That first day back
of rush-and-forgottens
as this holiday home
is squeezed of teens
and returns to its role
of roof and routine
for another term,
and outside The Unruly
form pairs and packs
on the narrow paths,
back to scattering
their breakfast crumbs
up the hill to school.
And then just the dog.
Sussex, September
The unstable season
of rookies, fireworks,
and Sussex smugglers
has set off in Uckfield
under a sluggish cloud
of torch-raised smoke,
in imbricated ranks
to the drums and hollers
of the oddly-uniformed,
dressed for rememberance
and celebration of times
when Sussex mattered:
then the littering residue
of this lit revolution
is ineptly swept aside
by shopkeepers fighting
the wind-tipped slews
of firecracker paper.
Stick Note
Without my stick I’m ‘looking so well’,
it would appear to those who can tell:
As this imprisonment crafts weighty plans,
my exeunt is writ by another’s hand.
That hand which I use to place the stick
is a hand which fails this conjuring trick,
in a wrapper of skin, flesh and bone,
the pain is unseen, the strikes full-blown.
Note to Self
I am becoming
that old chatty man,
looking out for
shared interests,
and engaging
with dogs and kids,
boring the parents
with my apocryphal
announcements:
note to self,
shut up.
Kiss
As our mouths
toured together
in that slow
exploration
I found my heaven.
Cruise
Marriages cruise
across my view,
those small boats
of floating odedience,
taking occasional
below-the-line knocks:
I am told, again,
about others’ sinking,
I will keep on baling.
Dry Eyes
Something has set fire
to my right iris,
a voodoo needle
pricks my best eye,
and it weeps
before the pain,
really skewers,
an inflammation,
and I rub, rub, rub
and bawl without sobs,
at this inconvenience
of my mild disease.
Hesperidium
For JD & GD
Here, in the sun,
I tally their fruit,
counting the oranges,
among a thousand leaves,
as my cup of tea cools:
I reach into the tree
and pull, with twists,
a dozen, perhaps,
which are set to gravity’s
hard rule, magnetised
in the white fruit bowl.
Under the Flight Path
I am hemmed in
by rhododendrons
and poor-fruit
rusty brambles,
here part-hidden,
with lost headstones,
by bleached grasses,
I am waiting for you
(sat on Sarah Newlyn’s
berry-stained bench,
with my cooled coffee
and folded ‘paper),
under a flight path,
itself dubbed over
by the bubbled
squabble of birds
in the thickets
and tremoring hedges,
as loud crows plot
the distances in air
with their deep caws
and dark eyes,
their navigation
is fixed by sight.
And you set down
beside me, beautiful,
with your return,
into our hidden hold.
A Village Called Ugly
Welcome to Ugly
your new home
in the world,
Daddy isn’t here
for his two
favourite girls,
and he never
hugs mummy,
or kisses her lips:
Ugly, the village,
in which you now live;
it sneers and snaps
on the rumour mill,
marriages kept alive
just for the kill:
welcome to Ugly
a hamlet of hate,
if you haven’t
got perfect
then it’s far too late.
08:59
In my fake Eames chair,
in the new bay window,
I spend fifteen minutes
of this Sunday morning
reading ‘The Observer’
from three weeks ago,
and, by avoiding the news,
find the world was,
back then,
very much the same
as the world today,
like the to-and-fros
outside the bay window.
M.D.
Behind my eyes,
becalmed in bed,
as the rooks clatter
in the lime trees,
and the last barks
of a dog trails off,
I am in the entrepot
of my memories,
picking at the skin
of scar tissue love,
I peel back time,
to make the past bleed
with the lifting
of rough scabs,
and with this peeling
comes a sore wound
which will not heal,
because I scratch it
into an angry mess:
her mark remains.
Bikini
It was a photo
(they no longer
curl or crack,
these moments
captured, now
kept immaculate).
focus-wrong,
but I knew,
recognising your
bared bones,
and in that posture,
comport
from below,
I knew that moment,
which was yours,
chromatic.
Bikini
It was a photo
[they no longer
curl or crack,
these moments
captured – now
kept immaculate] –
focus-wrong –
but I knew –
recognising your
bared bones –
and in that posture
odd-comport
from below –
I knew that moment –
which was yours –
ugly – chromatic
A View
The more we say
the less we do,
we read the news,
reading nothing new.
We type out love,
but feel no lust,
we trip in potholes
on the paths of dust.
We stand in the sea
as the waves repeat,
and look at the sky
under which we weep.
Today
A small calendar reminder
in the corner of my screen,
‘DAD DIED 1987’;
so it’s been three decades
since his ashes were tipped
by an unknown R.N. padre
at Spitshead, Portsmouth:
There a dying empire’s
grey fleet anchored in ’53,
with my father aboard.
His page will be turned
in that memorial chapel,
which he visits, briefly,
once a year, for a day,
back where he escaped
from his own conflicts.
Screw Fixed
Car park chaos
outside Green’s DIY
as estate cars reverse
their boots piled high
In aisles screwed dads
wander the store
this Saturday a test
of their handyman score
They’ll drive home fleeced
having spent fifty quid
the shelf won’t hang
‘cos DIY-dad did
Box Set
Red wine split,
choose box-sets
on Netflix,
these drugs
will numb us
throughout
Brexit,
along with
Facebook’s
diatribes and trends,
we’ll sit
before screens
until the
very
end.
The Wedding Reception
Today, the re-climbed height
of another British summer,
when buffed-up cars are steered
on a weeded gravel drive,
slow on that unmade road,
to park at a once-grand house,
where wedding guests gather,
those love-hungry witnesses
at the dressed-up ceremony:
Ribbons, flowers and cloth
hide all manner of hires,
including those who serve
the seated, the laughing
and the old, and still so unsure:
The band’s equipment, that wire-fest,
has been readied for later,
for phone-captured errors,
which will be viewed across Facebook,
but not included in the bound album:
The newly-married, etiquette-dressed,
are set on display, arrayed for viewing,
itching under garter and wing collar.
Twitter for Dummies
Forget them kids,
your latest results,
your failures are
the teachers’ fault.
Then finger the poor,
those necessitous –
the lazy grazers,
who benefit off us:
Shoot from the hip
your spiteful aims,
we are all makers
in this self-made game.
Bring your fury
upon others’ beliefs,
that hateful tweet
is your true motif.
No More
My stiff hands
no more
give the grip
I once held –
my legs
no more
step well
in this world –
my mind
no more,
is to be left
to rest –
this body
no more
is the one
I can trust.
E120219
The Pig & Butcher
Friday lunchtime, slumped, re-arrives,
a shuffle of septuagenarians departs
as I place my pint, and my backside,
at a mat-free table in the lounge bar:
Two regulars take on slack scampi,
and one more pint for the road;
the barmaid’s sweet pull is too great,
so they stall, longer, the return to work,
and I sit, supping at the old familiarity,
that which Wetherspoons cannot fake,
also poorly replicated in English Pubs
in New York, and pop-up Asian cities:
You cannot make these spills and stains,
the rough wearing, long-worn by the repeat
of orders, of rounds, of social patterns:
They will never decode this pub’s DNA.
My Lady of Good Encounter
Benoite, you are not, but still a reader of hearts,
a live angel on Earth, but not the saint of Laus:
that girl watched Christ, she witnessed his passion,
and I watched you undress with stiff absolution:
The lace-pull of perfume took her down from the hill,
whilst here in your thighs I drank from a well:
I saw her people slow-mo into prayer,
the rest fell in agony in that melee.
Benoite was sent to the Valley of Kilns,
by a dark-skinned Saint who worked those hills,
and I fall to sleep on your flattened breast,
as you turn your head and see your own Benoite.
Foregrounding
You are
that small detail
which a true artist
includes
in his landscape
in his space
in his brush’s
unlettered exposit
Late
I cannot suppress the yawns
of this drawn-down evening;
earlier she re-scaled a recipe
into four guest-sized dishes,
adding a handful of dark olives:
We were sat, blindfold-drunk,
in alcohol’s sway of puked lies,
arguing against the concrete
piles of objectionable opinions –
truth still born by boozed cecity.
We the Grey-haired
We grey-haired
but fashion-aware
men of a certain age
Us would-be punks
once heavy-coated
liking Echo
or an almost quiffed
Morrissey lover –
or confirmed hater
We still tug our loneliness
still unsure about stuff –
but not music
just politics and love
Still trying on fashion
and making mistakes
E010619
Summer Night
Rolled under the duvet
in breath-heated twists,
where is my ending
in this beginning?
In the sweat-oiled turns
of semen’s last grease,
we are those creatures
which creep in the heat.
Brighton 0 – Man City 2
Alan-the-postie
predicted a big loss,
so two against,
not so badly off:
Had we won 3-0
we’d be top,
instead we sit equal
to Chelsea’s flop.
Rising
Google is Evil,
along with Facebook,
Instagram will f*ck you,
and Twitter will look:
The next revolution
will burn in the States,
where the off-lines will rise
against those engaged:
Removed from utility,
sidelined, betrayed,
armed against violence,
their violence they’ll raise.
Rainy Days
The commuter drag
through Haywards Heath,
nose-to-tail,
we queue before death,
we the cocooned
in our leases of life,
counting the weeks
until the holiday ride:
Succour found in Waitrose,
and down at Screwfix,
then a fantastic night –
thanks to Netflix.
I will wake in darkness,
and return home the same,
my weekends are spent
to validate this pain:
I squander my fortune
before I no longer work,
I save nothing for old age,
my pension’s a joke.
Mr. Parkinson
This disease, he is winning
when I retreat to sleep,
when I retreat to sleep,
I am numbed and reduced
by his creeping fatigue,
he curls me mid-day,
moving me sour to bed,
making me invisible
to those who are left:
this is my rehearsal
for a decade hence,
we are better at living
when we fear being dead.
Breaks
Our summer holidays
were always ‘at’ Easter,
‘cos that time of year
it’s so much cheaper,
even after a pay rise
for the-men-with-truncheons,
still that week,
but upgraded to Butlin’s:
We went self-catering
at Bognor Regis,
where Dad smuggled in
my eldest brother
through the camp’s
padlocked gates,
Chris was concealed
under oil-soaked sheets.
I sketched seagulls,
the only visible detail
in that thin view
of endless shingle.
Forty years later
and another vacation,
off to Devon,
a last-minute stay-cation,
a holiday to engender
family joy,
the gulls now snap-chatted
by our youngest boy.
My Apprenticeships
Morrissey, Cave,
and Leonard Cohen,
I played, and played,
Cash’s country songs:
Later Heaney’s
and Walcott’s islands,
were my stations,
instruments silenced:
My craft continues,
in the voice of men,
this voice is sonorous,
as taught by them.
East
I rest at her table,
she dances out East,
I turn the virgin pages
which she leaves me
to read,
this she has chosen,
to touch me, again,
I am left here
in her empty domain:
a last gripped kiss,
and clear instructions,
but I am no good
as a good companion.
Walking too fast
He slow-sputters back
as his day is reduced,
but she won’t agree
his speed is removed,
because it is easier
to stride at her pace,
and when she slows
to show no grace:
all empathy removed
by her barbed remarks,
‘Of course you’re hot
in all those layers’;
and he’ll shuffle home
not wanting that bed,
because their marriage
is long-slow spent.
Diorama
I stood outside the cabinet
and Chi Chi was still looking
through dark glass eyes,
as she gorged on bamboo,
in her reduced diorama,
another box – a confined story
for us visitors to feed upon.
Freelancers
We lay spooned,
upstairs, under the duvet
for half an afternoon,
as Ian Macmillan
ran to time
on Radio Four:
The lowered summer sky
dumped an excuse,
an inch in an hour,
and other weather news,
giving us
a lame excuse.
Belief
I do not believe
in anything I read,
apart from the stutters
of rhymed poetry:
I will kneel down
to fix the any-things,
I know kneeling’s best done
beneath un-wed kings,
under His patronage,
under His state,
because Royalty commands
us plebs to wait:
Ladies, crowns, patronage
and the fine arts,
we queue in His corridor
to win His blue heart:
I will piss up my shed,
the oak-clad exterior,
and wish to piss
on the Royal posterior:
Believe nothing, son,
instead recall,
your grandfather died,
and your father was a fool:
Dig deep into ancestry,
for a small fee,
there you will find
no royalty.
Marching Season
Mass demonstrations
will fall out of favour,
now we have Facebook,
the friends’ agitator:
Remove your cagoules,
no flasks of cold soup,
we’ll duck into Costa
to rage at YouTube.
The Sex Tourist
His urges worked to remove him
for a month to another place,
to lie with girls in hotel rooms,
face down in their paid-up disgrace:
He breakfasted after lunchtime,
smoking packs of duty free:
the afternoons sweated in bed,
soaked in counterfeit Jack D.
Each night was a dark playground,
of bars, birds, and no time for drouth,
he spat his vestige of manners,
with his foul-spun English mouth:
Then he woke in a concrete room,
dried piss as his cold mattress:
“The sex wasn’t ever that good,
not worth the spunked-up cash”.
Ballon
Your beauty is to float
above his weight of hate,
it’s how you deal with love,
in your well-practiced way,
which is a crafted dance,
on stage, a casting off,
no half-ballon d’essai,
this is the way with loss:
every marriage dies,
a slow death kills us all,
some sleep with the dead,
but you are not that cruel.
You will rise above the stage,
the ballon, made yours alone,
you will lift, without a man,
because all men will disown,
and you can see from there
the distance others miss,
above the weight of love,
not floored by one long kiss.
You will be the one
who will fly and never fall,
because you are lifted high
and will rise above us all.
The Ghost
We are sat drinking
‘Old Speckled Hen’,
out of cooled tins
in the summer’s cold rain,
we talk of the last house,
a ghost we recalled,
when we each met
the ghost in the hall.
Tales
This crumbling man
has let you down,
with shortened pulls
of heavy breaths,
a broken pledge
to set high your crown,
instead, disgraced,
he failed that test:
These rough-made men,
reset as fools,
by that male God,
who knows no shame,
who ‘out of love’
re-shaped their fear,
because of Him
I should lose love’s claims.
That Nice Man
Jacob Rees-Mog
is a dangerous man,
playing the gent
to fool your Gran:
‘He’s a lovely chap,
so very old-fashioned!
With traditional values
long lost in England.’
Trust a politician
who lives in the past?
The past was shit
for the working class.
Demulcent
Here her brushed skin rises
over her freckled shoulders,
and then slopes away to meet
her curved spine’s cobbled path:
Here I am led, by my cock’s enquiry,
to her hips, the pale dune profiles,
where I slow-climb, but am dragged
down, again, by my stiffening hands:
Here I part and knead her to yielding,
where, by the slightest of timed turns,
I set her tide’s clock, with twist of fingers,
forcing on her – a small death by drowning.
