Am I rebuffed by your cooling love?
I tremor under naked phone lines –
oscillating – now wind-touched –
Silent are our words in the wires
which we strung to allow such whip –
Without voices they are set to squinch
and tighten before a snapped mishap
of misunderstood tensions – of speech –
No text – no reveal – such cold harm
here – left open – rough translations
like the coded language of telegrams –
Are muted signals your intention?
And I’ll sit by my phone – as if
your voice is the waited-for-gift
Lewes Martyr
She lays fond recall
of burning the Pope
onto today’s
bonfires of Lewes –
but only with
late-night distance
from the day-trippers
and the easily upset –
that small army
of misunderstandings
who do not march here
or through Sussex –
at these most robust
of memorials for the dead
Leaving
Through me among the people lost for aye –
Dante
We were set upon by the leopard
the lion and the stinking she-wolf –
also known in these parts as Pleasure
Ambition and that foul Avarice –
whilst stiff Reason stood off-stage
with no straight lines or measures –
as our small state folded in on itself –
as our families split because of it –
and now wade through a cesspit
left by the cage-padding haters
Inside My Lover
I am entertained inside her lento lungs –
travelling alone and partly dusk-blind –
within her low suck of cooling breath –
I inhale her exhale of purest oxygen
and with it comes an unwinding –
an expansion of my otiose senses –
an awareness of this as existing –
of living things set around – but
obscured by the falling of the hour –
Now the manic chp-chp-chp-chp-chp
of panicked blackbirds to one side –
joined by the rude crows overhead –
that tuneless duet of birdsong is overlaid
on itself by others’ alarms and queries
which set off – concentric – around me –
As I tread – as I compact the leafy mucus –
which she absorbs into her membrane –
the fallen are re-sown by the plough
of my steps on this weaved footpath –
Her cold stew of re-use – of rotting down –
is nature’s re-design – it is not random –
be it the branched capillary urge
of saplings – or the fork of tipped boughs –
or the patterning of her cast off leaves –
already thick enough to hide the paths –
Now on cinders I miss the give of the mulch –
the weighted compress and its last sound
The Seamstress
It is traditional
at this time
of year
to bring down –
from the loft –
the bonfire box
and for you
to sit and sew –
with those
glint-sized
needles –
It is traditional
to leave it so late
The Corpse Gate
I called it a tithe gate –
but it is a lychgate –
I confused it with barns –
my first mistake –
Here are the lost bones
of dead English words –
and here a brutal joinery
hewn by blunt saws –
Here the just-deceased
were propped overnight –
Here guarded ‘gainst theft
by snatchers on the sly –
Laid still – after carriage
on the rough corpse road –
under this shelter
for one night’s repose –
Wood knots – whales watching –
here the whorled grain –
This was not God’s work –
but of man’s own domain
The Dealers
Vituperous – you lie –
you low politicians –
with your back-slap careers
and solid state pensions
You’re immune to the illness
as this state becomes
The Sick Man Ex-Europe –
the ailing one
Hide in your shepherd huts –
short the future –
your acts have created
these Alt-Right tumours
You’ll parade through The Lords –
wearing garters and ermine –
having laid out your poison
for us – the sick vermin
Pablo
I wasn’t looking for Picasso
but I found him – seated –
whilst my Spanish was poor
his English was gilded
Please – Monsieur Picasso –
Call me Pablo – he gestured
at the world and her wife –
Could I ask you one question?
He looked me up and down –
sized for a suit – or a kiss?
Maybe eyeing my fixed shape
for his oiled redress?
Was it – ‘Inspiration will come,
but it must find you working?’
Or – ‘Inspiration exists,
but it has to find us working?’
His eyes were hard marbles –
set polished and buffed –
I was stroked by his gaze –
those eyes were his touch
which re-set the truth
which now took me down –
Realmente importa?
A smile then a frown
He loosed a curled dove –
his brush was speaking –
‘Inspiration exists –
but it has to find you working’
Venezia è la Prima Inondazione
Over four feet deep
across St. Marks –
risen too much
for high tide footpaths –
or trolley bag trundles
on dry cobblestones —
The Death of Venice
is the latest show
Goodbye Miami –
and New York too –
whilst Shanghai sinks
into Hell’s hot stew
The Blinded
The olfactory hit kicks in –
smelling at a filed return
of youthful tree climbing –
of guns-made-from-sticks
and of our lumpen crashing
among swallowing bracken
I am now drawing so deeply
on this propel of perfumes –
of the under-tree rotten scents –
and also taking the shaded chill –
which seems to feed the smell –
which was the first suggestion
My childhood – found in the kernels
of peeled sweet chestnuts –
was so open-ended that nothing
was going to set a conclusion –
Then on to the unexpected
cinder path – where it ends – again
This Older Driver
I want our lowering sun to burn
for a much – much – longer last hour –
or more – and brighter than now
I do not want to be driving
on those sunken country roads
into the skulk of dusk’s gloom –
and then turned back through black
I wish to see clearly tonight where
the patch of tarmac starts and ends
on the threaded bends and turns –
without the switch of dipped lights
or the blinding others’ high beams –
they set me to groping
as a blind man gropes
I’ll weave between the unseen deer
Mushrooming
Theirs is a new
imperialism of ill will –
an underfoot tendril –
like fungi it spreads
just below the soil –
until it flowers –
a poisonous fruit
surfaces in the dark
which is fed to
the hungry as hate
British Summer Time
Do not turn back the clocks
unless you have the time
to reset your circadian rhythm
and so to fall into line
The Leavers love the thought
that Europe will end this game –
so that Britain will reverse
to a different time again
Perhaps revisiting 1916
and war-footings everwhere –
The cowards will stay in Britain
because Europe is over there
White feathers for the three –
for Gove – Johnson and Mogg –
may they seek some forgiveness
from the dead who fought for love
And in the spring in England –
as good times rush to leave –
those rotters on the omnibus
won’t stand by lies they weaved
Turns
I returned the ripped heart
of Saint Laurence O’Toole –
canonised post-mortem
for acts whilst entombed
As Archbishop Lorcan
he acted well in hair shirts –
and in shroud-wrapped death
he performed miracle parts
Another found-reliquary –
I gave it back to the nuns
Religion is theatre –
but it’s not the West End
The Gift
It is as if
you were delivered to us
to bear witness
You brought a book
about fatherhood –
which I read
I cannot hear your words
because you murmur
more than speak –
but I see how you shy –
even at six foot two –
you are still a child
This Parish
We stick to the leaf-kicked route –
a parting of the dry sea of leaves
cleared by dog-following boots –
We tack down its meandered drop
to the time-softened abyss –
plugged not by God – but drains –
where a watercourse once hollowed
the hillside into this shallow dean –
before the slugs of tarmac upstream –
Here the irregular plots of silver birches
ignore the fallen old lady in lime green –
this is the parish of ineffectual giants –
these natives – a copse within the woods –
are a finger-daubed fearful tribe in white –
chary – waiting – as if standing ready –
listening for the infected invaders
from other places – for intruders
who will bring other such followers
to spread the canker and pestilence –
which was not the way things changed –
not until we changed the weather
For a Pot of Paint
The tall bay window
is our empty white frame –
on the front of this home
of unshuttered shame –
but now winter-battered –
past my amateur repair –
the paint has flaked off
through changes out there –
The weather has whipped it
in layer-thrashed strokes –
like the blistered hull
of a forgot-turned boat –
with a peeled underbelly
for so long undressed –
it has been left unsealed
losing sea-worthiness
No sensible man
would sail in her –
he would never return –
she is so unfair
Hangover
There is an almost mist of ghostly off-loadings –
like pellucid Nan Tuck – or the long-lost Lord Lucan
My night now haunts me as a half-recalled dream
I breathe and count steps – taught by Seneca’s NHS –
Let only your body wander – don’t admit useless thoughts
The dog bounds due east in her leaps at life’s time
Unseen from overhead I’m no more standing – erased
under glances of passenger lists –
I am lost in the skinned canopy’s leaf-bare branches
I am then ducking below berry-weighted evergreens –
where the temperature drops by one or two degrees –
and still the weakened sun scathes my misted wine eyes
In the Eye
Women slip from winsome
under their senescent faces –
their hands steal the looks
off youth’s eyed-embraces –
They pleasure in pastimes
of tease-tricks and flirts –
they command your heart –
their hard rules will subvert
I want to reach out
and trace your lined beauty –
of furrows and laugh lines
worn freely at forty
I will kiss your eyelids
of stitch-tightened skin –
because here is your beauty –
it is still within
Naming Rights
Should I give a name
to those stolen logs
and breaks of wood
which were dragged
and then laid in place
in the muddiest parts
of our dipping routes?
They span the indents –
the heel-suck puddles
in the uneven paths –
Not bridging boughs
too stepping stones –
I will leave it now to
a far greater authority
to find the best thing
to fill that word space
A Ceremony
We passed a wedding
in the vaulted woods –
on a narrow aisle
between pious trees –
under the tumblewing
of dropped confetti –
released by the upright –
the congregation –
the bearers who waited
all of that summer
to see the fall –
the first of their leaves
#bbcqt
Hear pile-up politics in a thick lathered buzz –
Question Time’s audience is a scream-streamed TX
Almost over-directed for a hyped-up reception –
Our screens are re-tuned to TV’s deception
Below the radar into our licensed homes –
finding the softest – in our sofa-slumped zones –
Some people will toss their floating votes –
they’ll re-tune held views via the set-top box
to long-lost frequencies of old-school racists –
an angry audience with their for-TV faces
October Half Term
The paths were soft under me today
although this low sun is still capable
of tricking the insects into revival –
setting off a dragonfly over the bridge
and pulling late flowers from pods
until the quick slaughter of an early frost
will clear our compound of anxieties
for the seasons – those off-kilter fears
which are felt as warmth on the skin –
At such a late time of year – she says
to her friend over steam-lifting coffees –
I rest my stiff legs under the cafe table –
I feel no quiver of guilt at the dried mud
which is the hardened path to my seat
The Impatient Plant
The Himalayan Balsam’s scent
clogs – a laundry swill of smells –
lingering – invasive – out-of-place –
underlining the call to action –
Since its foolish introduction
it’s no longer welcome here
Almost sticky – swollen with pollen –
it waits with near-primed seeds
until it fires ripe-wide explosions
finding further incursions
Balsam Bashing – its removal –
is now a nationwide fixation –
The bent stem-cutters – the pullers –
are impatient traditionalists
who tug – with gardening gloves –
working hard at their final solution
Repose
The granite markers have tipped forward –
angled over the settling of in-filled earth
where the boxes and bones collapsed –
the stones remain whilst other things fall –
The once beloved’s burial is long forgotten –
but not the slab’s patience over centuries
of bearing – the carved words mumble
a worn-down remembrance of years lived –
The mason’s refined font is rubbing thin –
almost erased by the wear of the world
which has re-touched the carved surface –
even death cannot claim shelter from time
Disputed Questions of Truth
Aquinas floats in his grave
and Socrates will not swallow –
their thoughts have been inverted –
their words are sounding hollow
A strategia della tensione
is courted by the State –
those clowns in the Senate
will let their votes bring hate
Salvini is banning love –
he cracks his sharpened tongue –
as his men buff their batons
to swipe the foreign sons
He’s shutting corner shops early –
the dens of drugs and plots –
he refuses ships safe harbour –
those boats which bear the lost
The different are set to suffer
as Salvini cracks his whip
on the skin of migrant settlers
who had found their hope in risk
The borders close on promises
as the ports are mopped of tears –
the Far Right drops the barriers
to block their far-right fears
Above the Ouse
Here are the random spillages
of sorrel-glazed sweet chestnuts –
an overnight downed bounty
which has settled on the layers
of leaves and paths underneath
The splayed-open spiky cupules
offer – like unclipped purses –
their copper-only change –
I finger out those fattened nuts
which were once so desired
to fill the bowls of soldiers –
As I gather – not easy work for me –
the loosened crop on my route –
they mass to make my pockets
weigh as if full of dreadful stones –
but these will not pull me under
In Line
Weird kids never came out –
not back then –
that’s why they were not in
our rushed pack
of loosely herded imaginations
running under the command of
Up to the ruins!
Us from identical houses
yet each uneasily unique –
being found guilty
of English differences –
set by the age of cars on drives –
which kept us in our place –
forever fixing our sub-classifications
The weird kids only went outside
to be the last-in-lines –
to retreat to bedroom isolation
which was still a viable option –
back then
The Hammer
There was a plan
doing the rounds
to destroy my love
and us –
I was the worst
of the plotters
and now that scheme
is crushed –
I pissed on
fizzing fuses
and broke the glass
to press
the alarm
and her breathing –
so crushing
her sweet neck
Envious
My envy device knows me too well
just from the lightest of my touches –
She is engineered to conduct risings
inside my mind from sparked jealousy –
ramping up to shrill shocks of hate –
which will then swill around my unfit gut
and tease those last good microbes
into a lurching frenzy of brain cramps –
then I want to steal their smug smiles
which beam from their side of the world –
and she will be working so very well
at keeping me in her malicious circle –
and I will add fuel to her high pyre
by posting my oh-so-perfect life atop it all
*Inspired by@guardian and Moyra Sarner – thanks for the ‘envy device’
Last Summer
From this hill top distance
above the slope of the estate –
there – in thinning October light –
almost aligned to your rooftop –
I see that solitary oak still in leaf –
forever isolated – also cast out –
under which we took our shade
and where my laggard fingers
gripped at your then-bared skin –
slipping below your blue shorts –
flimsy attire suited for sunshine –
but now the cool dew counters
such all out abandonment –
our laid time remains in summer
Finding You
I found value in my love for you
under Aurelius and Epictetus –
so I purchased a one-way ticket
to end my lonely sojourn abroad
I wasn’t tempted in empty deserts –
no fingers took my potent virtue –
no foreign lips encouraged sin –
But I saw mirrors on their pages
and I watched myself translating –
framing – like Christ – opportune times –
I saw my mouth speak in tongues
telling you to taste my poison
Now I unpack my emptied bags
having brought back nothing more –
I left behind heavy possessions
which I no longer wish to share
Samara
Anemochory takes this seamless child
of these immigrants – landed from Europe –
and urges her to fly
We named her Samara because of her wings
and the hope that she will carry
our future further
Her family has been resident here – four centuries –
but historically are the dark foreigners
among landscape and cities
She is Anglicised among childhood memories –
kids awe at her presumption to fly –
We call her spinning Jenny
At Anfield
The scouser outside
the pub gave a stare
at our unashamed
blue and white colours
from behind
his circular eye glass –
with it’s stretched froth
and shallow backwash –
he spied our short cut
through the car park
and called out –
Six-Nil !
before he dragged
his fag into his lungs
to chase his beer
into that strain
of shirt and buttons
On our return
to the parked car
the only difference
was his demeanour –
that and the fresh pint
and a virgin cigarette –
Ey! One-nil –
Not bad –
Good on yer!
