which hide rotted bodies and tossed litter
until the rape of leaves under winter
I drive between my rural commitments
of drop-offs and collections along roads
which were never designed for our speeds
nor any misjudged braking distance
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
At three thousand feet
I peck at a tray of crap
as the girl next to me
pokes her laptop
Her typing is rapid –
she’s re-writing scripts
I rinse food with wine
and leave the worst bits
A man swings his baby
in a hipster sling
parading his manhood
as an accoutrement
I cannot sleep
even drugged by booze
on this return
which I do not choose
The night’s timed howl outside
is of another wheel-rattled diesel
slowing over the level crossing
which is now closed to us
It reminds me of the distance
which we can no longer walk –
out to the suburb’s grip around
the kibbutz’s old burial ground
As if a sacred place can be safe
in this country of rude expansion –
of tightened grips on settlements
and the troubling of neighbours
They blocked the road over the line
and so all remebrance is diverted
via town in a short car journey
of blasting air and Arab music
The lock is turned against rust
and we the gatekeepers follow
the steps to where death rests
in this scalped remnant of other lives
The dead are watched over not by God
but those who live in the high blocks –
the commuters and the city workers
who pass these crumbled bones
on each day’s journey to and from
their own short hell of Tel Aviv’s pull
They pass my brother’s white grave
without knowing how far he travelled.
That preterist way
of completed schemes
here sound as raw
as infants’ screams
I watch the place
where parakeets nest
in weighted boughs
they make protests
Those trees which grew
a heightened shade
on this claimed place
which Jews re-made
The pool’s loud shouts
a stone’s throw there –
to that shared space
we now repair
Here parents stand
in thigh-deep games –
their inflated kids
play out their day
‘The realm of the dead below is all astir to meet you at your coming’ Isaiah 14:9
I have turned against the world’s clock
and her perpetual request for following
and found myself with my back to her sun
My shadow’s stain laid like the Long Man
I am that untouched layer which obscures
but which time will shift again and again
I am part gnomon – being so subdued
that a blackbird lands in my cast of darkness
This shaded life is mine to command
as I take on the correctness of watchfaces
and counter the arguments for my decline
which are under the thin mantras she sings
I will cleanse with the Rephaim around me
in the baths in which my brother washed off
his own reductions in the last of his living world
and I will not take on her sour sung calls.
You were balanced on a bar stool
balanced on a bar
as ambivelent south Londoners
watched you play guitar –
Tooting had never seen the like before
You ripped down a poster
from the high brick wall
and lugged the trophy back
We found it curled in the hall –
Terminator 2 in Gassiot Road
The wild night you leapt from
bonnets of parked cars
leaving your shoe prints
evidently marked –
the coppers took you in
We poured back pints in the
Whores and Gloom
kidding the tired nurses
we were the gifts in the room –
the Northern Line shook the urinals
The mother of your children came
and took you away
our child removed
to North London’s sober ways –
I have never seen the like again.
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
I do not see this shaded life ending –
that which is being set forth by you
A plan of my restraint from expectation
to make me more comfortable
in a low shelter erected inside our home –
to protect you all from my hideous storms
I will not be laid out in the front room
in a God-awful wake of thirty years –
my very meaning slept away each night –
making daylight a drawn prelude to sleep
That is not my life – it cannot be the way
to feed my dignity and the thought of me
Over three decades ago I lived
under this ridge and these roof tiles
of repeatedly cast red clay
They were more malleable days
when constant change was good
and my future still had thirty years
From under these timber beams
Chris was removed before his fiftieth year
A weariness tinged with amazement
Perhaps Camus – or my tired words
will lift the eyes of my children to life
I sip my Arabic coffee as Israel growls