Rock Pools
In these recharged times
of eye-sucking screens
the two boys still felt
the pull to cold rock pools,
where Fred wrist-delved,
turning possible pebbles,
but Wilf was slowed, upset
by his so-aching tooth:
Me, their photographer,
was quite unsteady,
cautious over rough slices
of tripped possibilities,
and my parental recall
of other times, of deep cuts,
but still they climbed, hunters,
stalking in their innocence
of that shorter progression,
just before their steps lengthen,
when they will stumble
with the strides into ageing.
But now they leapt from high
to scribe in sand their names,
a stick scrape, like us before,
to be tide-washed from the shore.
Exeter St Davids (sic)
Is there nothing more
depressingly British
than pacing wet stretches
of railway platforms?
Laid grey under long runs
of iron-beamed roofing,
wlith those fret cut fascias
– hundreds of vertical slats,
above us, there, suspended,
‘Up’ and ‘Down’ indicators,
all part of the railway’s
once national language,
which forced the idea of time,
across the country, to be fixed
against the nature of space;
hours regulated, queued by law,
and compartmentalized by class
inside the carriages,
a big difference in leg space,
but all on a standard gauge.
Static
The curtains swing,
lifting in and out
of the single-glazed
breeze-wide windows,
through which
the gulls’ cries circle,
in turned over levels
of kid-like bickering:
The slim walls disclose
coughs and mumbles
of our own children,
and we are drape-blind
in the box bedroom
of this plot-placed
static tin caravan,
which rattles now,
as the sky lowers
with holiday-grey rain,
and the wet suits
are rinsed again,
but the view is great,
whilst we both lie,
seeing the world
through poor WiFi.
On the Beach
She inserted pink earbuds
whilst lain out on the beach,
a solution to drown seagulls,
and other such wild screeches,
like those howls whipped up by
huge ice-cream-now-demands,
fought off by over-tired parents,
complaints of the young and old:
Immobile, eyes shut, sight cut,
with that downloaded programme
off Radio Four, for such times,
and now, she was kissed by the breeze,
and the soft attrition of blown sand,
she was no longer on the beach.
Holiday Traffic
Keep two chevrons apart
is the roadside command
for some of the foot-down way
as we cruise boot-squeezed
with brake lights popping
on this – the first Monday
of the summer holidays
We are driven just one stop
for service station Starbucks
The boys danced to muzak
in the hourly-mopped loos
as we refilled with tea and latte
Then back to the rushed tarmac
and the dash-dash-dash of lanes
to hurtle again through the flume
towards a static caravan in Devon
E020619
The Free Ride
Here, for a second time
in our relationship
(should that be ‘only’?)
I wait in a rain-spat car,
now on the wrong side
of a hand-braked midnight,
expecting you, please soon,
to re-surface from a night
of red wine, gin and fags,
in this town of staggerers,
shed-sheltered faggers,
last-bus-to-Ringmer-takers,
on this dark street of
shouts-from-around-about,
but you do not answer me,
my repeated calls and texts,
and it will be, later, much later
a simple miscommunication
writ by your right to escape.
Reductions
You are the slightest
of persons
who perches,
weightless,
with your constant
lightness,
which lifts me too:
I am reduced
when locked to you.
Counting the Miles
That intermit of the storm,
when the lightening is charged
before the next hurl from God,
and his voice booms over us
commanding the flash-flood
upon us: we still cower, primal,
reduced to cave-dwellers
under our awe of the unknown:
So do not consider the fears,
as we teach ourselves to remain
in the moment, dread nothing,
do not fight, do not flight.
At the peak they made love,
with her bent over the windowsill,
run into from behind,
the storm was then earthed.
Plans
Tomorrow I do nothing,
therefore I drink,
and flood this vacuum –
the emptied-admits,
those stumbled paces,
not alcohol’s stab,
because my body
is a diseased quick-grab:
so steady me onwards,
point me uphill,
time my ascent
and flatten this thrill.
The Prince
I am the Bastard Prince
with my mounted portrait
showing me at my worst
as an ugly creature of spite
caught in wedded anger
and then openly exhibited
by the keen female artist,
she the re-commissioned,
with her de-construct of love,
being the all-seeing critic,
captured by what she can admit
in this oversized oil portrait.
I am the Bastard Prince.
The Present
This moment, at ten-thirty,
his present is wrapped,
and I am sat sweating,
bloated after breakfast,
me feeling slowed, heavy,
the grain turns inside,
and to now head back
to hand-deliver the card
and a paperback copy
of ‘When Breath Becomes Air’
for this friend, an occasional
husband to a dying widow:
Birthdays push us closer.
The Swimmers
At Temple Grove they emerged
in their towel-wrapped attire,
a mother, maybe, and her daughter,
in spot colours, those of rich cottons,
lifting them in the gloomy outfield
as they placed white feet on grass,
in that tiptoe way we all have to
when barefoot in summer;
as they dripped pond water,
and held themselves from shivers,
we spectators for the ball game
wondered at their wild pleasure.
U-11 Cricket
Talk of H.M. the Queen
in the cricket pavilion,
of immigration controls
and of ‘darkie millions’,
‘C*nts can’t speak English,
they take our jobs’,
as the under-elevens
are wicket-robbed:
They teach the youth well
to play the bat straight,
to detest Johnny Foreigner,
because ‘whites are great’.
Doctor Who?
The new Doctor Who
is a female being,
not a Troughton or Baker,
but a girl of a thing;
the thirteenth Lord
is now a Time Lady,
hurrah for The Doctor,
and her bisexuality.
Church Bells
I asked if you wanted
to stay married to me,
a repeated proposal,
which, for some, is love
being vow-reinforced
in a reprised performance,
but for me it was almost
rhetorical, almost answered
as you let it ring over us,
without an answered peal.
And now I ask, again.
The Ending
They gather, again,
after an endless week
of slow commutes
and old complaints,
about train operators
and these long dog days,
but tonight, all together,
returned to the village,
at the cricket ground,
propped on folding chairs,
or in heel-rocked groups,
gripping their quick pint,
and here too those
time-battered wives,
the stay-behinds,
who attempt to hide
their underlined eyes
behind bag-sized
designer sunglasses:
Here, outscoring,
by the pint-poured pavilion,
they size up the weekend
and, again, get slightly pissed
before they return,
at dusk, with burnt-out kids,
to their pleasure domes,
still on loan, as is the car,
and all that they know.
Freelance
This quiescent night
is my daytime of no fools,
no calls, no unread emails,
no uploaded updates,
or delaying indecisions
about the final design,
which should be mine,
but is there to adjust
in other distant placed,
delayed, latte-meetings:
Shift an inch, or more,
back again, to the left!
The client’s always right.
Sick Note
No, I do not regularly
commute away to work,
or to pushy schools,
or sumptuous trips alone,
and there meet others,
and interact, deeply,
with so many people
in an assortment of places,
for assorted pleasures:
So I badly escape,
to the same rough places,
for a coffee, or beer,
and then slowly return,
usually at the call
of my freelance work.
I am always here. Alone.
The Tower
Shaken in six mill’ sieves,
for identification purposes,
not through the eye of a needle,
each remnant of life, of bone,
of those residents still there,
is trowelled, gathered, bagged,
by kneeling men and women;
detectives in the cooled tower,
still finding those, the remained.
We
We, the now-diagnosed,
may be the dead men walking,
slapped, strapped,
labelled as a bit too different
by the uncovered disconnects,
which, compounded by stress,
and our near normal efforts
to be the original self, to be us,
may reduce our ability to fly,
but that doesn’t stop us trying:
we will pull on our waxed wings,
lift from the cloying labyrinth,
and shake off the weight of hubris,
to take self-esteem back, yet again.
Under the Woods
Among the ragged shadows
of the canopy umbrella,
cut by the leaf-shaped gobos,
here that broken sunlight will die,
increasing neck-breaking risks
as I avoid tripping up on
worn rib roots along the paths:
here the blackbird hacks
with its cut-cut-cut alarm call,
and my rescue is almost assured.
Sunday
The backlit curtain hesitates
across the open window,
with the inhale, exhale, breeze
it moves on the unintended axis,
creating a dragged complaint
of man-made materials,
an almost-radio sound effect –
of the turn of Edwardian ladies,
or the inflate of doldrum sails,
perhaps a man’s last breaths,
and here I will lie, behind them,
putting off the shift called Sunday.
Metamerism
God, how my reckoning
is adjusted, discoloured
by the darkened shades
in my heart, so judgements
rub, like an ill-fitting shoe,
slow, limped, true damage
unknown, until it is viewed.
Beddingham Landfill
The picked at scab
scarring above Beddingham,
containing such poisons,
rain-washed infections,
which leach, for this ever,
into the tide-turned Ouse.
Up there they buried
square metres of radiation,
and household stuff,
tonnes of weighty nappies,
and other tipped shit
of our modern lives
into that former chalk pit:
High open-heart surgery
on the South Downs,
that gull-dived littering,
best buried and grassed over;
invite butterflies.
PM
A duvet afternoon
of malice aforethought,
of sheet-knotted limbs,
lined-faces contorted:
Here, across the bed,
of rolled propositions,
they kissed, they fingered,
blowing out wishes.
Do
Do not look closely
at your borrowed life,
leave deepest scrutiny
to your surgeon’s knife,
look away from the glass
of aphotic reflections,
re-route your path
in other directions,
sleep behind curtains,
part-drawn for dawn,
rise this next day,
deny one more gone.
I Wake
Sleep is that warm,
welcoming state,
through which I wander
in painless peace,
distances across
my long-slept skull
is that other place
where I run and fly,
that land of otherness,
of time, of love,
the expanse, the place,
I will leave behind.
The Patio
The level is still wrong
because the land slopes,
and I used my tired eyes,
not the bubble’s advice
to set out a dozen slabs
around the cut back tree:
here another shoddy job
of hard lifting and laying
an imperfect surface,
a memorial, my monument.
The Path
I kicked at the summer
along the bosky path,
punting insects and scents
with each measured step
through spiteful nettles
and over-reaching weeds:
I was forced to dip, to avoid,
the slap of weighted branches,
pulled apart by my leading
companion, let to whiplash,
without malice, on this walk
through the dense end of June,
where the nature of things
had been thickened by rain:
Here the blackberry blossom
advertised an abundant crop,
here the small dog had to leap
to make her own way through
the viscid grip of grasses
on the rooted public path
of stings and itchy skin.
Smeuse
Smeuse – that low-run gap
where the wild things are –
under Sussex-set hedges –
but now a reduced tag –
worn out – as are the places
without any lasting labels –
things will no longer exist
My kids already fail to name
occasional birds or trees
and without nature’s
passed down placeholders
a creation disappears –
until we chance to recapture
the nameless creatures
and pass the landscape on
with their ancient titles
and collected echoes
of common-place parlance
We may lose them all –
no word for ‘sparrow‘?
Then no sparrows are left
E0201219
Waking Friday
A lightness emulsions
this house,
of each room
I move through,
before any movement
from beds, from others,
under these cat slides
and pitch of tiles,
and the moment dries
to now.
Sheffield Park, East Sussex
The wide open workshop
was beyond my education
(three terms of metalwork
forty years earlier was never
any kind of apprenticeship).
Greased tools, backs bent to it,
at components, stripped elements
of dead men engineering,
here exhumed across scale layouts
of locomotive parts, almost lost
until men in overalls, and tilted caps,
pulled on levers and tools to fix
the lines from one shut station
to another, suffered, under Beeching:
to get the steam into the pistons:
Our kids milled, kicked at ballast,
and were more intrigued by a ring tone
than the scale of rod-shoved wheels,
and steps so high, halfway to Heaven,
for these men, so we left the engine shed.
10 More
Lead me upright
to the ageds’ bus pass,
and OAP discounts
in Clinton Cards,
let me put on
my slippers myself,
at sixty still able
to wipe my own arse.
The Poll
That drab civic room,
where we had voted,
here the Parkinson’s
support group met:
a chesty (badged) lady
offered us coffee,
pamphlets were handed,
flicked, to be kept.
A clipboard was passed,
to take names and numbers,
and to indicate interest
in meeting again:
My wife bent down,
plundering her handbag,
pulling out a tissue,
here the ending begins.
Back
I have to step back
from the offer you make,
remove myself, now,
from that covert place,
return to the house,
leave fields behind,
stand at the window,
and draw down the blind.
I will stoke the low fire,
which throws no heat,
and turn from the hearth,
my retreat complete.
Walking on Water
Arlington Reservoir vibrated,
that low bowl of gust-cut waves,
the quantity now the difference
to my previous walk here,
that and my end-of-day inability
to route march any more:
as a kid, returning from school
they called me ‘Bell-fast’.
A stared sparrowhawk, high,
worked miracles to remain in place:
I am the opposite of that bird,
landlocked, working to move.
The gravel scuffs, my soles wear,
it hurts, even in these boots,
and because I have sent myself
back before the rest, I must
sit at the car park and wait.
My youngest is the first to return,
and to hide my accelerated pain
I ask to be taught to skateboard,
and as I stand, held by him, unsure,
the wind drops, and I balance
as on a small boat, not quite Galilee,
but hoping he still believes in me.
Mahnmal
Never an admission
that our past was wrong,
our history sullied by
bloody pogroms,
we pale British are
so full of such shit,
on a pissy island,
we have set adrift,
an old sucking leech
imbibing low souls,
this country,
this country,
this island of fools.
Free Swimming
What do you wear
when off to the pool,
something quite flattering,
or nothing at all?
Something to cover
your large modesty,
or Speedos – to test
poolside probity?
Or do you cover up,
head to toe,
because such is your right,
wherever you go?
Dancefloor
From above a radio drones
whilst the clippers whine
across the reddened neck
of the gentleman’s haircut.
Lined cars rumble outside
as gusts cross the threshold
and push the trimmings,
snips, hairy tumble weed,
from beneath the two-step
of the rug-cutting barber,
who never seems to struggle
with small talk on the floor.
Done, he attends to, brushes,
the now-vacated chair,
and gentlemen look sideways,
who is next on the dance card?
On (Goat) Skin
No more ‘Great’ pre-fixed
to the Repeal Bill,
no more ‘Great’ in Britain,
it is the richest who will
command this state
as it recoils, reduces,
and they’ll pinch all that’s great,
leaving austerity bruises.
St. Anne’s Hill
My father died
aged fifty-five,
I was aged
twenty-three,
he slipped away
at St. Peter’s:
My mourned dusk
then came back,
as I was buried
in the haunted dark,
under the canopy
in Buxted Park,
back to his story,
as we three ducked
through the woods
on St Anne’s Hill,
our fears fostered
by his ghost story.
Solstice, Uncelebrated.