His beer was held high
above his thinned hair
as he tipped a glass
to the Albion’s lost game
The Butchers
There – baited by the thump
of traffic several times –
it looked more than dead
with its striped pelt ripped open
There between the rush
of commuters and trucks
magpies took greedy pleasure
from the brock’s speedy kill
There the spill of pink inners
across the black tarmac
was a shiny reminder
that this pile was once alive
Here on my return journey
the carcass is less – now bated –
but not by the mischief of birds –
instead by a compaction of cars
Shortcut
Dream holes and desire paths –
those spire views and bared routes –
those modern urban lay lines –
guiding light and human shifts –
letting sound and choice drift
until the unbuilt gets put down
and our tracks are lost to tarmac –
when our reveries are blocked up –
once the empty churches are sold
and the open parks are enclosed
by signs halting walking on grass –
we will lose the ways we made
Pevensey Levels
The filleted contrails
meet at an equal
destination over there –
weak carbon offsets
of traceable aspect lines
for the flightpath artist –
but not strung long enough
for the followed eye to apply
into the capture of nature
It is runway flat under them
so pray they don’t align here
and find this level for land
Zero Four Thirty
For a man who has done his natural duty,
death is as natural as sleep. GS
Here we meet again
you no longer a friend
you jolt – a waking itch
this drugged portend
This unnatural discontent
which sleep is for me
it is a sickly thing
It is as if rest itself
is my disease
It is as if my register
of a simple expectation
of a longed-for sopor
no more allows it to admit
Yet we will drift in daytime’s
impolite light
with eyelids weighted
by the night
just enough to stop me seeing things
This puzzle of so many pieces
which darkness has become
You – my new foe –
my agonist – my bedlam
E100419
County Lines
There – incongruous in khaki
among the lurid colours of youth –
two sallow lads sat by the tunnel
at the love-etched bench
as if recovering from a hundred years
of trench warfare with their coughs
whilst the younger troops are bound
to school desks and repeated tasks
The soldiers’ drugs are sweet perfume
above the sour rot and kicked mud
of the early hints of a winter campaign
across county lines with bunched fists
New England
They will soon take command
of the scattered pill boxes –
those red brick squatters
sat above river crossings –
built for strategic purposes –
and to fool the nescient
of a Maginot Line in England –
to withstand our invasion
There will be working parties
to restore the squat outposts –
drinking tea and sipping gin
as the last of Locarno evaporates
The new guard will take to parades
under friendly church hall beams –
taught to guide the landing parties
into concentration camps in Kent –
and you will shift the weight of anger
by reposting others’ indignant shouts
from your padded cell of social media –
which is how all of this begins
יין אדום
I don’t believe in God
but I think she hears my prayers
I can only hope to touch her face
if she deigns to ever care
We don’t talk much about politics
it bores her more than sex
We drink red wine and compromise
on what is truly meant
I woke to judgement nightmares
and a terror in my heart –
with an empty wine glass by my bed –
that brittle bodyguard
Loot
So she dug up my soul –
I have a price on my head –
she pulled it from my skull
because of what I said –
Quoting Aristotle –
in accordance with virtue –
she showed me my old failings
as they formed a ragged queue
Jealousy and mistrust
once mine to sculpt with ease –
I’d struck at our confidence –
I’d cut her blood with tears
She placed her prize on scales –
held high by a blinded hand –
and claimed the inside of my head
was hers to now command
The Boxers
There’s now a looseness
of my limbs –
my flesh is tidal-tugged –
my skin’s forgotten fingers –
it doesn’t get their rub
She slugs her way through cities
knocking back – inside pubs
Testing weights and measuring –
she seems to get enough
I spit blood into my bucket –
they don’t say why it drips –
and I wonder if old Jesus
felt the nails as they ripped
Morning is my saviour
telling me that I’m not dead –
I wake her with my stiffness
but she’s not inside my bed
Old Devices
We’d race to get the telephone –
stating our number as rote taught –
our mother in her poshest voice
but rough for sister talk
Relative news transmissions –
but not intended to be heard –
I knew nothing of kindred facts
’til I stole truth from her words
We were ignorant between acts –
maybe flattening an irksome book –
we’d stare through the yellowed nets
whilst half-tuned to loosened talk
We tugged at the reluctant drawers
where our history was lost and found –
there tucked between old table mats –
sepia smiles were loosely bound
News bulletins marked the hours
or were shoved through the letterbox –
that narrow window on the world –
ink fears of the Eastern bloc
Ignorance was a short-lived bliss
in those disconnected times –
no algorithms on our wrists
to redress the truths and lies
Cracks
I’m spitting out my words
I do not like their taste –
I’ve been thinking too much lately
now I’m fat around my waist
I’ve been seeing the small hours
without sleep’s dead embrace –
I’ve directed thoughts to work
on your holes and your disgrace
I’ll wash my mouth with alcohol
to remove the lines I hate –
whilst the bitter hit of whisky
sets my mind to sleep awake
And if we survive this winter
without a thaw across the lake
then we will skate more fearlessly
since the ice will take our weight
Call Ended
When I touched the button
and killed our discourse
I ripped with emptiness
then filled with remorse
I cannot handle
these telephonic wars –
I start thinking out loud
my unspoken thoughts
I struggle with distances
logged by servers and silos –
those creeping tendrils
gathering ones and zeros
But my ear is pressed
to heed numbers you say –
of your long hours awake
and your days still away
We have lost the buttons
and slow rotary dials –
these phones are devices
which hack our denials
Jürgen
How many teeth
has Jürgen got?
His smile exposes
quite a glut
of bright-white incisors
lined up like a squad –
His grin illuminates
the depths of The Kop –
They lighten the lives
of Scousers enough
to maintain a belief
in Salah’s own God –
and maintain their faith
in Klopp’s wide gob
Gravesend
The singing whale
sang canary song
swimming upstream
in the river of kings
Almost a portent –
a white flag of truce –
dipping and guiding
her head by the moon
There will be a dinghy
to greet the creature –
to check her origins
and to refuse a visa
We know too well
that her journey will fail –
in that dead end course
taken by other whales
09:45
This is my time of day
with the door wide open –
just clock ticks and the dog
to keep me company
I am untouched by anyone
whilst the alerts and alarms
are switched off – for now –
I do not think about you
I steer my thoughts around
this selfishness of silence –
I would not explain myself
to any visitor to this moment
In this capsule of my remove
I am so strong – now capable
of stopping time and breath
by not thinking about you
Self Portrait
My naked body would look worse
only if crucified on Bacon’s canvas –
Because I conspire with my reflection
to blank out the sags and stretches
which later ageing has brush-dragged
so that my dark-haired belly bloats
with the crap and oil I cannot avoid –
I then wash it down with just one more –
and the wine glass is half an egg timer
of emptiness – rouged red and framed
The Flood
There’s a shifted density in the landscape
following your biblical month of rain –
It has been days and disturbed nights –
a battening of doors and shutting-ins
My chosen path is tread-thickened soup –
the mossy velour on my usual pew
is now an orbicular stump-top sponge –
my meditative place is soaked right through
The dripping leaves of the common hawthorn
are plated to silver and bent in prayer
by the salty weight of God’s squeezed tears –
here funnelled from him by the doctrinaire
Where my path rises with logs as steps
the deluge descends in no need of grip –
making me turn to take another route
to the higher ground where your boat should sit
In your clearing – of the sawn and fallen –
you list in pairs and shout deaf-ear orders
finding many gone – or now missing –
‘I have to postpone my plans for The Flood’
Your holy fable finds a level in puddles
where water pools in the lowest place –
and in the clearing there is no Ark –
Others will say when the seas are raised
Lover
I leave clues in the bathroom –
empty blisters of pills –
Leonard is everywhere
singing of stiffening thrills
Affection is not infecting
the bodies in the beds
and children speak in whispers
because of what is said
All I want from your presence
is engagement and thoughts
instead we stare at screens
and read others’ fingered words
My weight is dropping daily
whilst the world fattens up –
I would pray for forgiveness
but I’d be praying far too much
Deleted Facebook
This phone feels lighter
after I deleted the app –
today I’ve restarted
with a single act
No pushes from Facebook –
that microscope
into others’ lived lies
and hashtag tropes
My thoughts were narrowed
by the blinkered view –
No yearns for ‘Likes’ –
No fear of peer reviews
Late Out
This dessicated path
is an off-white scar
under the moon’s phase
of waxing gibbous
Boots and tamed dogs
have worn this route
into a grass-bare map
which I read by that light
The holding flightpaths
of man-made meteors –
of ephemeral accords –
circle among the clouds
The transmitter mast blinks
with a beast’s red eye
shaming Arcturus and Mars
so even those stars fade
This as the bypass hums
a song of our war won –
our tilt against creation
by over engineering
Bottle
Here clear water springs
halfway up the hill –
forming a slow stream
into leaf-rotted mud
which could – at source –
be bottled and branded
It would sell in Lewes
as a holy of holy waters
off the Sussex Downs
because small miracles
still curl in these parts –
by the sagacious oak
and sacred hawthorn –
a liquid gift from God –
for five Lewes quid
Ali
This latest named storm
is as magnificently loud
as Seaford’s raw shingle
when overturned by tides –
but now it is tipped across
the highest of these trees
which emit fearful creaks
and then offer a low footfall
of snapped touchwood
These tall variations
take each sucker punch
like hardened pugilists
with their bent bones –
whilst whipped saplings
spill their dried germen
as they cower and crowd
like ingrateful men
sheltered from a fight
I sit to rest my shuffled legs
and shut my blasted eyes
to truly see what I can hear
as the stripped off leaves
fall in layers around my seat –
each arrival noted by the puff
of a soft landing on another –
In the hush of this ripped storm
I find my ancient connections
Appointments
The back door
is pinned open
to let last night
leave the house
My latest letter
from the doctor
has been delivered
to the table
by our postman
who is counting
his morning paces
to retirement
I watch him tread
our uneven path
out to others
who wake as late
You Said in the Car
I would rather see
a benign dictatorship –
Democracy only offers
power to liars
I can still read that
ink-pressed megaphone
which lay wide open
on your kitchen table –
bare column thoughts
of the paper-sellers –
of power seekers
your new advisors
The Drawer
Then they grow up
and are like us
and our inheritances
which we hid
Those hand-me-downs tucked
below old underwear
in the sagged dresser
which needs mending
But moving it would
surely unsettle
the air into dustlight –
They sparkle at times
but not enough
to dampen our fear
of them becoming
just like us
Quietus
It is now zero-two-twenty-two
and my sleep is distracted
by far too much thinking
about minor possibilities –
and other rum miracles
in my conjouring mind –
such as taking my mother
back to the Holy Land –
to see her greet the white grave
of her eldest son – at least once –
for me to tolerate her
misunderstandings
There will be no myrrhbearers
but only her – one more witness
before the laid down stone
which is fixed – she will stand alone
But I know that she will never return –
and I have no chance of any apology
as she struggles with family acts
of untranslatable love
She may live a few more years
having never felt his breath on her –
off his loud grandchildren –
and seen the tears of his wife
And at zero-three-zero-three
I save this disturbance of sleep
among notes on my phone
and a reminder to call my mother
Last Day
It is the day after
the last red ball
and rain has found
the indentations
made by the size
eleven landings –
those measured
imprints on grass
which were placed
half a dozen times
in the hunt for another
man’s number –
And another summer
is ticked off
and recorded inside
the scorer’s book.
The Boat
His boat had seen action in the East –
the reek of cooled sweat met him –
not yet mopped by long-damp cloths –
Never dried enough to work well
so that his first breath taken underwater
faltered – his onshore training failed him
making him cough like that last fag had
as he carried his black kit bag
He crouched to find the right height
at which he was to live and work –
now his skimming on the waves
were inked notes on his service record
This is how it started – it’ll make him –
those hours of constant perspiration –
a hundred nights of coffin dreams –
and still yet to learn Jack Speak
Dew
There has been no rain overnight
but the underfoot dew is enough
to darken both my boot toecaps
and to soak the dog’s knotted hair
as she bounds into blind prospects
of hedges and low distractions
And I look up at the underbelly
of another aircraft on another path
and do not envy their chosen route –
I then shout out for the dog’s return.
Into the Trees
Under the trees we find the path –
that one we missed last time –
and climb above the flood plain
on which – five miles downstream –
fools build fifty-four homes
We are now in nature’s green skin
where branches and hand-propped boughs
form unfinished rough shelters –
these experiments and adventures
decay to an undesigned usefulness
Further on the slunked gully runs –
here kids built mud and stick dams
until a wire fence was erected
and that sucking and silting stream
was blocked from the apprentices
The track is beaten and heat-cracked
which encourages youngsters on bikes
to take the risks we also under took –
but we hadn’t the engineered machines
on which they hurtle as fearless riders
The trees reverberate with monkey calls
and the shrill complaint of a lost child –
it is as if the internet doesn’t exist
as the off stage scramble of children
escalates – not quite Lord of the Flies.
Box Hedge
I ran my dipped fingers
through unscented hedges
as I tried to leave the rings
of your invisible traces
from our long afternoon
of deep interrogations –
the footpath steepened
to demand some attention
but I flipped my focus
back to that gratification
which I had deposited
on the untrimmed hedges
of the respectable tenants
New Terms
Whist you commuters
weary your lit ways
at ergonomic desks
and begging screens
I will walk out
to that richer idyll
that you can only visit
when allowed
You are locked down
by your WiFi streams –
even the commute
is more small displays
Those sealed views
from that fixed carriage
is the best you can do
on most weekdays
until the sullenness
of September dims
and the daily journeys
are seen as reflections
And the mid-term break
in October’s pointlessness
is the dark reminder
that holidays have been taken.