Today the sun tipped-up
at four forty-three –
kicking cats and dogs –
it then will scathe across
the sky for sixteen hours
and thirty-eight minutes
(plus eighteen seconds)
which will be the longest day
over a liquescent London –
before dropping out
twenty-one minutes
after nine – hated
E270219
Heated
A few weeks back,
this summer,
and I would be stood
in a mist,
but this ridiculous
month of June
offers no such
cool sleights
as I stick-click,
lop-sided, alongside
the sucked-slouch
of the muddied Uck;
then hollered at
by the diesel’s sad call
as it sights
the unattended crossing,
and all the time,
across Manor Park,
bedroom windows are flung
in an un-English surrender
to the day’s heat
still found in bricks,
as the padding fox,
so thin,
sets off the estate’s
choir of panting dogs.
Brian Cant, Could.
Brian Cant
always did,
the man who sang
for this country’s kids;
each late afternoon,
no dull school rules,
as I grew older,
he still played the fool.
Into teenage years,
then into adulthood,
I hoped Brian still did
what he could.
Hate
Hate drove a van
at people again,
hate is alive in
ignorant men,
hate is spewed
at dinner tables,
hate is consumed
in social ensembles,
hate is served up,
a spat out mantra,
because hate
needs hate,
a hateful dogma.
Sleep Walking
It arrived in the night,
thickened, from within,
that sulking infection
of continental heat,
not the slimmest hint
of a breeze to relieve
us, laid out, moribund
on our double bed,
with kicked-off duvets
and a great distance,
because we are rolled
from each others’ heat.
Netflix
Do not reveal
where your chocs are hid
whilst I’m watching
box sets on Netflix.
Our Talk
I had to lie down,
having taken a bullet
from this sniper,
back flat on grass,
and you stood
over me, in shadow,
as the dog came close,
her concern simple.
Strength taken,
I struggled to stand,
to no offered hand,
and so all was said.
The Sleep
I am naked on our bed,
upright, pre-slept,
at the gracious request
of my funked body:
It asks, politely,
at first with a flicker
across my eyelids,
felt as light tremors,
then it rudely produces
enormous weights,
conjurer’s tricks,
strapped to my arms,
followed by an elephant –
it places that, too easily,
across my bared chest:
Now I am breathless,
on awkward pillows,
on those between knees;
I claim this space
for my night’s reprise.
One More
A few typed words
to fill this gap,
counting as
my committed act.
No Angel
He endeavours to be
one who ‘can’,
not a bit-part, paused,
not half a man,
not battled to bend,
with rusted mettle,
he’ll hold her at night,
unmasked and settled:
No more a young man
in the place reserved
in God’s waiting room,
which others deserve:
Grant a slow decade,
ten years of good life,
please God, he asks you,
for his kids, and his wife:
Re-set their happiness,
that for his spouse,
he won’t demand space
in your over-filled house.
First Hour
I boot-up from an ill-night,
one of disturbances, of pain,
under unpolished dreams,
to the unnecessary brightness
now lighting domestic chaos:
my slept agitation seeps
across the bathroom, bedroom,
and then mills about, recalcitrant.
I carry over the dreamt infection
into the first hour of each day,
my crude night’s spilt-illness
will dissipate, but only under
woken, worked-on, distractions.
Slurred
Doubles
You were still on my fingers,
even then, a slow hour later,
as my whiskey rolled inside
that glass, two fingers deep,
that leftover mix of still-sweet,
of earth’s dark-barrelled cut,
of strong flavours above taste:
and my mouth rested, it did,
on the rim, as on your lips,
as we held that kiss over time:
you were my one-woman orgy.
I Am Backing Theresa May
Mail on Sunday tripe
I am backing Theresa May
Let’s get on with the job
Thus tweeted Boris J –
still refusing to admit
he’s keen on Leadership
but this country knows
he was the right arse
to a bum-fumbling Gove
The Liars
She was an ugly capture ,
and was smelling quite ‘off’ –
‘landed in nets near Batavia,
and worth five thousand dollars’
– traded for the last time
in the city of London.
But that wasn’t her real story,
rather the laughed result
of a fishmonger’s joke
down in Billingsgate:
Charlie stitched half a salmon
to the rotting monkey
which had been found
on Lower Thames Street,
George Cruickshank etched,
and embellished, the lie
committing the mermaid
to a much longer life.
Knots
I dropped into her
from this height,
into her eyes,
there fixed in size
from birth,
framed by lines,
burnt in recall
by now-evaporated
tears of flicked, blinked,
intimate enquiries,
here refocused on me
into an expectation,
of cross-stitched lashes,
re-knotted,
a tight press of eyelids
in each exploratory kiss,
and then untied
as she measured my heart.
New Broom
She’ll not be swept back
to Downing Street,
her election broom snapped
under the weight;
the Tories will seek
‘a strong and stable’ hand,
to pick up the broom
and lead these lands.
For now she will clean
without the right tools,
whilst Boris and Rudd
agree which of them rules.
The UK untidy,
until the new cleaner sweeps,
austerity to continue
because brooms aren’t cheap.
Exit to Bed
The exit polls excited us,
off the kids stomped,
I promised to wake them
at six-fifteen (prompt),
with an insecure prediction
their country is strong,
but to the bed I’m afeard
that exit polls are wrong.
Two-shot Tories
A table of old Tories
in the Kemptown cafe
plotting the downfall
of your future today:
Grumbling ’bout democracy,
and ‘leftie threats’,
whilst wanking their pensions
on skinny lattes:
The last generation
to enjoy a grand old age,
they’ll spoon all the sugar
and ensure nothing remains.
Embargo
Normal service
has been resumed
today the Beeb
does ‘other news’,
for this short time
they cannot bitch,
no Tory scorn
on Corbyn’s pitch;
Laura is muted
for a whole day,
but Kuenssberg readies
her hateful ways.
NHS on Election Day
In Outpatients,
Brighton,
and efficiently
weighed by Julie,
‘blood pressure good’,
then to ECG,
to confirm I am well,
as this country
threatens an ill result,
which will mean
in five years’ time
I will need to pay
a private company,
and shareholders,
for finding me unwell.
New Town Clock
The clock’s being replaced
on Uckfield High Street,
under Emergency Orders
it’ll now strike thirteen,
and then in line
with the ‘Bill of No Rights’
you’ll get a timely vote,
but only if you’re white.
The people of Uckfield
will sleep easier this week,
clocks will chime thirteen,
they’ll dream in doublespeak.
New story HERE
Echo Chambers
It is too easy to hate,
to speak in screams,
to find all solutions
in final extremes;
the volume racked up
in your echo chamber,
knowing your hatred
reverberates longer.
Too many such rooms,
with men pushing in,
these are the places
where the end begins.
[Published here on The Dangerous Globe]
Dad’s Cooking
I love you – hope meeting going well x
A text from his phone, pecked, auto-spelt.
Beyond the window, hinges bared to the heat,
he heard his boys’ repeat beseech:
Another game on the moss-marched lawn,
another day gone, a fatherhood mourned.
He fumbled with dinner, poured from a can,
which wrestled and spat in the unstirred pan.
Kids don’t eat salad, his menu approved,
he returned to his fill of exterior views,
of summer stretching, there below,
of the day reeling in, of longing shadows.
He called them to wash, hollered from the house,
the garden relaid by their boots on the mat.
As a fight broke out in the downstairs bog,
he travelled, returned, to his brother’s love,
that punch of youth, tested again and again,
of everything around them, a smaller world then,
no internet, no screens, no loose connections.
He put food on their plates, and matched expectations.
This Sunday
Call out for the dead, mark the London doors,
a plague on our house which the politic adore.
There is no cure, no treatment, but Gods,
their calls for death, Grails and Jihads.
Our children see men doing harm unto others,
our children are assured that God is among us.
This waking Sunday, more holy work,
tell me of a sermon using honest words.
Terroir
[This poem was deleted
on my handheld device,
there is no ‘Undo’
much like my life.]
Kabul, 90
This week in Kabul
the angel of death
rolled through the city
to cause distress,
to dig a space
blown by one man’s fuse,
on bloodied streets,
to pay God his dues:
This could be you,
in country or town,
this could be us
laid flat by God’s bomb.
But also consider
why we are targeted,
why we cower,
now fear-addicted.
0.3c 2100
It’s the laziest retreat in US history,
that of the bought into a sold misery,
to remove from accord with everything to lose,
an old battle plan of an oiled-up whore:
Sat at his desk, fingering fat contracts,
letting frackers suck dry our one planet,
because the POTUS doesn’t give a jack,
he’ll f*ck us all with this one man act.
My Haunting
On that sprung branch,
she was lifted to my height
an easier examination,
I greeted my ghost,
I then figured her shape
with my touch, formed, real,
she offered me a scent
her sex, her appeal:
but my old man attentions
could scare her off –
my lightest of hauntings –
I must stay light myself.
Local Racists
Just now in my pub
there was racist talk,
loud howl of ‘Nigger’
in context of what?
Not for the first time,
and not for the last,
this country is shite,
it enjoys hatred.
Trumpf Coverage
Covfefe gets coverage
and Trumpf is berated,
tweeted from his iPhone
which had been confiscated:
He had rang up Melania
from his POTUS bed,
‘How do you spell ‘coverage’?’
Her reply he mis-heard..
‘Ka-Oh-va..
fff-ee-fff-eee..’
POTUS sounded the letters,
quite carefully,
but pressed ‘Tweet’ too quick
(with his very small fingers) –
covfefe hung there,
like a bad fart it lingers.
The Witness
They are overshadowed by that evergreen giant,
the one thousand year witness to ceremonies,
to burials, and namings.
Coal was once hoarded where the hollowing
of the yew meets the earth. There, inside God’s tree,
they find a held shelter,
but the air is reduced, taxine within the yew’s
five propped branches, he is hallucinating
as he tastes her,
that passed mead of love, now drugged by her.
Add Odin’s ability to bind and unbind,
and a two millennia lie,
he has no defences left, hung, and crucified
by the centre of her which wets his fingers
in the yew’s compression.
Englishmess
Reduce the Brits – take away their tea –
and Jaguar – Mini – and Wedgwood pottery –
All sold off – the last of British treasures –
what’s now left to make Britain special?
The Great British dinner – battered fish and chips?
Actually a recipe from Jewish immigrants –
The gold we hold in the Bank of England?
No – it’s ‘ta’ to Huguenots for banking millions –
Ah – nothing more Albion than our ancient royals?
Nein – migrant blue blood now long-despoiled –
But Punch ‘n’ Judy – that traditional beach farce?
Alas Italian – their commedia dell’arte –
OK – Saint George – a true Sainted Brit?
No – a Syrian son – with a dragon – illlegit –
Right – polo – how English – on the lawns of Windsor?
Sadly for you from the dusty kingdom of Persia –
That mothers’ ruin poured from gin distilleries?
Been shipped in barrels from overseas –
Pigeon racing – ’tis Northern – an ‘Oop-North’ fancy?
Nay lad – flown in by Belgian bird-loving royalty –
The Womens’ Institute – cake and Englishness?
Sorry – Canada made it and Wales repossessed –
That well-mannered bear – who as kids we well knew?
Ah – even Paddington Bear is a foreigner too –
This country of confusions – imports and invention –
is at its British best when admitting immigration
E031118
What Makes Us Special?
Reduce the Brits, take away their tea,
Jaguar, Landrover, and Wedgwood pottery,
all now sold, the last of British treasures,
what is left ‘Great’ to make Britain special?
The Great British dinner – battered fish and chips?
Actually a recipe from Jewish immigrants:
The gold we hold in the Bank of England?
No, its ‘ta’ to Huguenots for banking millions.
Ah, nothing more Albion than our ancient royals?
Nein, migrant blue blood, now long-despoiled.
But Punch and Judy, that traditional beach farce?
Alas Italian, their commedia dell’arte.
OK, Saint George, a true Sainted Brit?
No, a Syrian son, with a dragon, illlegit.
Right, polo, how English, on lawns of Windsor?
Sadly, for you, from the dusty kingdom of Persia.
That mothers’ ruin poured from gin distilleries?
Been shipped in barrels, from overseas.
Pigeon racing, ’tis Northern, an ‘Up-North’ fancy?
Nay lad, flown in by Belgian bird-loving royalty.
The Womens’ Institute, cake and Englishness?
Sorry, Canada made it, and Wales repossessed.
That well-mannered bear, who as kids we well knew?
Ah, even Paddington Bear is a foreigner too.
This country of confusions, imports and invention,
is at its British best when embracing immigration.
How do you mute a problem like Katie?
[Apologies to Oscar Hammerstein II, none to Katie Hopkins]
How do you mute a problem like Katie?
How do you catch a cow and pin it down?
How do you find a word that means Katie?
A fascist-in-favour, a will-o’-the wisp! A clown!
Many a-thing you know she’d like to tell you,
many a-thing she so mis-understands,
but how do you make her mute,
to listen to what you say,
being sacked is part of her bigger plan:
Oh, how do you solve a problem like Katie?
How do you get Hopkins forever banned?
When I hear her I’m confused,
ears bleeding and bemused,
And I know that she doesn’t give a f*cking damn.
#GE2017
There will be a ballot
with outcomes unknown,
but the resulting state
could be one that’ll harm,
it may finally remove
the vestiges of pride
which were the first choice
of the winning side,
that construction of faith,
more real than dead Gods,
off socialist embers
fired after the war.
When you make your mark
it will determine the fate
of the care of your family,
the future price paid.
Each ballot with a cross,
is a kiss for the carers,
a token of love,
for the state which will keep us.
Or leave it, don’t bother,
make a mark for the rich,
and let them get fat
on the illness of kids;
let them turn profits
on dementia, new business,
let them trade shares
in your family’s sickness.
Manchester
A minute
passed,
of aircraft
and traffic,
but schools
stopped,
a short class
in silence.
The Red Bridge II
There, tonight, across the red bridge,
I captured my ghost, pulled her hard to me,
under wings folded, her talons curled tight,
her fix on mine, her heart in flight,
there tamed under oak, one guarantee –
this ghost ‘cross the bridge will always haunt me.
Who the F*ck is Nick Timothy?
Who is Nick Timothy?
Do you give a toss?
He’s the quiet one –
St Theresa’s soft voice.
Almost Deputy PM,
with no vote or mandate,
he’ll re-draw Conservatism,
tracing over the Left;
aided by Fiona,
the Queen of Press Passes,
but Nick wears the boots,
‘cos he likes to kick arses.
[Published here on The Dangerous Globe]
God is a Lie
Strapped by a promise,
bolt-weighted by God,
then queued into Heaven,
the gates a bit clogged.
An eye for an eye,
and all that shit:
Pray for the religious,
they stoke all of this.
The Red Bridge
I long for a ghost to greet me here,
halfway across the rust red bridge,
to challenge me now with a lover’s kiss,
which burns to red on my own dry lips.
Her hair to fall long, beyond death’s hold,
but her neck, her face a brush of cold:
and for me to lean into death’s cool mask,
for me to succumb to her breath of chance:
inhale the vacuum expunged from her lungs,
and I breathe into her my breath of song.
Did I Mention Dementia?
Dementia Tax is coming,
unless you’re so struck,
then you’re a lucky one,
as you won’t give a f*ck.
Contrails
The words
‘under contrails’
rounded on me,
those raised scars,
high gatherings
of man-made clouds
over this county,
the icy remnants
of others’ flights
to warmer climes,
and I was grounded
by the weight of my foot
after foot:
I no longer dream
of taking off,
arms wide,
a kick and up,
but I leave a trail
of sorts.
Where I Sit
I sat with care
on a wide (sawn) stump,
it cut back
by an oxidised blade,
I found a seat
of chamfered comfort,
but still a hard cushion
of battered rings,
where the rounded years
had been taken
by the scouring rain,
and the decay of things;
now rubbed back,
grooves removed,
until the turn of time
had been loosened,
and the history of it all,
once held central,
had been hard-weathered,
no more nature’s annal.
Seven point five
A boot-sucked dropdown
and through Views Wood
across a scuffed bridge
and a rank ditch in flood
I clamber – not climb –
up the leaf-pressed path
My rooted friction slows
each step and staff press
as my step is led straight
alongside a hawthorn hedge
The sun is low – cooled –
a million miles to my left
And on to his dead centre –
a landlord’s dictate by oaks
into an estate of birches
then across rolled out tarmac –
on past Buxted Hotel’s views
Up to St. Margaret the Queen –
a landmark of curious ghosts –
of gravestones’ tilts
and on to a squealing gate
where seeping gothic
creeps slowly on buttresses
Under a weighty yew tree
old boughs pray for props
Then to a wall by holy ground –
a crumbled brick boundary
This is a walk I have desired.
Not Northern Enough
I am not northern enough
to be a radio poet –
not a McGough, a McMillan,
or a Normal kinda bloke.
I am not street enough
to holler as a slam artist,
not a Sia, Poppa E.,
or even Kate Tempest.
I am not black enough
to rhyme [with the best]
not MC Drake –
nor a Kanye West
I am not angry, outraged,
able to bark,
like Attila the Stockbroker
or John Cooper Clarke.
I am (Attila said)
‘that other poetry.’
In which case I’ll exult
with my southern dignity.
Guinnless
Friday lunchtime
and a tall pint of Guinness,
I enter the calories –
two hundred added,
less the few quid
of change in my pocket,
this is weight watching
with drunken benefits.
Miracle on Downing Street
Saint Theresa knows what is good for us now –
she sings ‘Hallelujahs’ and takes a low bow
as she cleans the feet of the blessed rich
whilst loosening her grip on their privatised bits
She’s touched The Trump – held the hand of God
and now she is saying Come and buy the lot!
And on Election Day – perhaps in 2022
when they’ve won again – against the too few
you might turn round and look back on this time
and regret the miracles you left behind –
the medicine – the doctors – the freedom to move –
the care for the elderly – state schools improved –
the future for kids – ours without privilege –
the rights we had – to stand up ‘n still rage
When the state that blessed us is sold for our good,
you’ll have no one to trust, except Theresa’s rich gods
E281118
House of Cards
As if it is a politic farce
of staged denouements
of scripted turns
and off the plot
we are rantng runts
either way
it is
drama enough.
It
Remaindered on Amazon, an unread tome,
that Tory horror story: ‘The Manifesto’.
Launched in Yorkshire (for Gothic effect),
a fiction, or future? You The Reader elects:
The monster, the creature, a clown called ‘May’,
rises from the drains to suck young lives away.
From the wrong side of the tracks our hero steps –
Jeremy shouts about the clowning threats.
Deaf to his warnings (of hospitals sucked dry,
of schools destroyed, of the old left to die),
the constituency of Hereabouts sees only May’s grin,
but you, The Reader, are not taken in:
They flock to the clown’s carnival show
(“the last clown lady was very good you know”).
But Reader, you too, will be dragged on your back,
as this horror story becomes a fact.
The Tory Manifesto, a cliffhanger for the kids?
Is this the future? Will they have to live with ‘It’.
As featured in ‘The Dangerous Globe’ HERE
Humid
You could see the unexpected humidity
in the weep of the trees
almost a rainforest drip in the woods of Sussex
and being tall I had to dip to avoid
the damp stroke of lime leaf on my neck
that of a sweated relative
or grease-ball teacher.
Underfoot the cinder path was an equal impact
on memory as I lugged my groceries
back
back to
that playground in Surrey which grazed kids
and scuffed the sandals
a home to sparkled
stones and shiny ants
and games of ball
chase
kisses
and secret skipping songs of girls.
No Rain
That kicked-up
wild garlic hit
was the mist
through which
the walk took them
on that route,
slow
upstream,
and then sloped
above the low cut
of rain-denied river.
Each step was
another distance
which closed
the gap
between them.
On his solitary return,
under the dapple
of sodium,
over hard tarmac,
the true nature
of things
returned.
Kathy
For Kathy.
Kathy spoke for a minute,
it may have been less:
“I’m being serious,
I want you to do
something for us.”
[The most powerful woman, in this reduced state,
rep(lied) through her teeth – not one of them straight.]
I vote for Kathy,
I vote for the traduced.
We’ll remove the ‘Fat Cats’ –
make sure your vote is used.
Original NEWS story here
Amended to ‘Kathy’ 17.05.17 – updated NEWS story here
06:34
That stillness
feel it
not even a clock
no scrape of chair
nothing dropped
just me sat here
in this echo hall
with upright piano
and parquet floor
set below bays
and the same break
of day
but offset by
time
and the tune
we must play.
The Pile
Every brick was identical
and took the same grip
in the lift from left to right,
from the old pile to the new pile,
in the repetitive task
that I undertook –
to clear the driveway
of the builders’ detritus.
Each heave was unique in time
but same as the last,
with slight variations
at the start and the end.
Leftover dust was blown
as I picked at the old pile,
counting the weights
like our equalised days.
In such manual work,
of free menial sorts,
I build a low wall
on a slowly stacked week.
Two Women
I met Makris and Demeter
bent over a half-inflated dinghy
and me, the old boy,
interrupted their labour
with a brief history
of my youth on The Thames;
‘meander’ came back to me,
along with ‘blade’ and ‘gate’,
my recall faltered at Barcombe,
on a twist of The Ouse to Lewes,
their sure sweep of youth’s grace
patched my pause with their words,
they were back from The Anchor
to this downstream landing;
they sparkled in the late-May light
with an assurance, in such love,
and I walked on against the current’s force,
but only knee-deep in meadow grass.
Plye pen againe
Under this reduced hand,
my writing slightly askew,
(less old script from my fountain pen,
loosen your grip, man, to let the nib scrape
without the chisel effect of an inky furrow)
I shall claim a small victory
over this place
by a return to legible verse,
by lifting my plough,
bracing,
and taking the next line straight.
Cross
I will now deny the rich
their pleasured agenda
by switching off the media
by restoring my memories,
to recall how secure
our future once felt
I make these my choices –
I will stand up for the NHS,
I will support state education,
I will seek dignity for the elderly,
I will not let sickness profit,
and I will respect those with less
because I will never be
the one percent, not us,
the freelancers,
the fireman,
the coppers,
the nurses,
the teachers,
the shop-keepers,
the factory
and the office workers
we,
the unelected,
the kept-at-bay,
the once state-maintained,
the f*cking Hard Working
tax payers
will be screwed, lustrum-long,
by policies born of private pickings,
whelped by Bullingdon boys
and when I wake to them, again,
wearing sneers they call smiles,
with drubbings for the losers,
I’ll know that my cross was counted,
piled, not as high as the winner’s cards,
but, briefly, in that mark, my minority won.
The Thief – the Lover
He felt her ribs
in his reading
of her body
Next
an appraisal
of her breasts
His blind fingers
stole more
from her
Such slightness –
such daylight
robbery
He kissed
her lips
before he stole the rest
E241119
The Thief, The Lover.
He felt her ribs
(in his reading
of her body),
next,
an appraisal
of her breasts.
His blind fingers
stole
the female form
which she possessed:
Such slightness
in that robbery:
He kissed
her lips,
before the rest.
TN22
Seven AM,
just me and the dog,
on the piled steps
of the lifestyle shop,
as an off-white van
rumbles up the hill,
leaving a rolled cloud
of diesel ill-will,
blaring inanity
with windows wound down.
A commuter snarls,
bent into her frown,
striding with a latte
to catch the train,
her life evaporating
within London (again).
And then the false dawn
of amber street lights
kill themselves off
as she departs this life.
Wednesday Night Massacre
History is this repetitive dross,
now the sacking of the FBI boss,
and let us review Nixon’s acts,
when Archibald Cox was
summarily sacked.
Watergate then stacked,
like a fat Russian doll,
and just a week later
impeachment called.
Cafe Garden
Through the gaps
in the fence
I saw them, facing,
that moment
of not-yetness,
a man, a woman,
holding from
the illegitimate kiss,
of out-of-marriage
connections,
stalled by the fumbled
crush of sex.
As I waited,
an amateur sleuth,
they stood, embraced,
and then left,
using separate exits.
Stephen Fry on Entering Heaven
“How dare you create a world
in which there is such misery..”
Fry cast out the kids’ cancer gifts –
sent forth by the tri-ghost ministry:
“Why should I respect a capricious,
mean-minded.. god?”
Thus he spake on R.T.E.,
tipping an Overman nod.
“The god who created this universe..
is.. clearly a maniac..”
No Stephen Fry tweet,
but a character attack.
“We have to spend our lives
on our knees thanking him.”
And the Gardai burnt time
on Stephen Fry’s meme.
[Original story here ]
Acyclist Now
I love the smell of Lycra
in the morning.
You know, one time
they had a hill climbed,
for 12 hours.
When it was all over,
I drove up.
We didn’t find one of ’em,
not one stinkin’ bikin’ body.
The smell,
you know that Lycra smell,
the whole hill.
Smelled like [sniffing, pondering]
Halfords.
[Apologies to John Milius, FF Coppola, & Joseph Conrad.]
The Path
Outside the gates we turned left,
my first time exeunt in that direction,
every other time it was ‘Exit Right’.
My stick ticked dust as the dog chased
her foreign prey of too-quick lizards,
one easily found, but dead, tyre-pressed.
Your perimeter wall merged into the next,
running the width of both properties,
two modern houses in olive-aged spaces.
Then another wall, but low, redoubled
with sticks, broken tiles and half plates,
homespun solutions from the roadside.
Behind it a squat building, a house,
appended by rusty corrugated metal,
poorly repaired, an unpaid maintenance.
Soon the path ended at such baronial gates,
a wrought iron statement of a loud arrival,
that brusque Englishman’s whitewashed castle.
And we turned, to walk back, alongside
the open field, ‘ploughed on the perimeter
to hold back the snakes,’ your explanation.
Pairs
If they knew the truth
what would it do?
He’d look a fool,
and she’d look cruel:
but for now,
she keeps the Jacks,
there are no Jokers
left in the pack.
The Common Book
These short-swiped days of instant history,
of unsavoury times, of such effrontery;
a meme we fed before the hour had passed,
then called upon as eye witnesses:
‘How could you renounce, so easily betray?’
‘How many times did you turn your gaze?’
Under cross-examination you may fall apart,
prepare your statement, commit it to heart.
This way we now live, screening all calls,
beholding our phones is the new protocol:
a covenant with our electric prayer book,
nailed in our palm, is the first place we look.
Grand Designs
Here I sit – baked –
in a perihelion place
and you back home
under aphelion greys
Our distances different
from the nuclear heat –
my reading of Hawking
left me browbeat
Our divorce dictated
by EasyJet flights –
our separate beds
moved closer tonight
Cornish Patsy
The Planting
Lancelot Capability Brown, sunburnt,
drives his yellow digger into your grove
and there, on the almost level ground,
he finds another hole for another root ball,
the third of his flatbed-dropped trees,
which ends up towering alongside
the horizontal swimming pool lines.
The new cipressos are aligned
by those two baseball-capped men,
who guide the next strapped trunk,
with bark rough hands, into the spoil,
planting, for you a marvellous reflection.
Poisoning
I know I am drunk
when my brain
draws profiles,
those artery-thick
lies
into words,
such ancient tricks
to throw the truth,
to re-draft my myth.
May Day, Puglia
Witnesses
I look to them, graveyard-aligned
in our sped view, forever left and right,
on the journey back from Otsuni;
anchored in the red earth, those groves,
set free from the interrupt of stones
by the cast of the rotivator’s throw.
I count, without enough numbers,
the great twisted variations of
olea europaea, those fixed olive trees:
Once shadows over Christ’s agony,
witnesses to his betrayal in three,
there as the shade in Gethsemane,
that which the Dutch artist sought
in his own lunatic star-field view,
in the daub and press of other oils.
I am told that the drupes are cultivated
between their green and purple state,
added to, altered, to make them black.
I know the shape well – bulbous
beads, like the sweated blood,
(Luke), from the pores of Christ.
We arrived at the house, set in a grove,
the venerable trees continue their telling,
blown by the wind, of that old song of God.
The Monkey. Not the Organist
Free me from the grind
of ‘strong and stable leadership’,
and from the organist’s
‘coalition of chaos’;
loosen these ties
of spin-doctored lines,
and let the monkeys dance
to an original lie.
The Card Shark
Today I faced up to The Future –
a rather distrustful chap –
he bowed low before my person –
but this man is full of such crap
The Future never regrets –
never stays in the present to say
what his timings hold for us all
and what of ours will still remain
E281118
Bonfire of Certainties
A bonfire of all certainties
has been built under me –
of timbers – by unseen hands –
crossed over and lain
on a cold heart – that core
of devoutly-snapped sticks
The ninety year old fell
and they discovered
her riddle of cancers –
She shouldn’t be alive
But her bonfire was doused –
I’m happier – she sung –
I have assurances
This told to me as I was driven
by the old woman’s nephew
through Puglia’s stone veins –
I saw my own pyre lit –
and you – my wife –
have to bear the still low heat
of this
the slowest of fires
A Very English Problem
when the inner
scrape
of your head
is as soiled
as the swallow
in your mouth
and your stomach
revolts
almost ready
to reintroduce
the Italian
that swill
in your gut
another spill
of red
then you
have finally
lived
The Mower
He has cut the grass around Stonehenge
for twenty summers, end-to-end,
ever concentric, from outer to inner,
he pulls out blades with the retreat of winter.
He knows each slab, the Welsh-ness within,
those dragged-erect stones and the truths they contain.
As the mulch and spewed grass build high in his bin,
the circling grass-cutter is again sucked in:
His subconscious cuts to a dream-fixed rout,
knots him in whispers, which the stones still shout,
and so he is sliced, chipped, and re-worked,
to be the defender against the road works.