Sunday in Seaford
There the sunburnt woman
sits alone – her cheeks inflated
and colouring to that near-pink
of shrimp-stained flamingos
whilst two older ladies draw
their lines in snapping charcoal
on bared sketch book pages –
each hoping to record beauty –
two on art-pressured sheets
and one – later – in the mirror –
England’s ruddy south coast
still blushes as if caught out
The tradition of seaside decay
settles alongside the ageing folk –
curling as flotsam – delineating
the ragged edge of our known world
And here we locate ourselves
in a bolted and braced beach hut
to watch the dog walkers and seekers
parade in opposite directions
After a Party
The wisest of the kids
had reset our house –
so that my scratch-forced
early morning ritual
of back-door-and-dog
was quite normal
The unexpected waft
of an outside chill
was the only thing
I found misplaced –
that and a small bowl
of rolled fag butts
which I’d suggested
be left outside
when I had patrolled
their dying party –
consciously sniffing
at the air for drugs –
only tasting
the boyfriends’ sprays
Earlier in the evening
I had bolted myself
in my dark study
as the various volumes
of the engineered event
were subject to
the same social forces
we adults endure –
but at a different pitch
The dog had scratched
at my side of the door
as I sank even lower
on displaced cushions
and kid-shifted furniture
My brief entombment
was almost equal
to Egyptian disarrays –
alas for me there was
no mass of splendour
or promise of some
sort of waking heaven
Turn Left
I take the dipped fork
of near-identical width
but this left path is falling
and narrowed in breadth
It follows the slope
of the redundant stream
where the hills ran off –
once-washed – bare reached
But now drainage and driveways
have altered old flows
above ancient rights
there is no such urge
I pass standing iron –
a fence absorbed in a tree –
it needs no hard posts
in that adopted place
There’s a weighted trade
in these heavy woods –
between man’s intervention
and her constant response
A Diversion on the Road to the Dead Sea
We drove due east
past the concrete wall –
by the older stones
which marked the fall
of carved-up gods
honed by man’s cold sword –
through the broken centre
of this confusing world –
here restricted Jews
and Muslims had bled
under scythed prayers
of crusading men –
Rose water was scrubbed
to reclaim the rock –
to wash from the slabs
the foul tread of a god –
When the mosque was burnt
in a war on the dome
a madness was found –
Jerusalem Syndrome
Hopes raise and implode
back to rubble and dust –
Forty centuries of walls
have never been lost
E170119
Under Buxted House
The gouged stream ran more loudly
than on our last slogged hike –
that rush was the first signpost
on this Sunday-worn path –
I had chosen the wrong boots
for the rain-slip and clay-stick
of the surface which had changed
after the previous day’s storm
Here the invasion of knotweed
was secure in these conditions
unlike my own slid footings
over roots and low branches
The moss sides of tree trunks
were theatrically intricate –
as if that last heavy downpour
had instructed them to thicken
I was thankful for my dog –
and my walking stick – both found
ways amongst the cake mix mud
to routes left unaffected overnight
I do not have names for all that I saw
Nature does not care for me
and refuses to give up her confusion
for us walkers of man-made breeds
The Bared Craters
Here under the canopy are exploded craters
where fickle nature has fought a short war
pitting her one-sided strengths to uproot
in an onslaught against these ancient woods
She reins victoriously with the long surrender
and now directs those flaking birch to fill the gaps
and for brambles and fern to hide the fallen
with their late summer re-sized leaves
When we walk here in the scowling winter
there will be no hiding her raged brutality
as the tipped roots are again exposed
and her brutal battlefield is uncovered
Meanings
For each life to have significance
it needs to be led by awareness
Do not stand off from others
like those diffident observers
You must embrace loved moments
as you move through slowed days
of small actions and interactions
so your short time is truly valued
There is an art to such attention
which is not taught at any school
Let your magnifying glass pause –
learn from the immodest instances
Tie the loose laces of another’s shoe
into the tight knot that they prefer
Become versed in their fingered turns –
how their interactions are directed
You should not steal their thoughts
as you stumble in their taken steps
Only consider how they measure
from their own eyes looking back
And live without your own thoughts
colliding in this time with inner fictions
Then you can walk at your own pace
with – or without – others
Digging
It was never about being held
until it stopped
and then my redrafted scenes
were all that remained
The unbalanced intimacies
of being in love
were ours to upset –
to greedily grab and pull at
until their weight combined
and collapsed
without a bed or shelter –
under the spire we stood naked
and blushed at foolishness –
or so it appeared –
because the mass of it all
was too much for us to bear
I pass through the graveyard
where our bench was set
and still cannot read
those upright names.
Out of the Woods
The soil is dry and compacted
under the last threadbare fall
The laggard stream clogs
between the dropped branches
The cow parsley – and others –
stand as unpicked summer fossils
The weighty berries tease
among sharpened brambles
August should now stutter
into the slow rot of Autumn
But that immigrant heatwave
has not shifted from us
The seasons are so confused
by our greedy interference.
Autumn Term
They make the slow haul uphill
with their shop-branded bags
of untried school uniforms
The boy bears his boxed Clarks shoes
as the girl lugs her sweatshop shirts –
freshly picked off Primark shelves –
Still with plenty of growing in ’em
was her mother’s observation
as she calculated the cost of it all
These slack summer holidays
will end not soon enough
for the parents – but not the kids
The hour-numbed regiments
will reform and take the school gates
in their battle colours of navy blue.
The Dog Walk
I mistook a dropped box of Durex
and the discarded instructions
as a rarely spotted fag packet
My two dogs poked their snouts
around this additional litter
and moved on without direction
This – our diverted morning walk
of squats and leg lifts en route
with me tugging on their long leads
I was a stalled stunt kite flyer –
crossing and uncrossing the strings
as they knotted ahead of me
The weekend gardeners buzzed
and clipped around my obligation
of giving these two their flight
Your Photos
A phone captured moment
of your recent childhood –
which I am guilty
of having forgotten –
until you put it up
on our shared channel –
our stored histories
were then brightly reignited
But for too short a time –
for the flare of a match –
again another lost curl
of extinguished recall
Laid
It was as if there was no step
or soft seat that did not force
the deep stab and grip of pain
through his frame and thoughts
He had stood well for a time
but then the ill rip-and-burns
filled his limbs with that sear
which fuelled flames in turn
Bad as it was – it was not Death –
He led The Crowd to the pit –
felt his calves lock on the path –
and then sear as if then split
He rocked on his heels to ease it all
whilst he read to them The Truth –
as laid out in the lines for the dead –
but God’s words were still no proof
As the Boxed Man was loose of his ties
and was set down in the earth
his own spine screamed for a seat –
or to lie flat on the peeled back turf
By the time the priest got to his car
all of the Dark Cast were gone –
In the cold groan of the air con
he let out a tear to mourn
That was his last one for The Church –
it had turned its arched back –
to leave him to face an ill grace
and to tear up the old contract
Murmur
On the rushed film set
we were re-hushed
for the recording
of a wide shot on B
and we – the extras –
dressed as coppers –
waited in the
bale-tipped barn –
Turning was bellowed
by the unsmiling AD
forcing a quietened
conference of uniforms –
there holding a debate
on colour and race
in hardly whispers
which were kept low –
a murmured conspiracy –
We acted without scripts
and mimed our interactions –
Nothing good was said.
The Living Will
My living will
must now be written –
whilst I command
my pen’s direction
I’ll instruct you Love
in my last performance –
I’m to design the setting
of my dying conditions
It will lay folded
under toungue-kissed glue
until my mind tips
from knowing you
You’re to take my scheme
from the secret place –
on the day my act
receives a poor review
You will sit with this artist
who has drawn so much –
and hold off rolled tears
for our last act of love
I am yet to hatch
the shape of my death –
But once its read out
I’ll have had a good life.
Above the Weir
The kayak wobbled
on the tamed river
as we paddled –
but out of time –
past bikini-strapped girls
and kids your age
whom we sat above
in our inflated craft
Within ten minutes
we had found
the quiet normality
of an unbroken tension
where water boatmen
skated in spurts –
here dragonflies dipped
to a secret dance
above our bright bow
We kept time for a while
and then you gave up
to let me drag routes
around low branches
and through narrowings –
I briefly quit with pain
so we were set adrift
against the nothing current
below the next weir
You held the ropes
as I tried to lift my weight
from the muddy berth –
but my legs could not do
what legs should do
so I dragged myself
up the herd-worn bank –
gripping grass clumps
to bring me ashore
I hold the memory
of that recent evening
as fondly as those of my youth
when I lived for the Thames
and her sly currents –
when I could cross
the tops of weirs –
but now I am reduced
to the sloth of the Ouse.
Into the Season
We have yet to see
our exhaled breaths
as we avoid the burn
of the cold handrails
on our expectant ascent
of fifty-odd concrete steps
to our fixed tipped seats
We have yet to inhale
that repeated wide view
of our floodlit pitch –
re-lined in the week
into a restart of hope
against eleven men
in an unloved strip
We have yet to sip
the bitter hot drinks
that we will queue for
in the muted half-time
of slight disappointments
as old rivals are set to win –
according to media streams
We will fear the descent
which others will take
before the hard blast
of whistle and biting winds –
to then exit The Amex
for seats on misted-up buses
which will take us home.
Monologuephobia
I fear monologuephobia –
the fear of repeated words
which is a dreadful error
in my error-prone verse
Cohen’s Disease
I have Leonard’s stiffness
and now no longer play
once his God decided
to make me kneel – not pray
Shelters in Israel
I measured the fixed areas
in which a life was doused –
drawn for the new owner –
one way to heal his house
Under shading palms
my foreign family sits –
another showed the plans
of his own home being built
I walked in his construction –
ready by the winter –
on a tour of whitewashed rooms
and the bomb-proof shelter
He led me through the building site
taking time to watch my path –
and I then saw his dear family
cowed below the blast
The rubble and busted timber
are props across this lot –
precursors to God’s plan
for when the bomb is dropped.
Postings
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
Attention
Heed half-attention
to these written words
and the breath it takes
to read my thoughts
Here in the present
at which you look
stay aware
of my conjoured tricks –
which we now see
in separate worlds
joined by my verse
and nothing else
No hardened borders
or long-haul flights –
so turn off the clock
to find more time
Then walk with me –
but not too fast
past Thoreau’s woods
to face what has passed
as it now collides
with the present
and our time is filed
as misplaced moments.
The Fly
The fly hummed her old song of death
as she jacked in the room’s still air
in a quickened patrol overhead
of absurd dashes and acrobatics
I considered my chances of a kill
but her own sense of time saw me
in slow motion – a sweated animal
of missed flails and wrong swats
Then she was gone from my space
because death was not here – not yet
But she will endure and then retrace
her plotted flight to my last warm breath.
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.
Holding
There are ripe callouses
on one of my palms –
a furrow of skin
in my walking stick hand
My limbs are nettled –
a tease of scratches
which paint my shins
with blood-dried patches
The constant cut pain
scythes my stilly squalls –
‘Just a walk to Waitrose’
is a distance too cruel
I lie fixed by the duvet
that weighty cover
Here reduced by time –
my sadistic lover.
Catching Butterflies
To catch a butterfly
takes a lightness of hand
which I try to employ
whenever I can
The reminder chimes
for the civic hall meeting
where the Parkinson’s carers
do all the speaking
Their therapy stirred
into cups of weak tea
and we smile politely
at the speaker’s ill ease
I’ll be the youngest
at this month’s farce –
still able to hold
a life trapped by glass
Eclipse
I danced my weight home
to a no-eclipsed Moon
whilst reports of Her crimp
were reduced – removed
Her amber qualities
here timely-abused
by a shifted Earth’s
slow sun-spun cruise
As we sweat into sleep
and tug on warmed fear
please pray for a God
who will rain on us tears
If no good will fall
on our field-wide droughts
then pray to the Devil
for floods to drown doubts
Expect little beauty
in this high hemisphere –
whilst long winds spin
the clouds quite queer
And if all such plans
only map out to dust
then take to the lake beds
and imagine them lush
Drink the low waters
which form as warm pools –
but do not imbibe
the next epoch of fools.
Emptied
There was a tin of Swarfega
under the kitchen sink –
its opening the notification
of Dad’s tinkering
His wrenched weekend battles
with ageing Austins and Fords –
as an amateur mechanic –
were his ongoing wars
He was sometimes frustrated
by metrication’s foray –
and I was equally stumped
by his imperialist’s ways
He became a man of peace
as he stripped his oiled guns
with no sprung swear words –
loud expletives unsung
He would put his bearded cheek
onto the cold wood and weigh
the heft of barrel loadings
and teach his lungs to wait
The engineering of Brownings
he’d refit with no complaint –
in his hands and soft breaths –
he exhaled and taught aim
At the farm – with my boys –
I put up targets with care –
There I taught them how to shoot
and shared my Dad’s zephyr
This Brexit Summer
Every upstairs window
was wide open
as if an exorcism
had violently willed
the throwing
of panes and drapes –
that unlocking
from the day’s hard heat
of still bedrooms
and even dark landings –
which up until now
were cool shelters
Such inflammation
is now an English condition
which is mishandled
in every negotiation
between couples
and sweated politicians
We will sit in shade
this July and not suffer
the rude temperatures
which expose flesh
and remove the duvets
but not for sex.
The Cull
It bolted into my beam
and was too fast for me
to stop the car in time –
a grey and white rush
of life under my wheels
and I could not avoid
the eye-shined badger
in the space between
ruts and embankments
A thudded weight cursed me
through the steered curves
with the guilt of road-kill –
of something too noble
which was always under
others’ orders to be culled.
3am
These are such long hours
in this slumbered house –
that only I ever know –
so being only mine to own
when the wall clocks talk
to no one else but me –
there is no competition
for chairs or channels
as the left alone wifi flows –
I unlock the back door
and let the dawn air flood
the breath-staled room
shorting the summer’s heat
that had been held over
from another day now gone –
which was all that remained
of a small part of my history –
a short story I’ll never repeat.
Eighteen. Yesterday
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
Dry
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
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
Early Rising
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
BN1
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.
Science Block
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
Fixings
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
Any High Street
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.
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.
The Long View
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 Lanes
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
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
Back from Israel
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 Crossing
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 turning into rust
as 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.
To Deny
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
Widdershins
‘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.
A Man of the Last Century
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.
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
A Letter Home
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
A Weariness
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
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 Foreigner
This sun on me is a cure
helping my nails grow
and burning off that skin
which had been flaking
I am the foreigner
who scares the small kids
with his Englishness
and chrome walking stick
Older residents recognise
my dead brother in me
and stop to talk – or more
A grandmother touched my face
I read books the wrong way round
was one child’s observation
My kin have my eyes and brow
and are shocked by this mirror
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
Your Place
How are you living your life
on a daily basis?
Is there space in your thoughts
where the over-quick reactions
usually ferment so that –
for a short time – you are only you
not that Bummer newsfeed junkie
Do you ever find yourself alone
and immersed in rich solitude?