Cast up by the ‘Henge, as its final guard,
he has been armed with the last sharp sword:
the defender of Arthur, protector of Albion,
in the dream he fills UK Highways’ tunnel.
Under cries of crows, and missives of sheep,
the lawn mower man is then roused from his sleep,
that disturbed warrior wakes at his wheel,
to return to his mowing, because dreams are not real.
Spam, spam, spam, spam, spam.
I delete another email
from Michael J. Fox
and his evangelist cry
that PD rocks!
and other such homilies
of which my eyes tire –
those in-box fat missives
sent down thin wires
And then I’m mailed offers
to re-double my pension
but the fuckers forget
this luxury they mention
is now only afforded
by the lucky few –
the politicians – the unionised
but not me and you
We’ll earn less in our dotage
but will still eat the same –
forever supplied
with their five spams a day
E02012020
Downhill
He is accelerating
into a compression
of constant slowing,
of rusted muscle,
and crumbling time.
He sees a narrowing
which you, an assured,
ignore at your peril:
there is no five year
warranty on your life,
you are not immune
to any of this, no matter
what you do at the gym,
in sweated Lycra-hours
of wrist-tracked time.
Beaten
I half-stand ring-centred,
in our squared kitchen,
just upright, aware of the
transmitted box of blows,
these roundings upon me,
and that scream-spat radio:
Yes, I feel beaten, as though
I should throw in my towel,
now surrender, step down,
no longer the heavyweight,
me, the former title holder,
in these endless rounds.
Radiohead
You tinsel town criers,
signatory luvvies,
calling for the blood
of a band of brothers,
crying out ‘gainst doing
Tel Aviv this time,
because the Israelis
have fucked Palestine.
“Make the contract in dollars
give me everything I need,
fuck the Palestinians,
this gig’s all about me.”
You actors, singers,
and cultured orifices,
would never pander
to such states of attrocities,
you’ll boycott those countries,
you high-and-erudite,
except the fat miscreant,
the U.S of Apartheid.
“Make the contract in dollars,
give me everything I need,
fuck the tribal nations,
this tour’s just about greed.”
You shouters took America
many years ago,
touring that glasshouse,
throwing no stones,
turning your back on
the fucked Indian tribes,
making no fuss
about that genocide.
“Make the letter in italics,
and sign it as one,
let’s lash another artist
with our long luvvy tongue.”
Postal Prayers
Twice
I have bantered
with the postie
today,
such small talk
is how
I pray.
Easter
God is on
St Theresa’s side,
He guides her through
Brexitcide.
Her Superior Being
will not falter:
Spain will never get
Gibraltar.
Thin
Sat close
and finger-locked,
with your thin press into
me,
there is
almost nothing
of you to take,
except where
my fingers had
played,
days before,
with no audience,
no surround sound,
apart from us,
coming.
Flag Stoned
The bunting had fallen
and strung in its place
long blown metres
of roadwork tape:
Our town had spent
all the developers’ tax
on wider footpaths,
which will now crack
under the weight
of various vans,
part-parked on kerbs
by the delivery man,
who will still take up
one of those lanes,
blocking the street
back to the library (again).
Ask the shop-keepers
if it was worth the chaos,
screwing the high street
for a developer’s pay-off.
The Visitors
I have negotiated
with such black rooks
(in our last two homes)
those soot ghosts
trapped in chimneys
most living
less a stiff pair
which
come the summer’s
long release of heat
woke nested flies
finding the window panes
there
made spot-spattered
fly-trapped
those small dark
scavengers
of the dead
The living rooks
were easier to
release
They’re Going on a Vote Hunt
Emma’s Driver
She made an Uber man cry
(only by being her true self);
he had to remove his glasses
to wipe, to drive his tears
because (he had assumed)
she was drunk, or drugged,
it was his mistake,
he needed to say sorry.
If those tears of a cab driver
were pooled, or swabbed,
could we, the ill, employ
such floods to end the pain?
Watch this video, please..
The Graphic Artist’s Lament
Lorem ipsum
dolor sit amet,
consectetur
adipiscing elit,
sed do eiusmod
tempor incididunt,
ut labore et dolore
magna aliqen.
Ut enim ad
minim veniam,
quis nostrud
exercitatium!
Breakfast Tea for One
The dishwasher needs filling,
even when you’re not here.
I was woken by the dog’s breath,
not your’s my dear.
This temporary separation
(of merely one night)
is the dawning realisation
that a divorce isn’t right.
Breakfast Tea for One
The dishwasher needs filling –
even when you’re not here –
I was woken by the dog’s
foul breath,
not your’s for once my dear –
This temporary separation
of merely just one night –
is the dawning realisation
that a divorce isn’t right
The Keep
A walk under
almost-visualised trees,
reached out, thin-limbed,
an architect’s dream,
to a part-filled car park
lined by tidy drivers,
their nominal SUVs,
and my Landover.
Even the bird song
is almost an effect,
in my walk-through,
on The Keep visit.
Election-careering
That pond of politics,
where amphibians crawl,
over arched backs
to gorge in the pool,
feeding, growing,
on the bottom-fat crud,
to rise from the Commons,
to ascend as a Lord.
To claim an allowance,
deigned for the rich,
to age into bitterness,
in the House of Old Gits.
To be buried in a churchyard,
“not some Commoner’s grave”,
to die as Lord Muck,
not labelled a knave.
Day 19,292
Yes, I anticipated
that shared moment,
as it was conjured
by your light arrival,
equal in my mind,
before the release
of your quick tongue,
put past my lips,
almost unexpected,
as was your skin,
midriff exposed,
by your stretched lift.
Then my response,
almost too much
to be contained:
I pinned that kiss.
Cuts
We re-loaded
the dishwashers,
as they re-loaded
the bombs,
outside
our smart homes
a covert snipping
began:
at first the truth
was subtly distorted,
and then the news
was misreported.
Coding was clipped,
hyper-links snapped,
Facebook re-liked
the on-line crap.
Let them use bombs,
sub-nuclear,
to help shift the focus
to a new fear:
Hear the bray of pigs,
this West’s old cry,
under the dropping
of lies from our sky,
then cut dictators
from negotiations,
severe all talks,
open the heavens,
let the sky weep,
flatten the earth,
another fresh harvest
of slash and burn.
Easter Opening Howls
Thank God for Waitrose
on Easter Monday,
a relief for the beige
after closure on Sunday.
Ring out the church bells
peal them thrice
we rejoice the coming
of posh stuff
half-priced.
Explanation
What bravado
the boys of Sussex
displayed,
and I tried to explain
to my youngest child
after it all,
as we sat outside
the imperial brick
police station:
I spoke about
how some things are
rehearsed,
I talked about
missing empathy,
how thrusts of ego,
cocktails of drugs,
that itchy fug,
near-fungal,
under their skin,
will always
do them in.
Radio for?
Oh My God, ’tis Thought for the Day:
Radio Four pauses to pray:
Humphrys kneels on the soundproof floor,
wishing for news which he can endure.
Melvyn Bragg berates a humble guest,
mumbling mantras as he doth protest!
Archerettes praise the God of scripts
for an endless drama of juicy bits.
Friday’s Now Show, the satirical melee,
not Now The Final Judgement Day,
with Hugh (not Grant) and the other one,
casting those stones of comedy puns.
The Reverend Coles, as Saturday arrives,
says his prayer: ‘Please not Five Live’.
Fair
As if you would burn,
but your over-sized
sunglasses are worn
against that enquiry
of the sky, and mine.
With a five-bar gate
to protect you
from further asking,
from a reach,
I will still take you.
I travel, growing,
in the hardened time
of our over-lit scene;
every item you wear
has been loosened
by my almost-retired
art of slowly stripping,
by eye, back to fair skin,
each layer you wrap
against the sun.
Away
That sip fills you,
but not enough –
your last morning
coffee in Europe
before your return
to this brackish
island of work
and others’ time;
here to be broken
again, as ever,
by tiring schedules,
and shifting deadlines.
But there, away,
you are, in that hour,
fixed by an americano,
still on the terrace.
Wrecked
Too long adrift
on my life raft
of tapped thoughts,
short-winded,
burnt by the sun
and unseen salt:
A rudderless man,
with sickness induced
by this tidal ride
of the curved
and empty horizon,
then struck wave-blind.
The slap and shatter
of seawater
are lunacy’s call
to me, displaced
in the wreck of my body,
a drowning fool.
Snip
For you
a minimal
love poem,
because
my seeds
are no
longer
sowing.
The Ritual
The extravagant white bathrobe,
bagged from a boutique hotel,
her remains of a left-behind weekend,
just the two of them, her and him,
sunk in love, a deeper love than now.
That thick gown hung guiltily
on the back of the bathroom door.
She took it down and wrapped it around
her shoulders, careful not to knock
the tall knotted towel, her damp crown.
The application of creams was next,
and then, only then, she was ready
to be a wife again. And a mother.
Always a mother, no matter what.
She then saw herself in the mirror.
The Back Door
For AM, an apology
Again door-stepped, and you, a good man,
guide my regrets, which I wept
(unlike like my foul-flat egress)
onto your quick-stained shoulders.
As my carrier you guided me up
to the sunlit seat where my shame was
burnt off. All quite unexpected,
as was my recall of the tossed
unfair words which I had spat at you.
And after, to lighten those weights,
I delivered, by tremors’ hand,
a small token towards better taste:
a simple gift to aid forgiveness,
which may settle, for us, eventually,
to be re-lifted, swallowed back,
as tears are, then wiped to avoid hate.
Timed Theft
These words will not be my sick complaint,
not my dull litany of low-dulled pains –
neither bellows of my half-swallowed fears,
no sandman damming floods of tears:
Instead, I will lift prizes that others miss,
those wasted seconds which they dismiss.
This is my crime spree, my timely dance,
I snatch, a poacher, trapping every chance.
Join me, in theft, even you, the still-fixed,
let us steal time before no time exists.
Please hold the torch high, it shakes in my grip,
aim the weak beam at that prize which I seek.
See there, in the shadows, a life’s remains,
a lost loot of time – which is mine to gain.
I will take such disposals, all so discarded,
and burn it with verse, now herein, recorded.
These words are the ticks of my observed tongue,
all that remains of our days that have run:
I reduce the weight of my loathsome disease
by stealing the life that others leave.
After Needlewriters
I turned my back on the bleached
slice of moon, that ancient stalker,
over bright, (still impossible for
smart-phone or trite word capture).
Lewes fidgeted, early to bed, ill-lit
by the the old devil overhead,
cut by earth’s shadow,
incapable of glazing cobblestones
There was that end-of-wordliness
on our walk down Cliffe High Street,
the ghosts had retreated to attics,
wrapped in ‘No Popery’ banners.
At such time the town behaves,
the worriers and campaigners,
the yet-druv, and the string sellers,
finding world peace under duvets.
We recalled Woolworths, long lost,
as I looped lunar stuff (we talked
from the pub to the car park),
I kneaded those minutes into now.
Return
For CM
You are waking 10,000 feet above me,
a fact I haven’t Googled,
more an ill-educated guess,
that precursor of the internet
when my intelligence was never doubted
by you, or me.
The sky will be different over Alpendorf
when you wake in a rented bed
before your coach-trip return,
when you shall try to slumber, bundled
on two thin seats, plugged into BBC
downloads,
as low Austrian, and dull German
suburban views
lull your plunge, infected to sleep.
Then your swallow-dive off the highs
of steep black runs, into the deep-end
of the dream pool.
Alan Bennett, Sheep & Me
“The electrical things have their lives too, paltry as those lives are”.
Deckard. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
I am buff on the sofa,
with Alan Bennett (a weight),
I have turned him over –
he bears a wretched face.
I must make it clear
I’m not holding that man,
no, I grip his fat tome,
held tight in my hands.
By ‘tome’ I mean book,
no, not anything rude –
Mr B’s not my type,
he is a bit of a prude.
Yes, a real book,
no Amazon e-kind,
but the weighty covers
with printed lines.
Now my eyes are aching,
as are my bits,
and Mr B’s recall
are a dull diarist’s.
Once more to my bed,
to count ‘leccy sheep,
because late night reading
makes my eyes weep.
7:01
You are waking
10,000 feet
above me,
a fact I haven’t
googled,
more an ill-educated
guess –
that precursor
of the internet,
when my intelligence
was never doubted
by you, or by me.
The sky will be
different
over Alpendorf
when you wake
in a rented bed.
Witnesses
Sat, live-streaming,
today, once more,
WE
oversee dying,
kids choked by war.
Are we as vile
as those missile crews?
Safe in glasshouses
of beamed rolling news?
At which frame does this
fail to entertain?
When won’t a death
squeeze out tears for their pain?
Marriage Texts
no prob x
she looked off earlier xx
will be out for short time x
think she needs attention xxx
shes getting screwed
**she’s**
in head!! 😉 x
she comes home to it x
this me piecing it together xx
then heckles up 😦 x
not in good place at m`o xx
HER!x
sorry best can do xxx
how did it go? x
She is worrying about u x
She is a good person xx
ah insecurity shows xx
testing again x
quite rightly x
u don’t want A to b an arse xx
you need to let her know xxx
do u have to ask? x
she is loved xx
we are all idiots x
we are all foolishly in love xx
stupidity steadfast x
love is also constant x
Untitled
supplicant
came to mind
and I had to check the word
but it was right
almost fingers
twined to prayer
but also humbled
entreating
bowed under
the rooted canopy
the artist
lifted
to pull
you
through the woods
30,000 Returns
The held blossom in the twitten
reminded me of sakura in Japan –
when we climbed Mount Yoshino –
anami to Oku Senbon
There I kissed your pencil lips
which tasted of the last yatai –
where my mouth passed across
the flowering of your eyes
We had spread our picnic blanket
as the sun rose on the arc –
a place under cherry blossom
a wide view across the park
That held flower is the carrier
of my re-imagined returns –
to our love in Nara prefecture –
as the sakura blushed and turned
E291018
She Gives Away
That girl gives away far too much,
Stripped her secrets to mens’ wiped touch;
Cropped, pulled naked, her clicked-on skin,
She’s devoured by those to whom she gives in.
Subjected but free, no lens-locked soul,
Instead she is instant, no Kodak unrolled.
Her surrender of self, in her shared gallery,
Is the nearest they get to adultery.
Her angelic frame, slight but potent,
Holds down her men – mostly aberrant.
Subjected but free, no lens-locked soul,
Instead she is instant, no Kodak unrolled.
All men will take what they can for free,
As wed men delete their watched history.
They wake to dreams, and a cheated wife,
As the girl sleeps late to avoid real life.
Subjected but free, no lens-locked soul,
Instead she is instant, no Kodak unrolled.
All Fools
Awake, readied, for April Fools’ Day,
one of misplaced apostrophe’s.
This All Fools’ Day suits this country,
this island of embarrassing Brexit,
this rained empire of excruciating Boris,
this idiot-breeding farm of Not-Sir Farage.
And this day suits me, an equal to all fools,
a composer of irregular rhymed diatribes,
a digger of holes, still in further education,
Head Boy at the School of Schoolboy Errors.
By Windover Hill
No rich patron for St Andrew’s Church,
unmoved by digging at historical facts,
dropped, slumped, almost marooned,
leaving it off-centred on Alfriston’s Tye,
a cross set high on a rough mound,
above the bezier-curves of The Ouse,
of her flood-carved meanders,
kept from the village by a low flint wall,
this house sits, quiet, above the tide,
that moon’s claim upon timed rises,
which shift according to typed charts,
there is more than one God working here.
This low Cathedral of the Downs
will always be half-framed by the slope
of that grazed slant of Windover Hill,
unsure of the Long Man’s presence.
Inspired by – Keith Pettit
Published in Flights Poetry – https://flightsscc.wordpress.com/
The Inheritor
I let my grey hair over-grow,
wear out dead man donated clothes,
I occasionally tap paths with my worn-down stick,
missing the beat of my off-time limp.
I’ve been re-set by a strangle, unseen,
I am less of a man, a reduction in mien,
offended by nature not playing it straight?
I eye the barrel of pain’s aimed complaints.
‘Life’s unfair,’ she spat out the words,
a line which I’ll refuse to rehearse.
But forty years later my recall has grown
of my mother’s bile rising, I swallow my own..
Life is fair, it is in agreement,
until we are held up by our parents,
then their bias, that family axiom:
We make our own lives by not repeating them.
I let my grey hairs over-grow,
wearing out dead man donated clothes.
Field Work
I write this, aching from my simple effort,
now bench-propped, on Luxford Field,
with car shunts and engine revs behind me,
then killed, still, replaced (for now) by birdsong.
This afternoon, under ripe end-of-March sun,
(we will judge once more with warming fears),
I wave at the future, upright in a buggy,
trundled up the path, bobbled over lifted roots.
And then the farcical entry of a dog shocks
the three matte pigeons, and a shined rook,
which lift away, leaving the expanse empty,
untimely, far too early for the annual fair,
it’s arrival to be rung by the hammering of pegs.
That fun, on this field, is still a drought away,
until then there will be the scattering of litter,
couples snogging, and teenagers swigging.
But today, with this lunch hour to be consumed,
and low warmth enjoyed, the town joins me
in the old art of laying, uniform, on the grass;
one skill which we were taught well at school.
Abiogenesis
You too have climbed
from the alluvial swamp
of youth, of immaturity,
that dark cloy which sticks,
a viscid ignorance,
up from that shallow place
to our adapted older-selves,
without His re-engineering,
One’s dulled interest long lost –
ever since J. Robert Oppenheimer
re-purposed the identity of God,
and made mankind the last hope.
‘Survival of the fittest,’ is questioned,
but we stand, good, on two legs,
presently erect on this planet,
us, the last keepers of the foul waters
in which we clean our children,
Let Him Die
He wants to die
no legal restraint,
before the pain
is beyond complaint;
connect his hope,
allow an abate,
let him die,
for that donate.
Crowdfund here
Before
Each weekend was a curst return
from pitch-black,
boot-filled, lifeless ditches,
each boy scolded for deep cuts
and rips off furrow-tripped meadows.
We ranged, untouchable, free,
across fallow farmland,
never knowing every acre was doomed.
The River Addle, our course of choice,
went first, piped and diverted.
Next came the laying of black lanes
for shot past trucks and cars –
killing machines, legally driven,
which then road-blocked our crossings.
Our wild life was inequally divided
by over-takings and lines of sped death,
cutting us off from the dark woods,
that far copse of unmanaged oak
which, before they lay the orbital road,
was our furthest-ever destination
on our stone-kicked roamings,
in squelch-squeezed Wellies.
We had read nature’s encyclopedia
within the oaks’ shadowy gloom –
the same woods where Dad
had me shoot all that moved.
HRH
I have danced on the stage
at the Royal Albert Hall,
sidled a swept Princess
and a hundred-like fools.
Their rules of movement,
to me unsaid,
I turned to a tune,
not that which played.
I spun below domes,
under the clouds of song,
with a woman so slight,
because ballet is wrong:
Their rules of movement,
to me set blind,
I turned from their tune,
not the dancing kind.
From Kensington Gore
dropped on to Queen’s Gate,
ripped fast from the ball
by my own complaint.
Their rules of movement,
to me mistimed,
I removed from that tune,
that which was mine.
Take me from such
dance floors and grace,
I have no true patience
to keep me engaged.
I Should Retire
The mean clock is doing it,
the balancing trick, ten-ten,
as ever the secondhand there
timed it, re-ticked on cue,
aligned with the brief minute’s
late-late reach to the far right,
just as I looked, synchronised,
to check another missed hour,
and I should retire at this point,
not too late, never, ever too late,
but for a man (of so many years)
it is so correct to consider such,
as others’ worlds spin in beer rounds,
long wet snogs, and streamed films:
I shall find comfort in a double bed,
propped-up pillows and hope,
whilst fitter men, soaked in bitter,
fuck-and-dance, dance-and-fuck,
in beer-washed sticky nightclubs,
swiped by Tinder, as I sleep soundly
through their infectious ribaldry,
and not have to hear the repeat
of chat-up lines I re-rehearsed
back in 1982, but never copyrighted,
then there was no intellectual theft,
instead we stole left-over half pints
and lengthening kisses with strangers,
to return to single beds in shared houses,
waking to cold kebabs at ten past ten.
Dinner for Pooh
Pooh and Eeyore
were spotted down town
dinner for two,
the c#nt and the clown,
whilst out on the street
their free limos purred,
poisoning the air,
as the pair conversed;
a meeting of minds
in a New York bar,
then back to the day jobs
to cause more harm.
Story HERE
Mutants
Princess Anne loves
her genetic crops –
she’s inbred-proof
they really work
There’s other experiments
in mutation –
displaying success
beyond expectation
Trump and Putin
re-mixed the truth
and now the States
is democratic proof
that all it takes
is a misogynist’s grab
to be Putin’s pussy –
sat there on his lap
This isle, set adrift
by Farage’s capers
is limp as cold chips
wrapped in newspaper
& its turning into
another Gulliver’s find –
becoming a nation
of the very small kind
As toxic shocks
of religion have shown
mix god with politics
and here Hell will grow
add in racism –
bestow false hopes –
and the future becomes
a right royal joke
Mutants
Princess Anne loves genetic crops,
she’s inbred-proof it really works,
there’s other experiments in mutation
displaying success beyond expectation:
Trump and Putin re-mixed the truth,
and now the States is democratic proof
that all it takes is a misogynist’s grab
to be Putin’s pussy; sat there on his lap.
This isle, set adrift by Farage’s caper,
limp as cold chips wrapped in newspaper,
is turning into another Gulliver’s find,
becoming a nation of the very small kind.
As toxic shocks of religion have shown
mix god with politics and here Hell will grow,
add in racism, bestow false hopes,
and the future becomes a right royal joke.
The Reader
A slight detour on the way home
to find my maybe-Quaker silence,
there, behind the shelved volumes,
in the near-silent reading room,
under zero gravity conditions –
just an old man’s licked turn
of an immaculate newspaper,
upon which he then comments,
so entering an amplified communion
with his just-arrived lady friend:
‘Shall we abandon this place?’
is his loud enquiry, almost to all.
And with his launch our vacuum
of unspoken words returns.
Numbered
He was born too late for ’21,
by ’68 he burnt with the charge:
Delivered 1950 in Bogside,
(part-named after Pope Pius XII),
the second of seven of Derry,
by fifteen years old a butcher.
Then to other blood at eighteen,
(after Fitt was struck in ’68),
and just one year later he was
Derry’s second-in-command:
A man at twenty-one counting
the dead after a bloody seventh day.
Politics’ cloak worn in the early 70’s,
but Mountbatten died on Shadow V:
Your man was the IRA’s number one,
that day when eighteen sons died.
By ’93 he was welcomed in London,
seeking peace within Number 10.
He lived 3,500 weeks, two sides,
and over that time 3,500 died.
The Piano
I lifted the hinged lid
of our upright piano
to find the centrifugal
of her studied song,
to listen to the hammers’
strikes, soft and loud,
in her found piece
on well-rehearsed keys:
but all I could sense
was what I breathed in,
back with the same smell
of my grandfather’s home,
sat again in his foreign fug
of deep wax and old wood,
back to a lost performance
sent by the piano’s opened belly:
There I slipped the cloy of voices,
to explore his own orchestra
of orderly outdoor plantings,
to escape the staining odours.
The Last Man in Europe
I see Eric Blair, upright, thin,
his bottom lip fag-lowered,
stiffly at his carried Remington,
posed at the high round keys,
which he knew too well, the sound
of a-e-i-o-u, those strikes
at very-necessary English vowels,
on fret-ish presses, in haste, to complete
The Novel – over coughs, those near-death
rattled expulsions, then later
to another hospital, long after a sniper’s
bullet fell him, blood-mouthed, in Spain.
He removed all his loved from the centre
to the offset Isle of Jura, an Astor invitation,
to her blanket bogs and Brecan’s whirlpool,
which his one-legged brother-in-law swam:
Eric could not row from that same draw,
instead he was guided to a shipwreck
upon a skerry, only to drown,
not much later, in a rip-tide of blood.
She Walked Out
Touch lightly his then bared back,
so harden his limp-loose skin,
walk close into unplanned shadows,
test his strength in kisses of sin,
offer yourself over would-be lovers,
those harpies who prop the bar,
remove him from lowly temptations,
place your centre in his cold hands,
let his fingers then loosen your hair,
and pull hard on your buttoned-self,
strip him down in your unsaid dreams,
gorge on him, let him fill, live well.
Derek Walcott, 1930-2017
‘Rhyme remains the parenthesis of palms,’
possibly misquoted, by myself, not the man,
that islander, playwright, poet, and giant,
gifted in language: ‘one of the chosen.’
Born under flesh-stained colonial rule,
he ran fast ‘cross the pink law of the Empire’s tongue:
stood huge on a platform, with Seamus and verse,
to see off the trains commuting their words.
It was the tidal returns, the moon’s low fold,
which refilled the pen he always held:
that implement, squat, was his quick mouthpiece,
the wordy, Saint Lucian, commander of language.
Along Brodsky, and Heaney, he will loudly reverb,
as his silent waves rise on sand-scribed words:
and the triumvirate will laugh at their own bawdy jokes,
in their office of tongues those three foreigners spoke.
The Flood
Evangelina Chamorro Díaz
climbed, primal, from the flood,
risen from muckled timbers,
smothered in Creation’s mud.
Heavy oxen struggled for land,
as Jesus Hidalgo filmed the girl,
some held out calloused hands
to return her to this world.
The deluge, instructed by God,
heaven-sent to test belief –
the sunken cattle didn’t know,
because God is a lying thief.
Evangelina Chamorro Díaz,
on slowed limbs from that slime,
an ascent of natural selection,
proving God isn’t on our side.
Eppur si muove
“And yet it moves”
was his response
to the given freedom
after arguing with God
about the spin
of the ‘great light’ sun –
his telescopic facts
which the church unspun.
Still their untruths shine,
ever since Day Four:
theology blocks
heliocentric thought.
The Funts
The foul-mouthed family
held court in the bar,
tossing “f#cking” and “c#nt”
in their expletive spars:
Sharp threats of a knifing,
came too easy, too quick,
that night of hard curses
got me peeved, thinking this,
I may have to frequent
a family-free pub:
A more friendly local,
With no fucking cunts.
Ozymandias
Lifted from water, brown as the Nile’s,
he was found under Cairo’s dust-slums,
in a bare-foot place of disrepair,
(another ruin to make Shelley smile),
given up, again, to the constant sun,
him, the lost King, Ozymandias.
uncovered, “boundless and bare” –
from under the city’s ruined piles,
in a three-tonne bucket, he becomes
the brief provider of a foul rain,
as the mud, which was newly carved,
slipped back to the dragged-at hole
from which he, the busted Ramses,
was shifted, ignobly pulled.
News Story Here
My Work
My work, the drawn-up stuff,
takes me to chair-rattled halls
and outwardly fabulous hotels,
but these days I visit on-line
to inspect the not-right spaces,
to then conjure in the nothing
of their rent-echoed rooms
such ideas and extents of build
that will last hours, days
or weeks, but never much more:
My work, the drawn stuff,
does not last long, a soft recall,
like that of a night with an escort:
I let them fuck me with their ideas.
The Son of the Wind
John Surtees, CBE 1934 – 2017
‘Figlio del vento’
this knight was called
by the motoring fraternity
from which he won all,
but he was never bestowed
a higher ranked honour,
that master, that maven,
the lord of horse power:
Championship titles
were his laurel-rewards,
perhaps no need
for the touch of her sword.
Donations to: Henry Surtees Foundation
Practice
She plays her scales
on our upright piano,
her late hour practice
is appassionato.
Her traveling completed,
enough notes pressed,
the white keys gleam
in this switched darkness.
I revel in the room’s
serene composure,
I am left alone
in our echo chamber.
I hammer this review
into lowly verse,
my midnight rehearsals
are never heard.
The Hulking Giants
East of Polegate,
as the cars fly by,
stand the three farmers
arcing their scythes:
Each a proud labourer
sweeping the field,
with clean cut blades
they slice nature’s yield.
As I drive alongside them,
breathing diesel’s spill,
I cannot understand
why we tilt at windmills.
We Few, We Happy Few
I could steal a line from Henry the Fifth,
but his battles were not with himself,
(he fought the French, which we can’t,
or else we’ll be fighting Knockaert).
Instead I’ll offer you my crass words
at this last phase of our season’s churn:
From Falmer’s low dip in our rolling county
The Albion will lift that long lost trophy.
Nine battles left in our thirty-year war,
nine matches, each, an Agincourt:
our long balls will let fly into the box,
to be buried in their hearts by a swift Baldock.
From the sure ranks of our mighty defense,
led by Bruno’s unwavering strength,
with Stockdale’s saves and domination,
we see Chris’ matchless machinations –
his tactics and plotting of every battle,
needs his foot soldiers to win every tackle,
across the pitch, from Dunk to March,
Houghton’s orders are: ‘Keep your guard’.
Our final throw in this season’s thriller,
is a match away at Aston Villa,
but ‘Gulls please win the Championship,
‘gainst Bristol City, here, at The Amex.
The Girl from the Hotel
She left her job
at The Mandarin
to finally feel
the London sun,
to another routine
in another place,
her future shifted
into the day.
She made her escape,
back to the sky,
leaving the sick
and trays behind.
Outside the rain
of London greyed,
a stolen light –
sodium replaced.
But she flew past the doorman,
shouting ‘Goodbye!’