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
The Cows
Two good legs shunt the shed’s herd
of black and white hand-numbered hides
into the single storey milking parlour –
the stiff udders are washed and latched
to German engineering by Israeli hands –
We would pour the cold output into a jug
and cross the lava-hot tarmac on bare feet –
to then undress and take one long shower –
with the milk in our throats as a reward
for our hard-work and hard-fucking –
The daughters of my brother’s bovine care
look at me with unrecognizable stares
as they chew on the sweet feed at my feet –
They do not know of the kindness I showed
their forebears under these shaded beams
E170119
Chorus
There is a constant rise
and fall of squabbles
between this variation
of rooks and songbirds
which was earlier today
played out in the shop
where pecking old women
disagreed in quick Hebrew
They found a sullen perch
to nudge within whilst queued
Here ruffled cotton feathers
were preened and re-aligned
A (Steam) Fair Diagnosis
I noticed the tremor in his hand
which seemed to be driven
from his bone-high wrist
as if he were deftly turning
an invisible threaded nut
and spinning it quick
up to the bolt’s bare shank
His wife’s coffee was spilling
in that grip as he turned to me
and she took the tepid remnants
He smiled and announced
his own diagnosis just that week –
but he knew it well before –
how unwell he was becoming
The engineering marvels rolled by
under the sure wheel and steer
of coke-puffed mechanics
Each boiler and firebox was riveted
or screwed and wrenched as one
We tremored as the showmen rumbled
Tractor Histories
They were parked in two lines
but not quite furrow straight
We walked through the
static display of old tractors
I read out the name plates of
those dearly beloved brands
now green and red patinas
over mottled paint and flaking rust
Rested greased beasts – loved or kicked
– depending on the maintenance
But my youngest wanted shade
and showed no interest in such things
Echo
He was moved down
to ‘The Departure Lounge’
and we were reduced
to the daytime whispers
of his night duty shifts
as required ten years earlier
but then Dad was dying
and his bed was grounded
almost as if the next stage
was another eased lowering
Three decades on
and I now look to a room
which is equally flawed
but my expected years
are not that finite reduction
of a terminal Illness
I struggle with this shift
from first floor to ground
but it will make life easier
for all in our household
I say I struggle with this shift
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
I, the Draughtsman
‘The Irish have the greatest command
of the English language’ Discuss
Some West Indian poets may disagree
as would others from further ports
of our whore-explored tongue
This waking moment lets me wander
in a drunken reverie the words of Wallcott
but I haven’t dropped a touch in a week
apart from that sip of gin and tonic
which I was asked to consider for taste
In the house children clunk on floorboards
and the eager dog patters and follows them
My eyelids measure the paucity of my sleep
Later today my fatigue will make a grand entrance
just as I need to be alive to connect the lines
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
Of Time
Our histories sit with us –
those unwelcome ghosts
We should not regret
their passing – that loss
If we foolishy embrace
unto any such crowd
then their knife – their gang
will bring us down
We should extinguish the flame
with wet finger tips
and promise the present
that the past has no grip
I am alone in these moments
taking each as my last –
secure that my future
is now planned by chance
Side Effects
My ugly bedfellow roused me
that itchy indolent whore
She gnawed at my naked nerve endings
breaking my sleep once more
She stiffened all the wrong muscles
made my hands lock into fists
She broke the reverence of sleep
with her poisonous nightly kiss
Only Being
I convalesce under the counterpane
with the play of evening birdsong
and that blood rush roar of jets
lifting the propped sash higher
The late light on the roofline tiles
is almost that Mediterranean red
against the flat chalk-blue sky
but I am rolled up in Sussex
The same songs will find me
waking in the same place
as the light and sky are turned
and the curtains are ripped
Then this moment will return
of me laid low by the small efforts
which others do not notice –
I have lost the art of only being
Checks
Earth Wind & Fire boogie
in the muted waiting room
But no one dances here
Adverts for vaginal creams
and local dry cleaners
rotate on the large screen
A mother instructs her kid
The patience in her command
fails for ‘naughty little girls’
An elderly couple openly flirt
in the propped-wide doorway
and exchange a loud kiss
My hands turn numb and stiffen
as I wait my turn for ten minutes
of a qualified person’s attention
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
A Man in White
We dropped over Falmer
and sped past a man in white
who was bent-double
among the weighted hedges
The descent past the stadium
was a collision of thoughts –
it then offered a roundabout
and we doubled back to offer
I rehearsed my approach
reminding myself of the place
and how I would have to slow
with hazards
with a wound window
But there was no man in white
in the place
only the waving of branches
under the charge of turbulence
No one on the untrod grass
Wedding Rites
The small streets of Windsor are sparkling today –
it helps that the homeless were moved on their way
Union flags limp overhead – bought online for thirty quid –
as the old – the young – the poor
the ill – wait patiently – right until
The rich – the landed – the toffs –
the Dukes – pass them by – up high –
so aloof
Then roads are re-opened to one and all –
the returning beggars lay out their stalls
Once more in England there’s a tale to tell –
How a town was reduced to a right royal hell
From the Gift Shop
In the dream there were scatterings
of things you had bought and then kept
Small gifts from a trip which were never given –
a sprinkle of purchased intentions
I bent with ease to pick each one up
and being of sleep they adjusted
to become other things and other thoughts
On waking I re-assembled the slim moments
from yesterday that my slept mind had touched
– I had briefly looked at a snapped picture of you
from that shortness of unschooled innocence
that age when we inhabit a world so small
– I sat in the sun on a hard garden bench
with my awareness shrunk to that of children
into only considering that which I could see –
down to that hemisphere of no more than a step
– Momentarily I had thought about a family trip
That was a rarity then and more so now
– An ugly fly landed on my emptied plate
but there was a jewel’s quality to the intricacies
of the fly’s translucent wings and rolled eyes –
an emerald’s glint as it fed on microcosms
We no longer stride the globe of our forbears –
that inheritance which childhood soon sheds
Our interests and eyes wander too wide
and so we stop seeing into the eyes of flies
Eating Out
Grown men nibble on ice cream cones
as a Chinese woman commands her dog
and two girls giggle whilst playing crazy golf
Below Volk’s Electric Railway
I drink coffee and watch the planet rotate
On the horizon the wind turbines move
to the onshore whip of nature into wire –
giving us that current and difference
which the rattling train line absorbs
Forever connecting nothing but thrills
the steel and iron of Brighton Pier
creates another kind of consumption
I fear for the woman with her stacked tray
of chips and teas as she crosses the beach
The gulls here are quite mordacious
Sip
The way I sipped
from my coffee cup lid
made me form
the pout of a kiss
and the contact
was almost instant
like the ripe recall
from a perfume
taking one back
to an off-map moment
And that shape
took the bitterness
held in the cup
Workshop Lines
These words are also chiselled
but it is still an easier art
than his hammer and tilt
His eye is in the oak’s own grain
at cuts and gouges to open –
as my vowel sounds now close
This floor is a drift of cuttings –
those slimmed timber edits
out of which his art unfolds
My on-screen deletions
do not pile high in corners
but are only known to me
Weather Warning
This apprehension rumbles –
one only audible to me?
I fear the threat of loneliness
Of old age’s inherent adage
being forced by the separation
which is executed under my hand
but has been otherwise decreed
I fear finding that all time has gone
and is then a compression to death
and then the flatline without recovery
I fear for the future of my children
because we have stolen their hope
I fear someone finding me frozen
in a bed
or chair
without them knowing me well
Recovery Position
I lie supine
on the marital bed
the curtains flirt
like Monroe’s dress
those heavy drapes
lift to the breeze
more ballgown hush
than film star tease.
Her Book of Acts
Other men arrived
so many times
finding a night
in wide open lies
I was made surplus
by your choice of lust
One return to the past
was never enough
That unholy spirit
descended to hell
as retold by Luke
and the Acts you tell
John’s head demanded
The Baptist was bowed
as he prayed over you
you took him as well
Planning Permission
I look up at in-need houses
but have to correct myself
as I do when I see the hills –
they are no longer
in my striking distance
My perspective is robbed
being weighed by the weights
which are my lead boots –
these heavily polished toes
which are re-scuffed by this
You see me slowed on the street
but still smile at our lives
and take me out to get drunk
as families quietly fall apart
There is no reason to fail on this
quite inglorious road trip
unless you get fucked
by an incurable illness.
A History Lesson
In my hand a precis of histories replayed
as my online device itches with faces
which I recognised even thirty years on
They strung off the first connected link –
One of a woman who had seduced me
because she had seduced them too
A continuum from which I had dropped –
from the connections which they still maintain
but are now set aside from me – cauterised
even though I was a part of it
albeit for a poor summer
But I was never one of the gang
being a latecomer to the fruits
and the well-trod intimate knowledge
which still binds them to that youth
My Generation
There’s cash to be screwed off this ageing population
of us the near-needy – the to-be-nursed generation
Flyers and ads freefall from the ‘papers
promotions galore to entice us old-agers
Walk-in baths with a seat for tired pins
and packaway loos – such convenient things
Save now for your funeral and reduce the high cost
Insure your fucked body – shield your kids from a loss
They’ll sell off the house and divide the proceeds
Now dead your true worth – two holidays to Greece.
The Delivery
I am driving slowly to your place –
well under the national speed limit
because there is no more rush
to arrive – to park up – to be there –
I am returning with the fourth nail
which a poor blacksmith forged
for a death and his condemnation –
but I cannot deliver it now
I step from the car with less art
because I no longer bear my weight
without a graceless poke of a stick
combined with planned landings
‘The sharpest will pierce his lung’
his feinting mother was told
of those tempered metal pins –
one of which I now hold
Care
What is he listening to today
the lad with the headphones
which are always on his head
as he strides to and from
the care home up our road
on seemingly shorter shifts
and forever fagging between them
then back
back to that commitment
in that same dark combination
of youth half-beard and sour look?
End of Hours
This rumbling fatigue
steals my concentration
like my thief of comfort
it leaves me tilted
so that my body bends
under the unseen blows
My reddening eyes
and leaden lids seal me in
Knife Crimes
I had sliced open my thumb
peeling flesh to fish-white bone –
but the unexpected incision
refused to well and bloom
Caesar took over twenty cuts –
and may still have survived –
but the one knife that killed him
stopped his heart – and then his life
I was stabbed by your fingers
and by your loud blunted tongue –
I pressed at my open wounds
to catch the crimson run
Then I raised my whetted blade
to your bared narrow back –
and plunged it so deeply
that your spine was duly snapped
Piccadilly
Hyde Road, Manchester
Malpas Street was assailed
in a sustained assault –
once the Neo-Liberals
took this city and the port
The remaining red terraces
of parallel-lived lives
then flattened by politics –
sold short by Tory lies
The bus rolls so slowly
over holes in Hyde Road –
then past the brick islands
of bust industrial gods
Near the church of football
I pass grim social housing –
No one wipes their doorstep –
we only swipe our devices
E150119
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
Virgin England
‘Get permission from the ticket office
to travel on this train’
sums up this queue-fat England
of intransigence and new rules
Here staff cannot show emotions
or make their own on-the-hoof decisions
The green biro’d ticket was waved on
an hour later by a shrugging millennial
Class resides on trains and in politics
those two parallel English antiquities
which feed off each other
and equally upset the low users of both
The woman serving in the galley
of processed food did so with a smile
That was my only uplifting Virgin moment
.
The Sign on Southern Railway
There’s a Samaritan’s helpline advertised on the platform
hanging from a lamp post on the sturdiest of wires
I think about the last hours of that American comedian
I picture him considering the place he will meet death
and try to uncoil his quick mind
as if such powers are really mine
It has to be such a certain thing because doubt won’t kill you
only the best of preparations
such as a strong hanging point
will see you through
Did he then worry about being found
or is that selfishness not allowed?
Is there a real risk of commuters throwing themselves under trains?
I step back from the edge as the train to London Bridge
slices through the taught cord which now gives
No Natural Death
“For a man who has done his natural duty, death is as natural as sleep.” Santayana
Here we meet again
you are no longer my friend
you the jolt the itch the portend
This disappointment
which sleep is for me
it is a lonely thing
It is as if rest
itself
is now my disease
as if my unwritten register
of simple expectations
no longer allows its admit
Yet I will drift in day time’s impolite light
with eyelids weighted just enough
to stop me seeing
This puzzle of so many pieces
that each night has become
This my lost friend is you
my agonist
again
Beachcombing
On the shingle-driven beach – I looked for shells – but found plastic
We are no more the guardians because everything we use returns
The indicant we find is a tide mark of oil-based products
As kids – we looked for rare treasures after the waves had retreated
Mermaids’ purses and seaweed – our stolen weather stations
The currencies of beachcombing are no longer nature’s ways
E221018
Kermode’s Lament
He walks the Croisette
between palm leaf shadows
this gloom-filled film critc
nursing a flopping hangover
A review for a near deadline
with just enough vitriol
next time this critic
will avoid the film festival
He promised the wife
and Fortnite-fixed kids
that never again
will he do this flick-trip
Instead he’ll drag them
kicking and screaming
to a safe place
which is way beyond streaming
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
Bank Holiday
The curtain moves as if asleep
those slight adjustments
but set by breeze
which is laced with the heat
promised today
over the news
Roads will melt
old men will fade
skin will burn
to such rude reds
This is the latest I have lain
after another night
of the new normal
of wakings and stiffness
in the places of which
Leonard complained
Repeats
For JMAB
It is as if
you were delivered to us
to bear witness –
You brought a book
about fatherhood
which I read –
I cannot hear your words
because you murmur
more than speak –
but I see how you shy
even at six-foot two –
You are my child
Wireless Night
04 19 marks this moment
which I share with you –
but I am still alone –
being single in a double bed
with a radio programme
and a mug of cooled tea –
My early hours are confused
by the distortions taking place –
This is a flight over deep seas
which are as hard as land –
My window was rattled up hours ago
to let the air in overnight
which is now laced by bird song
at 04 29
E210119
Honesty
As we suck in murmurs
I shut my eyes
the endangerment less
of that to cry
To explain in plainspeak
this fixing of pain
is to convert the Jews
to Christian games
Dinner is served
in a heated dish
as I drink red wine
which bleeds bullish
We hang the evening
like a bull in blood
the severance of such
is of all once loved
And I cry like a blackbird
that hazardous rasp
as tears hurt my face
in this regular farce
The Archers 5-5-18
Brian was drunk, sat alone down The Bull,
when Jazza rolled in and pulled up a stool:
‘Hey Brian, you ok? Fancy a bevvy session?
It’ll help relieve your current depression.’
Sunrise on Sunday can be sooo boring,
PC Burns lamented whilst street-patrolling,
but then he drove by a dreadful thing,
Brian Aldridge, there, asleep on The Green.