The girl from the hotel
danced out from the night.
For My Physician
You, with gilt-framed diplomas,
please sit for my dull certificate:
I am to lecture you about pain,
since your grasp is so inadequate.
It is the norm, we are born to screams,
the cuts and tears in every childbirth,
in which all mothers are victims:
Dear physician, you are too averse.
Here I sit in your consulting room,
where you ‘tut’ at me about booze,
as I twist under angered muscles,
my nerve-ends twitch, hurt, adduced.
All the time within my skin,
are such thrusts throughout my frame,
spiked and sliced, in feet and hands –
my digits gloved in pangs again.
When taking notes in my lecture
feel the smooth scribe, no hard design,
unsuited for people like me,
struggling to pen ‘anodyne’.
Alice
Down by the empty river bed,
the Todd, ‘usually dry’,
amongst litter and remnants,
sat a lone Aboriginal, dazed,
as if all this had just occurred,
and she was the last on her land:
her rheum-run eyes fixed mine
and she knew everything about me:
‘Miss Pink’s gone,’ she said,
as she pushed a black strand
of such dark hair from her face,
and she turned away, her work done.
Claudio, No! by Gary W. Lineker
You came to Leicester,
a silver fox to our pack,
the grey Tinker Man,
whom we’ve now sacked:
Claudio! Claudio!
You got me to strip
down to my shorts
– my crispiest bits.
To get me there
you proved me wrong,
you took my team,
at five thousand to one,
up to the top
of the Premiership,
but then you got dumped
for tinkering with it.
Alas you are gone,
no more punditry pokes,
I’ll live with the title,
and ignore Shearer’s jokes.
My pants are pressed,
my abs are tight,
I am now ready for
the relegation fight.
The Surveyor, Online
Her screen offerings in selfless forms
adorned or bare – she shared her allure
Of course – he preferred her nakedness
which so shamed his own rucked flesh
There is a distance he has yet to guess –
she stretched out on his bed – undressed
Would she lie for him – tongue and back –
to provide his review with an easy abstract?
No longer there – mere pleasant thoughts –
to move from such – no more he sought
E030619
Freelance
I have worked too hard
and am dead on my feet:
this lost time is recorded
across a hundred invoices,
thousands of hours stamped
by receiving bookkeepers,
who will be ‘sure to pay’ me
way beyond thirty days:
and I will work hard, again, at
getting those payments in
for designs and late hours,
my long-dead work.
The Fighting Temeraire
Apart from the obvious creases,
and immediate grey effects,
a flabby jowl from rich indulgences,
comes the breaking of our extents:
Once loose, no plot, our lives,
now rotting in unsure depths,
so we face a towed-to future,
to be beached in shallow dread:
The Fighting Temeraire repeated
on the walls of sheltered flats,
reprints from London visits,
an obsolescence, reduced to scrap.
Do not put me in a care home,
those stinking broken berths,
let me ease off, with the pull,
let me drift without tow ropes.
F5
‘The years teach much which the days never know.’
Ralph Emerson
Half a century has passed,
of my oblivious education:
Valves glowed behind Bakelite,
those wireless invocations,
mail was flap-rattled –
some bore oddity stamps,
wearing cent-priced strangers,
sent from inky confidantes.
My search was inherited,
in spine-bust encyclopaedias:
I learnt the word ‘concentric’,
and skipped the Roman Empire.
Medicinal Purposes
This empty bottle
is the evening’s measure
of my own drink units;
I am going against
the approved dosage,
proving salubrious,
whilst prescribed pills
bring on such nausea,
akin to a hangover.
This morning’s disposal
of that cleared bottle
is my recycled marker,
of an evening passed,
to this new day blessed.
The Triangle
Past that rough triangle
off Heath Road, Weybridge,
a slow junction lined
by gloom-slimmed birches,
these woods we all knew
as the murder patch,
where a woman was killed,
his low theft gone wrong,
and a foul faked rape
by other thrust means,
(facts then unknown):
we kids were alive to
her near place of death,
there scoured by detectives’
metal detectors:
and we looked for shadows
on every pass,
we innocents whelped
on his criminal act.
An Australian
An extra brother
was found post-mortem,
their mother lay shunted
on a locked-in gurney;
and so the drawer-hunt
was left, aborted,
stopped by finding
of an unknown’s journey;
‘the solution back then’
export the rebus,
her secret posted
to an empire – still burning.
Their mother outlived him
with her feelings,
in the found letter,
a secret hard blow:
‘He carked it,’ it said,
‘Tyres ripped, squealing.’
And that was all
to ever know:
A sibling departed
twice before them,
a brother, shipped,
sent a time ago:
Do not seek history,
do not go again,
that is the cruelty
put on women.
The Border
Should we care
that a man was held
upon re-entry
to Trump’s citadel?
A real American,
Muhammed Ali’s son,
stopped at the border
for his religion:
Detained for beliefs,
for his father’s choice,
once the loudest,
most American voice.
The Storm
There, feel suspicion
shifting, with
the volute of winds,
drilled, air-cracked,
this wooden floor,
almost set lifting,
with me tied-to,
in Ulysses contract,
waiting upon
a messenger’s distract:
A low across
my nervous squall,
you, my storm,
could destroy this all.
And I shall sleep
through falling trees,
as I did once before,
in another place,
where I was split,
felled to my knees
by a lover, me, cut,
redundant, disgraced
by her mis-order,
my love misplaced,
becalmed upon
her blunted bent:
I descended Leith Hill,
the storm then spent.
The Picture
That slightness
in her captured self,
artfulness in over-lit
exposure: an eye
upon her white skin,
heightened by arts
on her smooth canvas:
to be closely examined,
a laudatory touch
in better conditions:
now an old man’s job,
to be the critic.
The Tide Mill
This unwelcome
wash of fatigue –
a tide – a fall
from awareness –
felt in tipped eyes –
cross-stitched
by my ill-fit disease –
me – an early riser –
not any longer –
as this wave drags
Parents (sic) Evening
I return to my schooling
over parquet flooring,
in repeats of bruised corridors,
between their mending places,
but now to hear about bug fixes
and performance improvement.
This Parents Evening of the lost,
(always missing an apostrophe?),
in a maze worthy of Daedalus,
where hard logarithms rule
my expanding distance from kids:
I compare and contrast –
no more cradle-to-cane
as we follow our children,
from report to report,
from people young enough..
and that overload returns –
I still misuse my apostrophe’s.
The Artist’s Poem
In my dreams, there is silence,
not that conscious switch-off
for the rare library visits,
missed out, not muting devices,
no, not that easy click,
but another longer lull,
down the line of a pen:
a stalker’s murderous silence,
that of me, the fasted hunter,
treading, tarried, slowed over
kindling’s dry threats to snap:
in my sleep – that silence of captures.
Small
You, mine,
ever-untouched
a local distance,
my unexplored
smallest thing,
my yet-to-erect,
my yet-to-strip,
huge-to-be mistress,
still without a cry
under me, here,
your Fisher King,
moved, no place,
a groin-wounding.
Gone
It is hard to know
where time has slipped,
how each of our days
are torn, tossed words,
and within such trades
we seek to quip,
our histories writ
by mis-use of verbs –
those thrown at things,
which will always hurt;
and we’ll settle to books
in our double bed,
with singular thoughts
to be left unsaid.
No Country
You know, no more
war-won rewards,
the demobbed wonder
of victory-fixed asset
(assured recovery):
Hope is broken, redacted,
buffed wards pulled asunder.
Weep for our withdrawn beds,
now priced up, re-numbered.
Mrs. M
Risen, our ghost,
on this landing,
her, embalmed,
our prior owner,
wishing to leave,
without asking,
M. reduced
by a buried composure,
slighted under
daylight’s exposure.
Our eldest child
met her in his room,
dark, spectred,
unexpected there:
he slumped back
to sleep’s deep rheum,
in doing so she slipped,
rent back to air:
our review made her
his dreamt-slept affair.
Next Request
Listen, please listen,
I want to tear you apart,
this is my loudest
most immoral of pleads,
to be the next witness
to your dropped guard,
to have you bared now,
bring yourself on to me,
opened, turned out.
Honestly.
The Summoner
Your exhumed past
should not be here,
a dwindled forget,
such forms be gone:
feeling no cushion
as you now kneel,
on stiff prayer knees
for too long,
do not bow down
to history’s old song:
Summon no ghosts
under your sung spade,
leave those haunted houses
to others,
and turn your back,
walk the opposite way,
leaving your tools to rust
on the surface:
your past to rot
on undisturbed ashes.
The Late Shift, Again
Another ridiculous o’clock
finding me drawn at my desk,
hauling creativity and effort
from finite resources that,
when I am slow and upright,
need my re-engineered stick,
but not here, sitting, making
other worlds and other places
to help win Soho agencies
their prizes, small fools’ jewels:
My rude award is their money,
ninety days later, if I’m lucky.
Doc Martens
I remove these boots,
my long-trod armour,
made in a tool-racked
leather workshop;
Goodyear welted,
as craftsmen expect;
always double knotted,
like a tightly roped lover,
that fuck-snug-fit, laced,
too knowing, too close,
until the rub is too much
for me, then separated.
A Wall
Each imperial brick length
required malodorous acid
to be dippled, slow-brushed
(avoiding the old lime mortar),
applied to each unpainted face,
covering the exposed wall:
“Up, tight as possible,” she said.
“Right to the [recently plastered
and whitewashed] ceiling.”
My red canvas was four yards wide
(an old measure, antique, in keeping
with the building’s Edwardian lines).
I laboured, bent more, for a day,
etching with those rarely-exercised
dug out tools:
A paint scraper, a black hammer,
a quite unsure stepladder,
and two inherited wire brushes;
that last pair kept
over forty years to remind me
I am not the practical son.
Miracles
Upstairs, steam-dripped
by every breath,
becoming condensation
it sticks, a vertical film
on the inside of the windows
of the fan-packed top deck,
aboard the lane-swaying
Number 29 to Brighton:
I sit, as usual, with too much
of the bus-shift-and-tip;
meaning that my forever
poorly-travelled nausea
threatens, from somewhere,
to become a public thing,
to be my fellow passenger
(Otto’s) thrown-up problem;
so I roll my eyes inwards
to cheat my tilted brain,
and by the time we reach
the stop called Earwig Corner
I am away, off in another place,
to stored recall’s sinking edges,
inside the most private
of our human experiences:
So holding back the vomit,
with this old-time trick of closure,
of not looking out to half distances,
but instead by looking within
my journey is thus managed;
sight is restored by the push of mud
underfoot as we step off the bus
to witness miracles at The Amex.
Voyager Maintenant
Vous,
petite douce chose,
doit voyager,
doit visiter,
pour une journée,
une dernière fois:
Une dernière requête
traduit comme décès:
Pas plus de nourriture,
pas plus de boissons,
maintenant le temps
s’est écoulé:
Ces luxes égoïstes,
une telle prière,
cette demande:
À tout moment de la vie,
il est temps de vivre.
#CartepostaleàBannon
Cher Steve Bannon,
Comment redémarrer le mal?
Vous l’avez trop facile
mon altesse-droite,
vous avez votre chemin,
avec la haine, votre haine,
votre politique de quatre lettres:
Tenez leurs têtes courbées,
prendre leurs cœurs sombres,
et ensuite nourrir, si longtemps,
sur leurs intestins bouillonnés,
assaisonné de toss-politique,
raisonnement c’est tout pour eux.
Là, mon cruel ami,
est votre projet déplié
à construire avec l’iniquité.
Cordialement,
Mike Bell.
#postcardstoBannon
Dear Steve Bannon,
How to re-heat evil?
You have it too easy
my Alt-right friend,
you have your way,
with hate, your hate,
your four-letter policy:
Hold their bowed heads,
bake their dark hearts,
and then drizzle piss
on their bile-boiled guts,
seasoned with toss-politics,
reasoning it is all for them.
There, my cruel friend,
is your simple recipe
to cook with iniquity.
Regards,
Mike Bell.
Measured
I was taught to spot the imperfect years
by measuring, with eye and finger
the varied distances, the thicknesses
of those concentric, almost-whirled,
bark-marked lines in the bared-ankles
of cut trunks: Dendrochronology.
Counting back, to before I was born,
my smooth fingers touched the years,
and Dad recalled a distant summer
without enough rain (‘see the thin ring’),
when he felled a malicious child,
dragging him by the handy straps
of handed-down dungarees
through a dusty field of soft cow pats,
that bully face down, Dad ploughed
shit down his bib: he marked him.
At the bottom of Lime Tree Avenue
a bared examination of that past
with the removal of another tree,
rotten, untrusted to be above us,
all that is left is the raw-sawn stump,
of over a hundred imperfect years,
and I cannot touch the ring he was in,
as my finger is now too thick and rough.
Gifted, again..
Rise
She is slow – the River Ouse –
running muddied below Lewes –
there a capricious millpond –
but when she swells
under storms – off streams
Bevern and Northend
and the quick River Uck –
she reverts to ancient freshet –
swift to rise to redress
the forgotten flood meadows
now supplanted by tarmac –
She rushes such mistakes –
And then a stagnant retreat –
like some unabashed lover –
She leaves a long odour –
she is loathed-to-recede
and keep to the contract
made by tide charts and maps –
to stay inside banks and bends
without the town’s walls
E21018
Aside
It exists today, another foul descent,
where thousands of sickening acts are set:
Saydnaya – Assad’s concrete playhouse,
a lowly spectacle, directed from Damascus,
those dark rehearsal rooms set for Death.
He stands blindfolded, a metre above,
as if waiting on the missing prompt,
knowing this, now, is his unseen drop:
He prays too fast his final lines,
having suffered others’ rehearsal cries.
In the stinking cells, dragging overhead,
there is still no sign of anyone’s God,
instead an ark of the beaten remains,
humans left alive to endure the pain,
hourly woken by screams from this show,
which plays out each night on the floor below.
A last dance of kicks in strangulation:
The skinny ones flailing fast, hung prostrations.
Then, under direction, their legs are grabbed,
and with that embrace their final breath.
And we will watch, the show is streaming,
the dig and lift of Saydnaya’s murdered,
from under loose mounds in that desert:
Syria’s long dead then all laid head-to-toe
in the rewrite of Evil’s latest show.
Landings
They swayed on the deck
under throat-music chants,
heel-spun, with babies,
holding hope in their hands:
Welcome to Europe,
across uneasy borders,
where choices are streamed,
and the future’s disordered.
Fail Better
“All of old. Nothing else ever.
Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter.
Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”
Samuel Beckett
K.P.
Under this tilted roof,
as designed by me,
here briefly sheltered,
but no deft-certificate,
no kite mark of designer,
unlike your good self –
certification as artist,
qualified by eye and time;
but I am not wood-worked,
not equally level-pegged:
I am highly uninstructed,
except by constant practice,
in this low art of commerce,
deft in invoiced bullshit:
Here we sit, under my tilt,
and I advise you, with my art,
to fail, but only better.