‘Move along Mr Aldridge, you are quite drunk,
you appear to have thrown up yesterday’s lunch.’
Brian pulled out a wedge of bung-thick cash,
which Burns deftly pocketed for his wedding bash.
Jazzer awoke to Fallon’s soft snoring,
she was lost in her dreams about decorating.
He slipped from the bed, feeling quite naughty,
knowing her beloved would be home shortly.
Once more Brian woke, this time to a kiss,
from Linda’s new dog, right on the lips.
He stood and stretched his ancient frame,
Linda retreated, taking off down the lane.
‘Brian you’re a mess,’ Jennifer hissed,
as he climbed into bed, still quite pissed:
‘Ha! You should see the state of The Green,
the Environment Agency has even more to clean.’
Stand-in
Take this pain
and try it on for size
wear my suit
walk with me alongside
feel the cut
the weight of dark craft
wear my suit
and take my part
Parking Bays
David places the cones
at military distances
of old-paced equality
and makes sure the sign
which reads Funeral Today
is visible to all
It is a one way street
and not overly used
but it’s best to be sure
and there is nothing worse
than the blackened hearse
having to double park
Later in the day I watch
the staggered procession
of roughed-up mourners
making their way to church
on that road which has seen
the dead of Uckfield parked
Blow Winds
Ms. Stormy Daniels
you’ve raised a tempest –
not quite Shakespearian
but that of a temptress
A swellhead scorned
is a dangerous thing –
but once he’s made POTUS
he’ll act like a king
Rumble thy bellyful!
Spit, fire! Spout, rain!
Much like Shakespeare
he’ll end with exclaims
Poor naked wretches
whereso’er you are
That bide the pelting
of this pitiless storm
Full English in Brighton
The bare strip lights and over-loud radio
nudge me into an uncomfortable state
in this low rent cafe
A grease-shadowed place
I stir my mug of tea and drop the spoon
into a water-filled pot of stained cutlery
as I have done so many times before
My order cooks loudly
in the best-not-seen pan
as the chat back there
gyrates between water rates
and about the old man
A square plate
piled high
(the dish a brown colour
which briefly worries me)
is placed on my table
with a nod to the few
sauces available
May’s Britain
In this hushed-up country
of scandalous lies
where powerful classes
ensure their future is fine
we fall asleep in ignorance
and wake to right wing views
we lie to our scared children
that school will solve it all
we saunter down the aisle
in the Church of Endless Shops
we repeat our marriage vows
to those retail uber gods
we book our family holiday
to escape this treadmill life
we load the long-leased burden
and pray there’ll be wifi
In this hushed-up country
we are down on our knees
Here powerful classes
steal whatever they please
Agreements
I’m planning my own future
locking in to rental ties
I’m putting myself in the pool
of letting agents’ lies
I’m paying out for leeches
to confirm my decency
I’m viewing indecent houses
which will have to do for me
The Tin Man
I have thought of taking
unthinkable leaps
forced by this impedement
which reduces each step
I have examined myself
in a cracked black mirror
allowing for distortion
what I see is not anger
I have changed under this
my short-lived affair
Rejection is armour
which I now have to wear
Time Travel
Over half a decade
a lustrum of illness
these are the fixings
to which time commits
but you still refuse
to read such clocks
No fleeting
now restoring
your pendulum won’t stop
Each day is a waking
without restorative gains
Each day is your summons
to strike off the pain
For Emma
The Neighbours
It was the caller ID
which daunted
for a moment
a selfish part of me
I went next door
to the possible passing
the one when I found
my neighbour’s
sick wife had died
But through ajar openings
and by calls aloud
I met her
alive
under scab formations
She had fallen
we all will
on a blood-marked rug
and had been hurried
to A&E
Patched
Now back
retuned to this bedroom
with supplements scattered
her able state was propped
Broken
I left to cut ham sandwiches
and delivered their meal
later
with an apologetic cough
Sunday Service
I keep waking to the space
where contact has moved
to an impossible flight
I now stretch under the duvet
with no hope of one more
of those seven thousand nights
The solution is simple
no need for spreadsheets
just my summary removal
Beer in Lewes
The Gardener’s Arms
smells of bonfire
of Cliffe boys and beer
of bitter-soaked cotton
but no more of fags
This is a pub which needs
that low yellow cloud
of lead emmissions
Beer gives you cancer
Soon we will be supping pints
under wooden shelters
Tea at Charleston
A heavy shower traps me
it bolts me inside the car
under the fry of rain on roof
I am returned to campsites
and useless kagoules
those flimsy foldable coats
The windscreen streams
with hundreds of floods
and another revisit
when I was pressed
to the panes in my bedroom
where
on the wettest of days
the only sport was teasing
the fattening condensation
into vertical rivers
with my breath as mist
I find
the tearoom is closed
Sussex opens on Tuesday
Beer in Alfriston
A pint of IPA
almost Fenian
but still welcomed
by this Englishman
A beer will loosen
so many things
like tied up tongues
and wedding rings
Within view
of the lifted church
I pray to a God
that this ale will work
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
A Place to Sit
His round carver’s mallet
rung out vibrations
and workbench chimes
as he forced his chisel
into the oak
Other redundant tools
hung
shelved
and sung with the whack and saw
We talked about art and ecology
and how they could combine
as he formed his perfect edges
against nature’s aged grain
He was crafting a bench
one commissioned to sit
in Alfriston’s book store
No plans or dimensions to hand
because this was true art
We compared the unwritten notes
of our marriage dissertations
and found that such study
provides no long term rewards
Skin
This skin on my foot
is turning to scales
like that creeping carapace
worn by her grandfather
His octogenarian husk
was raw
flaking
as if spun adrift on the sea
and salt-burnt
The old campaigner held court
in a Surrey nursing home
This was thirty five years ago
His layers of dust
His remnants in that room
have long been hoovered up
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
The Secret
There are a thousand secrets
which cannot now be told
withheld in run-down hearts
and haunting tenebrous souls
He poured from the heavy bottle
that wine which was not blood
and broke the mouldy bread
to help soak the alcohol up
His life was changing shape
with the cut of floods and falls
all plots of pensions and peace
were not his
to now afford
He emptied that rattling bottle
of a pharmacist’s last count
and took his heartburn secrets
to a place upon the couch
No note
no one to read it
no confidences to be read aloud
Instead his pain passed silently
and his breath stopped in an hour
Ripped
I read of the theft
of a golden reliquary
which held the dead heart
of Anne of Brittany
They stole the Queen’s case
from the Dobrée museum
The bold theft of this viscus
raised local opprobrium
The measure of its value
isn’t in its gold plate
Now they ask of the Knave
to bring it back complete
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/04/15/queens-heart-gold-stolen-french-museum/amp/
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
Cutting Out
I step out to an evening’s aura
to West Park’s dark-cut recovery
of trim lawn-strimmed flora
now sliced to a fragrant enquiry
and I reply to a text’s posit:
Have they helped you
to a conclusion?
Which my stepdaughter
kneads and beats
in a knuckled-down confusion
I give her my finite answer
(as I do to each upset offspring)
I need to move out.. to be kind to
Then I thrashed my walking stick
amongst the white-sat flowers
and then I cracked it on the red bricks
of this house of sucked-off hours
World War
That was a beer-warmed evening
underlined by an obese burger –
I avoided my return to the house
which echoed to a party of kids
and the small dog’s commands –
In the kebab shop they cooked –
just for me –
as the Turkish news feed rolled –
and on my phone Syria choked
Again – in Elizabeth Gardens
I was all alone
with my paper-wrapped chips
whilst varied kids wandered past –
So pissed off –
followed by a lad who spits
And the ever-question hung –
Was I such a teenage-shit?
We all spat out many things –
The bin’s basket greeted me
into which I tossed
the greasy chip wrapper –
Nothing else smiled so much tonight
E241018
I wear it like a suit
It is always
your quick precedent –
You will be angry
with me –
It makes me to be
a monster –
A cruel judge
of misfortunes –
Is it said to put me
in my place
and I succumb
to an absolution
with my assurances
of serenity
to douse your
flagged fuck-up
and to shroud
my own frustrations
The Player
In our comedy of errors
I played the lead role
as the foil to your fool
my cruel lines were doled
This device was the prompt
which whispered off stage
The fixed words recited
because that was our play
The Dark Room
They appeared on my phone
in a series of texts
those photos of photos
you unearthed in a drawer
of our kids fifteen years before
we announced this ending
I wanted to steal those times
which chemistry had made
in the development of them
into glossy
but now cracking captures
My childhood remains
in one school photograph
alongside my brothers
one dead
one not talking
And in one other print I keep
of my father
holding me upright on a pony
His hand (for once) holding on to me
The Thames
I drag my wooden ride
to where the water lies
to that lowest of tides
before the tsunami’s rise
I rowed the swift Thames
with blistered palms
and calves of dark blood
where the runners harmed
We swam with the current
avoiding the crafts
in that summer of love
in which I held the shaft
Nothing has changed
as I push out this skiff
Nothing will alter
I have nothing to give
Un
We will discuss disconnections –
such things we must trust
in this poker face card place
of marriage-discourse
We will flip expectations –
like a shark wrists the deck
We will turn the dealt hand
counting down to slow death
Our marriage is skewered
on the spun-turned spit
here both parts are scorched
now the heat has ripped
Our future fixes divide
to avoid offspring hurt
No one is to blame
as the pain now burns
Saturday
The weekend recolours
into the red wine stain
inside my rip run gut
she takes me to sleep
under these weighty dreams
They vainly organise
all the light
into a Looking Glass
that hyper-realism of repose
in which I now struggle
as I do in the day’s slow death
of this reducing disease
The Fairway
For SJB Thank you
The forced rise behind gorse
drops to mud trick dips and turns
quick to take us out of sight
until the dogs return at pace
in bramble-wrapped coats
They failed to catch rabbits
A bench waits upon my warmth
as the walk meets itself halfway
For five minutes the dogs are missing
Our fear of sheep
and a double barrelled farmer
drops
unsighted
with their bounding return
All the time our heads spin
with driven thoughts
earlier said
of where this walk will take us
I touched your arm
and said something
which neither of us heard
Paradox of Choice
Division of everything
can be undertaken
only of that with worth –
it comes down to shutting
off the reversible –
or taking the nearest horse –
as Hobson would say
Fortnite
My son parachutes
into a zone
I think
as his mate chats
from another place
and they exchange advice
It is another vernacular
‘Let’s go greasy’ is agreed
Talk of killing and guns
is no different to my games
over Easter fortnight
forty-five years ago
when our cold war was
a whispered fear
and our battles were real
making bruises
and blood
off loaded pebbles and sticks
The Card
You offered me
his cut-up Amex card –
that found one
with your full name
embossed on it
Your palmed sacrifice
does not remove any debt
or explain missed payments
in these counted days
of credit scores
It was shown by you
as proof
that your imbalances
had been addressed
I saw him emasculated –
his balls in your hand
and that card’s white-edge
as your blade against flesh
to slice a caught fish
But the smell will remain
in your palm long after
that card is binned
E080619
Box Set
We are drunk-slumped
drugged by red wine
and the wide screen
into the L-shaped sofa
that and the sequential playback
of episodes long ago watched
It is a life now rewound
made so unstoppable
by a misplaced remote
Time no longer exists
for us
the once-tuned
to watersheds and news
played only on the hour
We don’t pace ourselves
with the TV breaks
Instead it’s consumed
in bibulous retakes
Quiet
If I could shut my eyes on this
and find instant quietus
which does not wake a hate
for my final choice
I would take to such sleep
The Jam
Forty years ago
today
I knew boys who swapped
Tangerine Dream records
and others who spat punk
A comprehensive education
in a scrag end Surrey town
of smoke-rattled bike sheds
of wrong trousers and collars
of part formed love and loss
We all knew the girl who gave it
to the intelligent thug
she cried in maths and the bogs
Sex education still has no use
The Tin Roof
The tin top cottages
should be haunted
but the only ghost
is Hoogstraten’s
That man ripped the roof
off one propped home
and the adjoining one
was then left for him
Now stand the brick twins
with no tiles or grace
torn for Hoogstraten
and his resting place
No Dance
We had no dance record –
no undulated score
to offer a vinyl track
to our lost time
of looking back —
The dog lies untouched –
her stroke mislaid
like a forgot chorus
of a heightened itch —
I broke the news
at O-one hundred
with shipping news
and ‘Sailing By’
and your phone died
a battery death
as if
we could recharge
E270219
On Luxford
The old boys’ bench
affords a wide view
of Luxford Fields –
of trees to the north
Here is my basecamp
on the ascent
over difficult terrain
of root-split tarmac
Dog walkers and kid strollers
criss-cross the scuff –
taking turns to shout
and to chase
Behind me shoppers steer
between tight spaces
of white lines –
UP TO THREE HOURS
Two boys on bikes gob
and then dare each other –
on their brakeless machines –
to ride the Tesco steps
E110119
The View
Here – a future lost
like a still fifth child –
her shortened view –
no more beguiled –
as paths by priests
churn to mud –
their robes now scabbed
in soured blood –
All is fouled –
left to burn –
her spin – her shaft
is now slow-worn
The wide street slopes
to rain-washed grey
which I take now –
adante –
the coffee sips
are her warm flesh –
her taste last kissed
of latte breaths
EDITED 170219
BST
BST – day one
as seen from this flint field
high above the Winterbourne’s
pinned course
above rushes off a distant bypass –
that continuous inland tide
Here I listen for reduced birdsong
as seagulls are distance-summoned
by the hip-jiggered tractor’s
turn of furrow in another flint field
You have walked on – bent to misery
with me left here to rest
above this valley in our landscape –
with an extra hour of light
as if the clocks
had stopped
you leave me and sulk
Head Down
I could never dance
so no loss there
as my left foot curls
over trod floorboards
Dammed tears are held
as the pain plays games
and each dog walk
is a walk of shame
Incrementals
It has been a month
of slightness and shifts
which can be described as
‘incremental deterioration’
in my overall condition
pain and rigidity are my bedfellows
and lovers
those bitches who snap
and squeeze at me in measure
it takes a toll on others
I know
my masked face shares
such small messages
Lunchtime News
The silence around the house
is perforated by the radio pips
as I switch on the hour’s news
and then my loneliness grows
as the reported world enters
and my scale of things is shown
to have such insignificance
my existence is low
states and men of action
do not hide from endeavors
but I do
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
The Laughing Fish
A late Friday lunch
of stale crisps and ale
Sorry the kitchen shut
2.30 today
Our dog tugs for crumbs
under the table
as lunchers and drunkards
pay for their pleasure
You are moored by the lead
so I get my second pint
a tall glass of ale
which will make things right
Gravity
Gravity is not my friend –
we are growing apart
but for her odd-chanced offerings
when she stops things rolling
I would gladly move from her weight
to overhead – in orbit
My lapses to shuffles
and rigidity then lost in space
But she will not let me go
Slap
My father had thinning hair
and ever thinning teeth
and a quick temper
no fists
once a slap
when my year older brother
sliced the bathroom sponge
with Dad’s shaving blades
There had been general punishment
until us boys
the muted quatrain
then gave up the culprit
A loud slap
once
which never healed the sponge
Sleep
Sleep you are
my sweet-lipped whore
my head-bound fuck
but temporal
Smog
I enter London
where nature is hated
here potted and placed
left to wilt disgracefully
This skyline is fugged
and bears no majesty
its stone spires smogged
by the smoke-glass travesties
At London Bridge
the train’s lathed wheels
complain on curves
in engineered squeals
Into Charing Cross
from the South Bank
above the dull Thames
and empty cruise boats
I leave the station
to find my black cab
that fuming transport
with it’s poisonous fag
Commuters
Hither Green Cemetery
could be viewed
whilst we were held
on a red signal
into London Bridge
but then partly obscured
by newly built flats
where the living sleep
as our journey resumed
Drift
The weight of the fall
is always abated
by the light landings –
noiseless it piles
if your eyes were shut
you would not know –
apart from flake kisses –
that the storm had come
How my pain drifts
in this invisible blizzard
which I carry inside
The beauty of your world
is briefly fixed under the
fall of snow
Text
A brief message
was enough
for the moment
but it opened old ways
I had tried to ignore
and it took me off
in less idle thoughts
and brought me a sense
of another course
Snake
A blonde hair spun
from the towel
like a flying snake
that leaping wonder
but this spin in Sussex
was slow motion gathered
by the early sun in bathroom
and in this marriage
there is no certainty
who is Ishah
with whom I fall?
Teatime
In the Brexit Tea Shoppe
here stuffy and overheated
near a table of old ladies
all loquacious over lattes
we discuss the sad parody
of this English existence
My Marmite on toast
arrives unspread
as our own coffees cool
then I knife the burnt bread
Vows
She sleeps on her side
as I turn to mine
under the covers
with adjustments
we are a couple
unlike all others
which the wed believe
in short woke moments
Vows
She sleeps on her side
as I turn to mine
under the covers
with our adjustments
we are a couple
unlike all others
which the wed believe
in short woke moments
Lag
In this removed state from sleep’s cycle
I wander drunk down the high street
picking my stick tick way past the woken
to sit in a barber’s chair and almost doze
through clippers and cuts of grey hair
to then return to the air and blown rain
to confirm I am here back in England.
Wheeled
I touched the thighs
of many men
as I was pushed
from check in
a brush to move
their leg-locked space
as I was rolled to
my waiting place
Returns
We refilled our disgorged bags
doing that roll up and re-stuff
necessary due to the rule of travel
which dictates a greater volume
is required on every return
another thirty
or more
hours of transfers and trolley bags
before we find our own pillows
the soft heart of our home.
Shade in Samui
Below the Big Buddha I took shade
like an aged cat
ready to refute contact
as you took the significant steps
to stand under the god
Here
stroked only by thick leaves
which weighed on the near rotten pagoda
I could hide from the sun
and the burn of phone lenses
on these tourist attractions
Speingle holy water with monk
your life for good luck
Take off your shoes
With my stick and stomach
topped by a beer brand hat
I look like the visitors
who buy genuine crap
You took in the views
which I imagined
as the sun was shadow cut for less than seconds
by the landing flightpath of another jet
In this holy place there are bins and litter
the common markers of men
alongside the spirits which were captured
in the name of this mess
The monk chants
the same intonation as football scores
there must be more than this.
Wired
There is barbed wire
on the moon-pulling palm tree
there to deter tourists
and their kids
from photo opportunities
Three dogs piss on two sandcastles
as dusk confuses the high tide shadows
and rich yellow puddles
We swig beers and cocktails
as the squid fisherman departs
A line of LED lights mark
the break neck edge
from this restaurant
to the sea’s revenge.
ความรัก (Love)
This Thai beachside paradise
of dribbled concrete streams
and well-kept swept lawns
is like the constructs of love
which also require maintenance
of surfaces and hid beams –
which need an ear to creaks
and underfoot complaints
Left unattended – even for a day
and the leaves will fill the pathways –
The beach will rustle with plastic
and the drains’ stink will stay
E100119
Low Tide
As if I were Crusoe
or you
with our footprints
but me three legged with my circles
my ringworm imprints off my bloody stick
and other differences
like weight and bearing
I read into each indent
with my father’s forensic hand me down observation.
Heading North
This coach reverberates
and ever, ever, rolls north
with us four and a dozen
back-packed younger souls
in various curls of inertia
as a million, or more,
palm trees are passed
plus the same number
of shacks and scooters,
those and a thousand
roadside spirit houses
are disregarded
in favour of tourism’s
sleep of death.
The highway’s ghost island
has been raised up
for hundreds of metres
in concrete dormers
to reduce the risks
and we pass our final
7-Eleven before the ports.
Time Travellers
‘The heavy weight of a lonely death’
I read
stated in bold at headline height
eye lined up to the old woman
here
English and abroad
reading her UK paper
as the onshore wind curled the other pages
held in her three score
and more
years of holiday-making
and with the other shaded septuagenarians
her clock refuses to stop
Time Travel
‘The heavy weight of a lonely death’
I read
stated in bold at headline height
eye lined up to the old woman
here
English and abroad
reading her UK paper
as the onshore wind curled the other pages
held in her three score and more years of holiday-making
and with the other shaded septuagenarians
her clock refuses to stop
The Engaged
For Beth & Samuel
Under wind-tipped red umbrellas they take midday shade
laid out behind sunglasses
flat down on sand-itch sunbeds
hiding from the equatorial burn
which catches us
the unblocked
out
They are separated
for now
by the short array of kindly shadows
between palms and the sky
set in another timezone
they submit to sleep’s distorted demands
to dream
to reset their love and lives
Browsing
The room service maid knocks
but I am flat out
heat beaten
and living under AC rules
as my wife tours islands
and our family is spread
wider than ever by time
and all forms of travel
but connected instantly
by wires and algorithms
because we all lie
with noxious devices
which cheat distance
and sleep
The Beach
Arrayed like solar panels
but bearing the weight
of sunburnt Russians
these beach beds align
nation unto nation
before the Indian Ocean
bringing equality back
as fat men match six packed
and sagged women
note cellulite on sex objects
To drown the screams of Chinese
I put my headphones on
Real Chang Mai Night Market
Genuine fakes
why leave
why leave?
Here the lights
sometimes not lie
about LV bags
sat above silver
winking watches
Here in the food market
The Nolan Sisters sing
streamed off Spotify
Here fat white men
plod with Thai wives
We could be in London
and the list rolls out
of brands and lies
here in Thailand
Shuttled
We are first classed
thousand miled aircrafted
then for two nights
cocooned
in AC hotel rooms
and then carriage locked
up north
in a wooden house
without the locks
which cut off
thank (fucking) god
Bangkok Welcomes You
A dead kitten in a tree
five feet above the street
and under the boughs
a man made sandals
whilst a woman sewed
all within the WiFi range
of our executive rooms
The Tall Don’t Sleep
The latch clack
of breakfast preparation
is the alarm call
at thousands of feet
for us
the blanketed
but ten hours in
we are
an overheating load
that itches and rolls
in tipped back classes
of cabin pleasures
We are arranged by price
not height
Dennis Potter
I have watched the plays
of Dennis Potter
and attended games
of English soccer
waltzed on the stage
of the Albert Hall
whilst my Dad’s ashes
were Solent-cooled
Falmer
It is drizzle
almost
the fine rainfall which is fixing
as the mass of coats and hoods
pass around the stadium
in an unholy circled attendance
at Saturday’s Mecca
Pies and chips
washed by beer
and kids swigging at bottles
now weaned from their mothers
to attend this mainly male church
Here to learn the hymns
and repeated mantras
passed down
No matter
The Return of Bike Sheds
With your old lover
are you revisiting
playgrounds left empty –
gripped swings and see-saws
of a groped adolescence –
of snucked-suck kisses –
behind rusted bike sheds
and lonely youth huts?
Then a quick-lifted skirt
to his stronger fingers –
Now replaced
by a sureness in him
EDITED 170219
The Return of Bike Sheds
With your re-found lover
are you re-visiting
those ancient playgrounds
left long unanswered?
The swings and saws
of groped adolescence
of snucked suck kisses
behind fixed extrusions?
Like rusted bike sheds
and youth group huts
of quick lifted skirts
to his young fingers
Now ease replaced
by a kiss more lingered
Mobile
The area code was known
to me
and for a few footsteps
I wished it was bad news
such that would end it all
my troubled family history
which crawls from me
could be sorted within seconds
instead it is another person
calling from the same place
and not the dialled news
of a family death
Station Bar
There are Yanks
doing snake stories
in the boozer
and girls sipping
on empty straws
as men tip pints
and women roll eyes
as the barmaid grips
the pump handle
Here the volume
is unbearable
Weights
I thought Fuck It
and pulled in at the pub
I found the weight
of a heavy beer
more appealing
than dry dumbbells
here the men were dead
glued into stiff poses
by the LED screen
as Man City kicked badly
and missed crisps fell
from their mouths
In the morning I will pull
three hundred calories
for us all
Kings
I am itch-rolled
curled on my side
of our double bed
my head sandwiched
between pumped pillows
whilst you are spread wide
elsewhere
until that breakfast tray
arrives at your door
and the cooled order
is admitted
Public Bar
Six collies stitched
an unseen thread
among the table legs
of the public bar
more dogs than drinkers
but the pub was good
and the beer sat well
as we touched again
Then on the forecourt
we pressed mouths
in a guilty kiss
tasting of bitter and gin
Fore
Your ripped scent
lingered
and returned
off my fingers
a metallic remnant
to rust here
West Pier
It may have been the 1970s –
it may have been Brighton –
but no one can confirm
when my father saved a pier
I was railing high –
navigating the gaps in the planks
with a slender fear –
a cheap thrill
as you walked above the sea –
and below – under the bolted timber –
waves hypnotised the iron work
The tang of salt over candyfloss
was taken up like Friars’ Balsam
through your head –
as we passed the rides
Dad saw smoke
a daft smoulder rising up
from the deck
and we stopped – bent –
to look for timbers –
for them burning
but it was just
a cigarette butt
still curling
PC 883 -as he was at work –
called out to an attendant
and the fag was drowned
with a red bucket –
marked ‘FIRE’
E311218
The House My Father Built
I am still weighted by the dream
of a house being built
by my long-dead father
It wasn’t him – but some stand-in –
and the details in the windows –
where colour was etched to capture
the hills and home of deer
so that the past could be lined-up
with the correct view and angle
A small leak in the high roof
and paint trod into the carpet
and cut timber remained
and an improbable kitchen –
which we mentioned lightly –
and it was likened to a shooting range
He had been a good shot
E030520
The Chair
I removed your top
folding it over the chair
and knelt below you
to your call to prayers
I kissed your hips
and praised your skin
you fed on my breast
as I thickened again
Don’t Give a Fuck
Don’t give a fuck about
those old moments
let go of the lines
taking you to them
untie the frayed twist
which bind you to such
and let this craft drift
from the hard moorings
that rubbed rope will sink
as you cast this end
Boxing Day
Sunlight is unexpected today
but welcome across the floor
it is heightened by blown clouds
and their linear crossing of the blaze
such quick shadows are soft removed
and before this all the branches dart
outside my front bay
those bared arteries conduct the skies.
Broken
And these awakenings roll
from stones into movement
of cruel stretches to unlock
my fixed hands from the straps
of an accelerated illness
as my skin crawls with insects
within the scratched at tingled layers
and no tablet on earth can fix
the inner unrubbed itch
no cream can offer emulsion
enough to bleach the nettle beaters
except for her mouth on mine
and a foreign breath to confuse
Brighton 1 – Watford 0
This concrete and steel
oozes last week’s freeze
where I sit with my pint
high in the East Stand
having travelled with my boys
but they are already perched
on the folding seats
as I wait for my beer to push
me there via the toilets
where scarfed men shuffle
and queue in silence for urinals
there they unwrap and rezip
after pissing a few quid
before the match
on to others’ left pubes
these gents hope beyond hope
for a home result
as they wash down those hairs
Fucking Christmas
These yearly demands unto revelry
with tipped back long stem glasses of Italian blood and French piss
are now taken in our blinded stride
through this season
which we should claim back from baby fucking Jesus
to now take the true Yuletide home into the debauchery we once had
good and bad
more traditional than trees and yo-fucking-ho
resurrect
before Easter
the true solstice.
Males
There is now a dragged difficulty
in being male
in being a man
with this presence
of being male
as fellow fools who surround us
with their cocks hung low
slap their flaccid tools
in the faces of women
as I bow and burn
after that quickened ignition
of inflammation
and now stand more alone.
God off-road
We three boys
would trawl boggy fields
well up to welly boot depths
and over
to heel and toe squelch home
from draining ditches
of dark unknowns
never measured before
by mankind
those unlit sinkholes
of fervent imaginations
each fed by slowed streams
of red Martian water
that oxide bleeding
so bloody it could be
the earth rusting inside
too much for life
and from that ditch
I lifted a fossil leaf
a tyre track of time
embedded into rock
as if left by God on a bike.
Sea bed
Deep anchored points
of my mishpocha
are now on charts
we will take a breath
and remain immobile
for a while
until the next wave of kids
decide to shift from us –
further from the quiet
anchorages –
this shelter
for them – then
to be returned from storms
and the low doldrums
of their travels
to become us –
equal and anchored
E151218
Dust
Shall we be honest with this matter
and talk like adults
but those antique sentiments
which we have stored up in the hope
of increased values
or something to hand down
our accruals
sit
weighing on our lives
something for someone else to dust
Eye Wash
And here it crawls
almost through me
laying old lead pipes
to siphon and drain
and to slowly poison
my seed free mind
the routing of pleasure
away from my centre
to a floodwall
built high
to contain this dark wash
of rolled on tears
Rain on shed
With the hard rainfall
is a clatter
it is bubbled
across my flat
but tipped roof
on this
my right-angled shed
where work flows
but words fix
lines almost glued
caught like slo-mo drips
in a work of other’s art
Aforethought
There is the intensity of sadness
caught in his reddening eyes
after being caught out by innocence
and the cross-infection of malice
albeit the slimmest form of such
found out by his misdemeanour
and a rolled tear as evidence
Bed post
That under duvet crush which –
especially mid-morning – is a sin –
along with being stripped –
but lighted first by a kiss –
and she was then locked
to him by thigh and hip –
jointed to him – dovetailed –
her skin was still summered
even on that storm day
in an outwardly foul December
E051118
The Tree
I dropped the car’s roof
with a pull on the switch
to make a high space
for the felled decoration
and drove over six miles
to home with the tree
there propped in your space
and at sixty miles an hour
the top of that cut tree
sung every forest song
that she could recall
before her Xmas demise
Crossed
We three men
unwise
but starred
put together
our lists of ifs
but now
limpened
half-hard
old age dreams
so
we steal glimpses
of girls
in frayed jeans
Papers
I am met by this low sun
and much less birdsong
than forty years before
when I was dawn-bagged
by the seven day round
of slotting news
then smudged
but verified mainly as fact
apart from The Sun
Today I no longer take
as read
the headlines
Beautiful
She sat at our table
placemats squared
like her stubborn
kissed chin
with a darkened mole
on her stage-right cheek
she never meant to
say so very much
’bout maternal dis-possessions
which is our shared
inheritance
but the problem is halved.
Linings
The daily rituals return
like when I took
the wooden rule
not quite up to the job
that knobbled edge to run
my fountain pen against
the overexcited Indian ink
would leave me to blot
those small stains
are inverted now
found on my sleeve
the toothpaste specks
are my page-ready mistakes
as I bend to this sink
making good this new day
to lay out
line by line
my life
Fall
Almost December
and this bit
of our northern hemisphere
is being tricked by the
man-made warmth
into putting feelers out
from within
the false Spring which catches
too keen lifeforms and me
I am over dressed for
these modern Novembers
Old scars
Again
she loosened him
like you do to a ripe scab
with a quick pick
and each time
she contributed to that flesh mark
he had upon her
that white scar
vividly lit by the sun’s admissions
never burn-protected
almost
just almost
cancer’s low cat flap
under which he crawled
to grow
again inside her
E110119
Of this parish
Our laid souls will return
to the same parish
there imperially paced
by our pre-descendents
where our earth-stained
attempts to create distance
with breath and word usage
are removed by the vacuum
in god’s pre-creation
and our put upons and ways
will fall
as Galileo guessed
at the same speed.
Fail
I do not want to see
or to feel
the place in which
you
a Light
have to exist:
Shore-washed
almost state-less
and un-returned
by muscles and
missing connections
I do not want
the contraction
of my view
which doctors
fail to fix:
a discomfort
I do not
EVER
want to
feel
Denis Potter at The Picture House -Uckfield
Here hiding
under the cover
of lowered lighting
and a backdrop
of
acoustic guitar
with a heavy glass
of London Pride
A tongue-end taste
which takes me
back to then 1984
trying to read
Potter on Potter
But playing
other songs
from old TV shows
inside my
head He wrote
(almost) musicals
and smoked
E210219
Denis Potter at The Picture House, Uckfield.
I am here, hiding,
under the cover
of lowered lighting
and a backdrop
of
acoustic guitar,
with a heavy glass
of London Pride:
A tongue-end taste
which takes me
back to then, 1984,
as I try to read
‘Potter on Potter.’
But I play
other songs,
from old TV shows,
inside my
head: he wrote
(almost) musicals
and smoked.
Lost
Buried in your bag, the excuse,
that modern cord, the line,
to the centre of us,
you would not have heard
notifications, and such,
as the weight of this end,
anchored, fixed in the bed,
felt no tug (or pull) from your end.
Wish
I would not wish
this hushed visitor
on any other
sleeping person,
my dark creature
which tightens the night
into these reeling
muscle spasms,
which medicine
and kindly doctors
chase through my racked body
with known drugs,
not knowing which one
will do their job:
none can help me
to sleep, no more, easy.
Verge
As if there was enough death
to recall at this time of year
there is another one to add
to the villagers’ engraved lists,
but she shall not be set to stone
in a public place, instead placed,
for now, in a far-removed room
to wait, to wake to dried tears;
she will not cry, or laugh, again,
pull faces, look for the moon,
take a selfie, be misunderstood,
she will not cry, or laugh, again.
Soldier in a field
He’s back in the village,
but alone in a field
where football posts
& dog walkers stand:
He can see the spire
in the electric light,
everything is brighter
this century later,
& closer –
the rush of cars,
unknown,
like his first met shell.
Wonder Years
No wonder our kids
look into their palms,
that well of distraction
in a real world of harm:
cupped as treasure,
almost delicate grips
around the devices
which free them from us;
we (the adults)
have written their code,
we are the fools
who offer no gold.
Hate
I am shackled by sunrise
which makes each waking
a slight inconvenience
my movement in dreams
are not as encumbered
by this symptom I hate
Endings
It requires great art
to fool your partner –
separation will not
come easy –
hate-forced tears
are not nearly enough
to grease the slips –
there to set loose
those thousand
or more men of war
E170219
Deer Leaps
An odd mound
in the lay by
with three kids
stood beside it
and a man
on his knees
inspecting the effect
of the deer collision
upon his car:
The untouchable
beast jerks
and two of the three
kids leap.
Sky lines
Bared, here in the sky,
as if upturned, roots
inverted, then left,
a myriad of black veins,
spot-clotted by lime leaves
and the left behind roosts
of the gone summer’s birds:
Like those casts they make
of ant colonies, dead-fused,
but these reached branches
are the uttermost fingers
of the stood still giants.
C-90
I ask her, Alexa,
for Prefab Sprout,
as I sip my coffee,
dipping in a playlist
first small-written
on C-90 inserts,
and turned to ten
on an Aiwa stereo,
then sounding
less compressed,
back then,
in those simpler sips.
Bonfires
They tripped the village
with explosions overhead,
tipped hip flasks, brimming,
and they smoked cigarettes:
Like wayward teenagers,
but with a greater rage,
the sisters from Sussex
resisted middle age.
She said: ‘There is one life,
but a single span!’
So they sucked on spirit
and exploded again.
Butterfly
I watched a butterfly die
after I had lifted it from
the laid-up timber store
where it had hid itself
from the last of summer,
four beats of its wings,
and then pinned still
by time’s invisible spike.
Remember
We eulogise the dead,
but not the living;
we recall past victims,
but not the suffering;
we celebrate history,
but not the present;
we are weighted by
a tradition of ignorance.
Evening Prayers
Across passing minutes
his foul envy simmered,
with another’s wide mouth
taking her down,
reducing the soft layers
(those he had watched,
so dutifully added),
a removal of fashions;
putting bare hands on,
lifting her to their God:
A few hours gone
of her agreed absence,
and he set to bed to weep.
Carebnb
My room is now
on Carebnb,
with lots to offer,
like a big TV,
breathtaking views
are on the list,
and you can see A&E
when the smog
finally lifts.
This Moment
Paul said that he thought
of Cornwall,
it was the sunlight
which set him;
the past arrived in bits,
unsweetened,
those that we trade
too freely
in our hourly estimates
of now;
with his recall
a shade took hold
and his being here,
lit, was gone.
Sunset
A thousand midges dither
over the backlit willow
like dust mites indoors,
but these caught between
the invisiblity made by the sun’s
low-lying positioning
and that cut-relief of shade
created by the hilltop villa
in this first phase of evening.
Authentic
I am no more,
I am this line,
You will take it
being
no longer mine,
now wired inside
your enquired mind:
You are no more:
You are my line.
Wine
The developed hills of Nerja
were not designed for me
(the me now rested halfway
on ascents and descents
in and out of the old town):
A quick trip to drink red wine
and pick at slapped down tapas,
as the silvered pensioners,
springing from bar to bar,
leave me blindly tapping.
The Mediterranean laps
on this unfinished coast
of collapsed kerbstones
and mismatched slopes,
Dali’s own theme park
of shadowy hazards.
And I make it back, alone,
with my whereabouts online,
via Google’s data pool,
for those I left at the bar
able to still pub crawl.
One Bedroom
It is another place,
but one you knew
in your previous life,
in the last century;
a shared knowledge
allows you back to it
after you took advice:
a lease signed with a kiss
Note
Yes, no stick. No. More pain:
But you did not ask, although I offer
full disclosure, a guided tour of this
ever so slight inconvenience:
Just above the statutory distances,
but they will shorten along with more
outward signs which should
reduce your doubt.
But for now I will dance off indicants
you’ll never see: I will dance with them
until I die.
Substitution
If there is an English word
for this heat please send it to me
along with recent pictures
of you being buffeted
there in the autumn break
as a male storm blows over
I am a short distance set
by an internet search and flights
I sit in a festooned bar
watching football from London
as my sweating groceries lounge
in ten cent shopping bags
and I am avoiding the hill
the heat and the inconvenience
of my body
Clouds
This nuclear sun over Nerja
seems to be a false detonation
just short of early November
sent with no sense of guilt
It sears the white on sunbeds
and encourages black beach vendors
equally fearful of seasonal clouds
like those dropped by atomic gods
experts at praying against shade:
stay caught on the peak of the hills
tied to the now-misted heights
by beaded string to rosemary.
Leading Men, by Judie
I dreamt again of men I’ve done,
of the actor who plays Mr Bond,
of that swearing Scot ‘Big Yin’,
of all those hunks, fat and thin.
I love a lovey thesp in trousers,
like Bill Nighy and Richard Briers.
I like ’em posh, a cultured swell,
but a bit of rough will perform as well.
Returning to rain
I have only seen rain here
once before
when hitch-hiking
across the north
I was on the run from banks
A night around Bilbao’s industry
on my journey east towards
the mountains’ clear attraction
of duty-free heights in Andorra
where gold trucks delivered cash
and the coffee was twice as much
But now I look out at the tarmac
and at men in their high-vis attire
me
with more baggage than last time
and heavier weights on my ankles
Back then I owed a thousand pounds
but now a hundred times more
which buys me a lounge pass
a front row seat on planes
and the back row comfort in cinemas.
Red Skies
If we stop to look up
at that vast underbelly
of the slow, the turned,
those Gods above us,
struck indolent, stuck,
and expect their help,
a thunderbolt, salt-pillars,
such types of intervention,
we will find no solution:
we are the only gods,
unbelievable as it is.
Sean H
Farewell Mr Hughes
there was a hint
under the crown
of unhappiness within
You joked that God
fucks us up
& he doesn’t exist-
in the same breath
Sideways
Again my eyes are sliced,
a vinegar-poured pain
which makes me weep
and stops me reading,
which takes me from being
my observant-self,
by forcing shut my eyelids,
to not see the discomfit.
Bus-olitics
Tories on Twitter
are all in the shit,
now split asunder
over Brexit,
their leader limping,
with one stood waiting
(sent overseas,
but now agitating),
then another appears
denying this news,
like crap omnibuses
they turn up in twos.
Cut
Here the grass cuttings rise
against the graveyard wall
that sloping mound
which will cover us all
when dug steam rises
routing a sour mash
of nature’s rotted flavours
I inhale sweetness
I Heard the News Today
Woke to the news,
quite the same:
#Iran, #abuse,
#Brexit again.
None of it changes
day-to-day,
even the weather
is the same.
Brex-git
Just bought a coffee off a #Brexit git
one of the Tories who doesn’t give a shit
‘If Corbyn wins it is ’72 again!‘
Alas by 2019 nowt ‘ll #Remain
The Lodger
He lay flat on his back,
jacket off, the worn soles
of his buffed brogues
almost rudely exposed,
any sign of breathing
invisible at the distance,
and my mother stood
at the kitchen window
Do you think he’s dead?
It must have been 1975,
and he was an old man
who was not known
to do such hippy stuff,
like lying on the lawn.
If it was ’76 then the heat
would have been the cause.
After that day Grandad wed
once more and moved out.
Mass Observation
I wake late, again,
seven-forty AM:
I learn a new word
(of the day):
‘Imprimatur’
and
I feel, almost,
a poem
coming on.
I drink tea, in bed,
as we discuss how much
this day will cost.
I read the news, in bed,
on my phone,
and then
I read out last night’s
poem.
Rees-Mogg, Again
Good grief we are in
a national state
about #Brexit
and our #NHS
Let’s give up moaning –
embrace the farce –
vote for Rees-Mogg
and live in the past
Reunited
This is Twitter,
it doesn’t do love,
140 characters
is not enough:
I’m going back
to Friends Reunited –
to hear more from folk
I’ve always hated.
Rees-Mogg, Again
Good grief we’re
in a national state
about #Brexit
& the #NHS.
Let’s give up moaning,
embrace the farce,
vote for Rees-Mogg
and live for the past.
I am the man
I sit empty,
drained,
syphoned off,
weighted,
strapped,
I have
had enough.
I will not remain
not on these terms
not with this pain,
which tips my words.
I am drugged by fatigue.
I am often confused.
I am the man
who will reduce.
Cable St.
Cable Street,
October ’36,
dignity remained
for those that stood;
can we line up
to stand again,
as our grandparents
did back then?
There defending
neighbours’ lives
from the threat
of the Right,
to stop, barricade,
with voices raised,
to blunt the
racists’ bayonets.
October ’17
A century of remembrance
but slipped over today
nervous shifts of stick into mud
The Right want a return
to Passchendaele’s blood
A late dragonfly buzzed
its barrel-blue hints
manic ahead in the dusk
A stuttering biplane
without one God to ask
I need a bench
as I cannot stand
even on this newly-laid route
Stamped
parade-hard paths
an old man’s bench will do
Theresa’s Lament
Sympathy,
Sympathy,
The Bastards
have it
in for me;
Men in blue ties,
repeating their
knotted lies.
Trust nobody,
especially your friends,
because ultimate power
ultimately ends.
BN01
I only know I am walking in Brighton
because the numbers 74 74 74
on taxi cabs semaphore the fact
that and the Number 24 is in club mode
It could so easily be east London’s
red bricks and lunatics
pumped bars
shops of tat and shops of coffee
with scooters outside McDonald’s
and pairs of staggerers off to shag
whilst round the back of the Co-op
people raid the big-mouth bins
looking for out-of-date two-for-ones
If I was younger
if I was single
only ifs
I would struggle less with urban stuff
which is Brighton’s after-dark equality
to every other smacked-in city
Steve Coogan Ate My Poetry
Thick, propped
in the black-slapped
under-belly
of Brighton’s Komedia,
for an evening
of Henry Normal
(other Northern Poets
are available):
I sit stool-high
(beer table handy),
an American asks me:
‘Is this guy funny?’
Before I respond
her English friend
offers explanation:
‘He’s friends
with Steve Coogan.’
Making Poetry, Because Causley Did
I am in the place of making poetry,
as Causley did, a revelation when
greengrocer-ed by school kids,
and then he described the act:
We will explode if its not written..
Appease the angel and the demons..
The poems have to be written..
Life goes on..
‘On Being Asked to Write a School Hymn,’
(this verse disturbs our tamest poet),
such creation was Causley’s response
to being exhausted, to being re-awakened,
daily re-set, after school, by the writer’s clock.
In 1982 Launceston appealed to me,
stone-faced before the town was laid,
found in that broken-back paperback ‘Collected.,’
which I stole from Surrey Libraries.
Now I pit my reducing self
into making poetry, which sits unread,
unpublished, not in bound paper,
re-edited only when I come across it:
I am making the words
to fit the verse of this hammered work,
but I use no blistering tools,
just the weight of big hits on tin ears.
[Poem #866]
#CPC17
Tossers, tossers,
tossers in suits,
groomed to an inch
of their Tory blue roots.
A lanyard, a sneer,
to let them in,
so the conference starts
and cock-sucking begins:
Motions are raised
in the near-empty hall,
as the screens are filled
by the faces of fools.
They bay for Boris,
pray to lose May,
pull knives out for Gove,
but no big beasts today.
They’ll ship in the blue rinses
on a new battle bus
this one will read:
‘You plebs are now fucked’.
[Poem 865]
Endavant
The same streets which I once took
with Kodachrome and pesetas
are now stolen by cruise line tourists
in digital edits of Catalan fist-fights,
of baton-crash-policing:
Here Spaniard cracks Spaniard
outside padlocked primary schools,
as Generation X rights are suspended,
here blood is the paper’s crossed mark.
[Poem 864]
Ms. Gyllenhaal
Aye, I would ask Maggie Gyllenhaal
to be my bride, with her feisty call,
and looseness of her expressive doe,
above, and under her doen breasts I’ll go:
but her new child meets, most devoutly,
so I’ll remain unfed, to lie quietly,
as my wife lambastes, half-heartedly,
my ask of Maggie? They both laugh at me.
[Poem #863]
The Mass of Men
Inspired by an interview with Stanley Kubrick by Eric Nordern for Playboy in 1968
The odoriferous sound
of others’ discomforts
may force to reduction
your gnawing intolerance,
but instead you must find
a sweet tone of acquittal
by listening much less
for their off-key approvals:
No more the simplified
repeal of nursed rhymes,
but a tune you’ll compose
when not feeling for lines:
Their trip on indifference,
when felled by jealousy
over others’ flat arias,
there you’ll find armouries;
strike this shone torch,
to guides with beams,
illuminate everything,
even old-echoed screams;
you’ll now light your voice,
here in the brightened throng,
to end at the same gate,
but with a much richer song.
[Poem #862]
Special Assistant
Special Assistance at an airport again,
no obvious symptoms above his pain;
minimal tremor, not dyskinetic,
a second class patient, almost pathetic.
‘Dad, can I ride on those cool little cars?’
‘No son, it’s just for the old and infirm.’
‘Dad, that man is the same age as you,
but he’s sat in one, so it can’t be true!’
‘Ah, some people are ill, but don’t look like it,
think yourself lucky that I am still fit!’
‘Dad, when you get ill..’
‘If, if, if!’
‘I’ll drive you everywhere, super-fast-quick!’
Loss
This dopaminergic
cell loss
in the substantia
nigra
of the basal
ganglia
will infect
more of us:
A relentless
condition
leading to
disability.
You did ask
what it is.
Oppugn
Spent,
an enured year off
for your partner’s slow death,
interrogated by a kid
about the remnants of life.
Our futures are schemed
by privateers,
those insurers will do well
in our twilight years.
They’ll suck on the dividends,
draw succus from flesh,
as our neighbours, our friends,
save hard for their death.
St. Catherine’s Sniff
I do not need to
Travel to California
To be struck by the low reek
From skunks,
Those striped creatures
Condemned by Jesuits as:
‘Not worthy to be the dogs of Pluto.’*
Here that crepuscular
Scavenger of the dusk
Lifts its too-proud tail
To squeeze
A malodorous attack
Upon us both:
‘The sin smelled by Saint Catherine
Must have had the same vile odor’**.
‘Hold your nose,’
I suggest to my wife,
But the foulness
Is already there,
Inside.
* **Thwaites, Reuben Gold, ed. (1633–1634). The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents. Travels and Explorations of the Jesuit Missionaries in New France 1610—1791. VI. Quebec.
Special Measures
The text you sent was brief
about that bastard
the man who is paid to stare
in teachers’ meetings
This is how they keep you
in your place
that senior leadership team
who throw daggers
To deal with it
you picture him squatting
over a hole in the ground
squit-struck
still staring
Of this Island
We were bound, secure,
tied to that wooden mast,
one made of good timber
imported from foreign states
across the Baltic Sea,
but then shipwrecked by others,
those more cunning sailors,
singers of the siren song,
those who pulled at the wheel
steering us towards hate
and lamentations,
those beef-witted blue jackets
who, even now, fly lies
like flags, their uniform message:
You are running into danger,
that refrain as they take
us to our dishonourable exile.
The English Grandfather in Israel
That soft crash of the blown clothes horse
lifted me, slowly, from the sprung chair
to put me, briefly, to laundry work
to fix, to lock, and to re-dress the frame
found flat with unfurled tablecloths,
which the wind had upgraded to sails:
I stood the fallen hanger against the other,
that second still-stood skeleton for linen,
from which my brother’s old shorts hung,
now washed, to be worn, with amusement,
by his still-living wife: ‘And they object,’
was her laughing remark.
I see him in that same sprung chair,
with a noxious fag burning, shouting ‘Ma?’,
meaning ‘What?’ Then ‘Ken, Ruti’ – ‘Yes..’
His long crossed legs span the space
as his children, now grown, place their kids
on the tiled terrace, the shade he once built,
where the babies crawl and toddlers dance
below their invisible grandfather’s smoke,
that Englishman who has never left this place.
Crow Flies
I thought I caught
your high laughter
above the babble
of the rear passengers,
those still seat-searching,
that loud release
of your soul through
the packed plane,
but you were fifty miles
as the black crow flies
back in Sussex,
strutting, teaching kids
the art of slow cooking,
whilst our youngest
was absent, next to me.
We circled above you
and then turned east,
and the tight discomforts
of modern air travel
meant I was cut off
by the rule of law,
subject to sky marshals
and air hostesses,
the containerised whims
when being removed,
a divorce, felt as tightness
from the buckle and belt,
which have to be worn
due to the turbulence,
we could drop from the sky.
Crow Flies
I thought I caught your high laughter
above the babble of the rear passengers,
those still seat-searching,
that loud release of your soul through
the packed plane, but you were fifty miles
as the black crow flies
back in Sussex, strutting, teaching kids
the art of slow cooking, whilst our youngest
was absent, next to me.
We circled above you and then turned east,
and the tight discomforts of modern air travel
meant I was cut off
by the rule of law, subject to sky marshals
and air hostesses, the containerised whims
when being removed,
a divorce, felt as a tightness from the buckle and belt,
which have to be worn due to the turbulence,
we could drop from the sky.
Black Flags
We aim to steal a shadow
on the blasted sand
of Palmachim Beach,
as we step on seashells
which, for one or two breaths,
threaten to slice
our sand-grabbed soles,
but unlike the bared
honesty of others’ flesh
they hardly achieve offense:
Those barrelled chests
and guts would never grace
the fussy covers of Vogue.
With the quick whistle blow,
and planting of black flags,
the surf is taken from bathers
by overly-fit young men,
bare but for matched shorts,
that uniform of angels,
who sit high in their tower,
above us wave-cut mortals.
The Path in Israel
I am back here, with my stick,
on that red powder paint path
down to the cemetery,
but the route is now blocked
by the bare bone homes
being built for kibuutniks
in this sweating country
of uncomfortable borders.
Ruti and I stop, for me,
for shade in the plantation,
at a table, daubed in kids’ paint,
a cake sale of blues and pinks:
A minute later my sister-in-law
is at work in the ploughed field,
gathering those missed shells
of last week’s peanut crop,
and she returns, weighted,
off centre, under Bruegel’s
heroic ordinariness,
pulled down, but undaunted.
There she cries as I read aloud
yesterday’s words on my phone,
but today’s unpainted lines
will not capture this shade of grief.
New Year’s Eve, Netzer Sereni
The heat drove us up to the pool,
that once military water tank,
now a five lane chlorine speedway
of hairy-backed kibbutzniks and kids:
The pool guard knew of my brother,
that ghost, here, who walks before me,
from the houses and to the store,
and down there in the cow sheds
which we had toured in the morning
with the nechadim he had never met,
his childrens’ own children,
his reduced obligations, taken by death:
And it could have been me again
walking alongside his ‘Christ! Fuck!’
expletives which his descendants repeated
under strong accents, an exaggerant:
We nine formed a ragged convoy
of buggies, a dog, and long shadows:
a unique celebration of his life
on this New Year’s Eve in September.
EasyJet to Tel Aviv
The red-haired air hostess,
pinned by pearls and ponytail,
worked the too busy aisle,
shunting the rattled trolley
as the Orthodox Jews
curled each payot dutifully,
before they gathered
for prayers over Europe:
Her ochre beauty bobbed
between the brushed hats
of the swaying gentlemen,
her colouring broke hearts.
Return
In The Griffin the staff tossed a ball
across our route to the empty bar,
girl-to-boy, boy-to-girl, and back –
a four-way playground match
of childish throw and catch:
The landlord muttered an apology
as their game was put away,
and from adjoining rooms came
the sound of lunch being scraped,
and of coffees replacing plates.
We then found ourselves alone,
only gin and beer to accompany us
in our own pub game of catch up,
our days apart were recalled
as we tried not to drop our ball.
Early in Uckfield
So, they were gathered early
in their Sunday best
for a christening,
and she said that kids
can be so irritating,
as she sipped coffee in Costa,
and then she complains
about the churches
which let children run wild:
He asks if you can rip a new fiver,
and the man with the plummy voice
jokes about fake Euros.
Then an American accent plays
within this cobbled troop,
with his knowledge of money,
as one of their kids, jacketed,
wanders among the group,
with a straw, Irritating them all.
Harry Dean Stanton
Paris, Texas, and H.D.S.,
add a neck slide Ry Cooder,
his strangled introduction,
over a peep show recall,
and Harry’s easy fitted drawl –
once told to let the costume act.
With the guitar’s skewered groans,
‘Yes they lived in a trailer home’,
his back, as directed, was turned.
He then shuffled off,
through the dust,
after a mother and son.
Stephen Fry and I
I knew I was senescent
when I matched Stephen Fry,
in corduroy and moleskin,
timeless like our lies,
all hung too loose
off our post-fifty frames,
but masking quite nicely
the weight we have gained:
Our jackets flap wildly
above the cut of our jib,
a good length to hide
the pee which we drip.
Trust Nobody
All politicians are liars,
the priests are hypocrites,
those estate agents sell boxes
to meet their sales targets.
Some doctors can’t be trusted,
as your dentist drills for gold,
the copper’s lot is valuable,
cells ready to be sold.
Kick the state-aid scroungers,
the devious thieves of pounds,
rip those leeches from the books
and claim the moral ground.
Austerity and denial
are the liars’ superior sneer,
as our kids fare worse than us
with their future full of fear.
Take on the Tory values
of reduction and rebuke,
give those holders of our fate
a grip they’ll not reduce:
And in a year we will hear
the sound of ten years gone,
the birthing screams of Austerity
will be the loudest ones.
As our kids reboot this island,
set adrift by Brexiteers,
they may ask of us, the voters,
how did it come to this?
In Woods Above Town
Sunlight broke ahead of us
snapping back the branches,
I wanted to gather them,
to take them on my camera,
which was then the backdrop
to your capture of my rights:
I give you an open license
to use me as you like.
Trafalgar
In all
22 nationalities
under 1 flag,
A British Victory
won
by foreign lads.
London
I looked up
and suddenly it was London,
the one of terraces
showing their scabby arses
to us,
the London of bent sheds
and blown clothes horses,
of propped bikes and kids’ toys,
and down in the ballast
the litter of a thousand takeaways,
whilst in the distance,
above the patchwork of tiles,
sit the erect spires and dreams
of the ever-dead empire architects,
when God and the trains ran on time.
Eating Out
He sits opposite me
in MacDonald’s,
my guest, for a moment,
in his curled hands
he holds this country’s
recent history,
not a minimum wage,
no longer the gun
for that war.
We could be anywhere
in this fast forward world,
almost discarded.
The Hunt
Hunt down the ragged fox,
reduce our long-earned rights,
set dogs upon the immigrants,
‘claimants should be denied‘:
Praise The Mail’s honesty,
share their Photoshop of lies,
become a born-again Christian,
to fight off Islamic cries.
Bitch about striking workers,
and ‘those sponging socialists‘,
stand up for the landed wankers
whose shined brogues you long to kiss:
Now you are a Conservative,
voting for returning to the past,
you will fight them on the beaches
once our borders return to France.
And as your vast shares in disaster
push tides and break up skies,
your pension fund will collapse,
and your children will ask you: ‘Why?’
The Pebble
It was no bigger
than the end of her finger,
and was almost lost
in my unwritten hand:
that half of a pebble,
broke at some time,
the Auschwitz stone,
taken,
another war crime.
On Duke St.
As I left the car park
men hunkered down,
in stain-greyed sleeping bags
they bartered their pains:
I passed a young bride
outside a loud bar,
she was laughing
unaware of the rain:
I found Duke Street,
there for a book launch,
a drink in a record store,
to tip my glass to his.
On my way to the bank
the black sky collapsed,
and on my return
I gave the bride a soft kiss.
Gardener
This subdued back garden
resists the thrust of growth
now the month has an ‘r’,
its slow dew will not shift
until that letter is removed
by the turn of the earth:
my grandfather is no longer there
with his shined boot pressed
upon the shoulder of his spade,
in all weathers, turning the earth.
Waking
This expected day is let in,
scratched at, half-awake,
as the mis-matched curtains
are tardily pulled apart,
to reveal, as pre-supposed,
an unwritten plaque of clouds:
Feet on boards and clicked doors
posit the quick-slow presence
of other family members
in this ritualised dance of risings:
As ever, I am unready for the day,
with no routine, as of now.
MIKE BELL | 10,000 Poems 