The Coming
We must build dikes of courage
to hold back the flood of fear
Martin Luther King, Jr.
I no longer understand this aberrant world –
I am standing – ill – aged and weeping in confusion
Please – for me – explain
without repeated cliches
then I might hear you
and avoid a crossing
On this side of the brook I did not drink the dark rum –
the fresh blood in the water – the slaughterhouse run-off
That upstream slew was held
in the foul storm
by time’s broken trees –
dipped raw dams
But nature’s stoppages are made to give up
and her stick-jammed wall broke under the rising
‘This isn’t forever,’
I shouted to you
as blood clogged the current
and the gully turned red
When all that floats are the clots of dead men
then we will have gorged on the last of the world
B(No L)T
What is the point of lettuce?
A taste instantly forgetted:
the crunch, and soft chew,
does little for you
apart from being the ‘L’ in sandwich.
Drawing
Another day of distances
at my complicated desk,
workings-out/drawings-up,
a world, yet to be seen,
here conjured, cuff-rolled
under my sleights of hand;
I am a whore for every hour
at this, my digital alchemy,
turning fixed ones and zeros
into other fools’ short gold:
And when their rush passes,
designs met, now unamended,
I can then draw out my words
across other complications.
Parents’ Bays, Waitrose, Uckfield.
4th February 2017
To she who mouthed an obscenity
(because I parked in a Family Bay):
I hope we get to meet up again,
as I didn’t get to fully explain:
There is no excuse for what I did,
especially as I didn’t drive my kids;
instead it was me picking up paint,
these days a much heavier weight:
the problem is my hands always hurt,
my feet are crippled, my strength is burnt:
Concession is king in my brain disease:
Hey, I’ll soon forget your obscenities!
Coffee Shop
Here’s my retreat,
here’s where I go,
this mug, this refill
of purchased repose;
Louche between low chats
of fat latte ladies,
opposite capped men,
brusque and too matey:
Aglow screen readers,
the Twitter typed lovers,
drugged kids in buggies,
under suffocate of covers;
a blind date, or business,
a couple here meet,
slow in the choosing –
What the f*ck to eat?
I am served by angels
in tight branded aprons,
when they offer the menu
my life is then taken.
Naked Killer Dolls
One could stand by herself,
being a Pedigree model,
but her voice had gone,
her real hair discoddled,
knots of locks trimmed
by nibbling vermin.
Two dolls from the loft
in one box, both hiding:
I brought them down,
as found, unbidden,
with rolled back eyes:
old toys, MADE IN BRITAIN.
From the same place
a thin negro doll,
but more limbs missing,
no hands to hold.
They sit mute and watchful,
reading us, the shocked,
with unabashed stares
and glass-eye looks.
We play tricks on the kids,
which becomes quite droll,
the unexpected placing of
those naked killer dolls.
The Visitor, 1984.
Recall is now grey scale,
but I once dreamt in colour
without any gnaw of limp,
or hint of restricted reach:
back when stiff was good:
And I would wake to this:
Eight AM, clear-road Sunday:
Floored up the A316,
in my stripped-down Landie,
roof-less, screen-dropped,
me, blown, almost removed,
with the doortops off:
I circled, again,
old Trafalgar Square,
to corral, with fumes,
the climb-shined lions,
those I once ascended,
(now boxed snapshots).
I then accelerated
under Admiralty Arch,
to bomb down that drive,
The Mall, a red carpet
of tarmac, on my whirred
agricultural tyres,
fast past the Jacks
of Buckingham Palace,
and then out, away,
to the Home Counties,
where my rough thoughts
took someone else’s wife, again.
Addlestone Crossing
There to see my father,
propped-up in a polished box,
one that my eldest brother,
chose, on the basis of, what?
Death was still too sour to us,
the parlour’s air throat-clogging,
this feared place of passing youth,
ten yards from the level crossing:
Often halted by its turned gates,
& scouring spin of wheels,
on our way in and out of town,
with Dad & his thousand skills:
he could dissect a battleship,
break apart any gun,
extemporize upon anything,
with sketch & rule of thumb.
Now boxed-in, he tarried,
we’d leave him, lonely, there:
my brother could not stand
the parlour’s execrable despair:
In that time, almost gone,
I learnt about death’s prop:
that last lesson from my father,
& our paths no longer crossed.
Addlestone Crossing
There to see my father,
propped-up in a polished box,
one that my eldest brother,
chose, on the basis of, what?
Death was still too sour to us,
the parlour’s air throat-clogging,
this feared place of passing youth,
ten yards from the level crossing:
Often halted by its turned gates,
and scoured spin of wheels,
on our way in and out of town,
with Dad, and his thousand skills:
he could dissect a battleship,
break apart any gun,
extemporize upon anything,
with sketch, and rule of thumb.
Now boxed-in, he tarried,
we’d leave him, lonely, there:
my brother could not stand
the shop’s execrable despair:
In that time, almost gone,
I learnt about death’s prop:
that last lesson from my father,
our paths no longer crossed.
Fear of Climbing
I have my inner tremor,
my lower jaw mumbles,
my right hand joins in,
connectedness concurs
to plot, and I cannot
easily climb the stairs,
instead piss in the garden
the less-stepped option –
until this house (for-the-fit)
is re-made, is bomb-proofed
to the extents it can be,
because I cannot live
like this and still be,
I’ll not let inched timbers
and imperial bricks unsettle me.
God’s Acre
Weddings and funerals, in the rare trip-place,
butted stone markers, dropped fags, and ill-grace:
Here Lies.. (A.N.Other) her time out-of-date,
alongside the latest, a brief recall in plate.
Our churchyards cursed by poets-come-thieves,
those poachers of hymns, and cheats in belief:
Let them stride loose, between slabs, low laid,
the church a salvation for those on crusades;
a theme park for tourists, a tick on their list,
a walk with the dead, shot quick on phone-sticks;
slowed-up in the aisle, as their eyes look to glass,
God’s kindles of colour can’t be caught on iPads.
In the yard scans the poet, as the thief wanders wide,
he is often disturbed, God is not on his side.
Continuation
This is my constant (since childhood):
along a rough path of almost-identified
bird song, high-scattered;
but I am no longer drawn to the slip and suck
of uneven grasses, to be welly-filled
so my socks squelched:
Not over the land topped by last year’s
stamped brambles: As ever the grey sky
has dropped,
she rests lightly on this damp copse,
where locked-in trees are north-greased
against climbers.
The birds I once shot, our farmers’ pests,
ruminate overhead on bowed wires,
adjusting with flap-claps,
and, still, ever, that distant roll of
tarmac breeze, of sped tyres
on a constant road.
Morte a Venezia
A driven route
without tarmac,
re-laid by each
warming tide
through that
visited stilt-city
of floods marks
and high arts,
where a man
can drown,
whilst thrown
racist weights
and life aids:
“He is stupid,”
as recorded.
“He wants to die,”
they cried.
Pateh Sabally,
not a Venetian,
was left to drown.
The Doppelgänger
St Theresa sat
on Trump’s stiff knee,
to him she was
a limey Queen,
but in her head she’s
Thatcher’s clone:
‘This dame’s my idea
of a woman I’d bone!’
Perhaps the future’s
perfect couple,
they both agree
to cause less trouble.
Hand-in-hand,
off they go,
but he’ll dump her soon
in Guantanamo.
The Past
I traced the lines
of my family tree,
my inherited myth
of Bonny Prince bastards,
but instead,
I prove poor breeding:
I dug up the broken,
coal miners and others,
I looked up tough people;
over the border
I counted the uneducated,
the low-paid, the lodged,
them, tight-packed, tired,
those given no quarter:
Always equal to the drag
my women, the mothers,
the pretty-named daughters,
working through the pain,
and the losses under God?
The census is short on facts.
The Surveyor
I am measuring my life
in Caroline’s greetings,
the mortgage repayments,
in slow sips of hot coffee,
the stick-tapped steps,
in unanswered emails,
thrusts of my toothbrush,
in the filing of VAT returns,
the social media updates,
in trips up the High Street,
the ‘phone battery warnings,
in the hours of lost sleep,
and the distances between.
Newick Ghosts
There are no palpable ghosts
in this slept Sussex town
of three pubs, all dark,
beyond those dead flags
on the village green,
odd tablecloths, emblems
stiff under the freezing fog.
Nor are there are any stars,
just winks of burglar alarms.
I walk the dog for pisses
and sniffs, past the slept
and snored, those locked-in,
under tugged-at wed duvets.
The path is our slippery task,
so we adopt the road’s dashes
to guide us, me fog-blinded.
A clicked floodlight wakes
to make us both turn, fooled
by the automatic other presence.
A Letter from Maria’s Seat
Quem te deus esse jussit*
1.
Lady Maria-Josepha Holyrod,
a quill-scratcher of enquiries,
sailed badly from Brighthelm:
‘L’Unique Miss Madam’ –
Mother re-anointed Maria
in ink and long-hand love
in her last address to her child,
her travelling sweet witness
to sword-thrust royal-shifts
across bloodied France,
posted from the girl’s carriage
on visits to grande houses.
2.
Maria looked from the mound,
Sheffield Park, settled in nature,
‘I live almost in the Garden’
she wrote, March 9, 1794:
Her planned wood view, back
on all that her family owned,
the land, the trees, the life,
but no more such a sure future:
She wrote in fear of local orders:
‘Drive the Cattle from the Coast’.
She signed her many letters:
Adieu! Ever yours, MJH.
*Learn the person God has commanded you to be
SOURCES:
Google Books: Girlhood of Maria Josepha Holroyd [Lady Stanley of Alderley] – Link HERE
Royal Collection: – Link HERE
Our Last Frost in Sussex
08:24 and I am touching that poke of a cold God
under unornamented woods
now contained by us – for the good of us
February is sugared overnight – here underfoot
The stripped hedgerow is briefly lit – crowned
by the blinding hour
Those umber-dipped high stick fingers
touch that very last of His
visible burnt presence
Along a raised path – my short timber route
over flood-expectant meadows – a convenience
for us dog walkers – commuters – drunkards
It has a ship’s complaint under my overweight –
a seaworthy distrust of an unstrapped cargo
My stick a peg leg poke across her slippery deck
Greater tussock sedges – rare Sussex clumps of grass
are green icebergs – gathered – they wait for an onslaught
by knotweed and other foreigner floods in this field
after the cold-breath time has been put aside – quicker
with each warmer year – a woodpecker stopped
in Buxted – 08:32
The Last Frost in Sussex
08:24. I am touching the last of a cold God,
over unevens, under unornamented woods,
now contained by us – for the good of all:
February over-sugared, overnight, here underfoot;
the stripped hedgerow is briefly lit, crowned
by the blinding hour, those umber-dipped
high stick fingers touch the very last of His
visible burnt presence.
Along the raised path, the short timber route,
over the flood-expected meadow, a convenience
for us led dog walkers, commuters, drunkards:
It has a ship’s complaint under my over-weight,
a sea worthy distrust of unstrapped cargo,
my stick a peg leg poke across her slippery deck.
Greater tussock sedges, rare Sussex lumps of grass,
green icebergs gathered, wait for the June onslaught
of Japanese knot weed, a foreign flood in this field
after the cold-breath time has been put aside, quicker
with each warmer year. The woodpecker stopped
in Buxted. 08:32.
Everything’ll Kill You
Toast’ll kill you
and chilled spuds,
avoid all contact
with food you love:
Another food scare,
avoid the fridge,
do not eat
then you’ll live.
News story here
Dear Assassin
I want to wake
to an assassination
a bullet, a bomb,
death’s assignations:
Please kill the fucker,
before he kills us,
its a simple deal,
Trump is a runt.
The Echo Chamber
No single flat surface,
polished, inconstants,
chromed undulations,
unmathematical béziers
in every direction,
here enough space,
briefly leaving a void,
always re-filled by you
never a long vacuum,
a place for your small voice
and sharp intakes of breath
of equalised complaints
to be set free, to bounce,
then back on to yourself,
to make more sense
as they return, many times.
The Last Man in Europe
Tappety-tap, tappety-tap, ting
[return]
He sits with narrowed-elbows
under fag smoke and cough –
typing – close to mechanical
Making English a simple press
That haircut – number two up to
the darkness – and I confuse him –
Mr. Orwell – with Mervyn Peake
Behind him – a rat-run trench
Fascists’ bullets sing out for him –
like they do now – for equal people
in other wars of shot hopes
Tappety-tap, tappety-tap, ting
[return]
Imperial confusions –
then he went to the heart of it
This man could pull a gun
as much as a metaphor –
although the former killed
I saw him – in my head –
back to the fighting – not scared
but engaged in his war
with words – once done with blood
The last man in Europe
would spit blood near to it –
that remote island of death –
spin in a dinghy on currents –
and he tells me – dead – to edit
Tappety-tap, tappety-tap, ting
[return]
E100619
Women’s March 21st Jan ’17
Don’t count
the numbers,
don’t read
the placards,
don’t see
the children,
no reports,
be inaccurate:
Instead count
on women,
stood again,
this world
is screwed
by us idle men.
London (2017)
Apologies to William Blake
I wander down each one-way street,
Near where the two way Thames flows.
A’glow on every face I meet
OS of weakness, screens of woe.
In every tweet of every Man,
In every Infants swipe of fear,
In every post: in every blog,
the Facebook lies I hear
How the Big Issue boys cry
Every converted Church appalls,
And the hapless homeless sigh
Lie in doorways in bankers’ walls
But most through midnight streets I hear
How the Tinder-swiped do curse
Blasts the new-born Infants tear
And blights with plagues the NHS hearse
Moon Landing, Today
There the remains
of the moon,
underlined
over blue,
by a seemingly
equal distant
west-headed
jet-left contrail:
Flights of J.F.K.
and how hope
used to work,
not too well,
but a bit more
than this day
of a swearing in.
Sick-Wrecked
Cancel the cancer ops,
sack the GPs,
bring this ill nation
to its pained knees;
ignore the prostates,
remove all faith,
God is protected,
the NHS ain’t.
No more guarantees,
no empty beds left,
nothing for free,
we are sick-wrecked.
A Pint
With a gold harp
on the glass,
the chilled weight,
reduced by tips
under the creamy
froth, which grips
the inner barrel
of the pint glass:
Framed over
the beer mat,
that final inch:
Avoid metrication!
For this is Guinness,
my old libation.
Laying a Fire, Again
He would lay, again, the open fire,
between night shifts, his own dark art in
balled-up shoe-polished newspapers,
rolled over last night’s cooled coals,
that base of almost volcanic remains,
near to weightless in its new state.
There, my father, 1976, recycled
in his making of each night’s blaze –
yesterday’s news, and yesterday’s coals.
As I bent over my own dark bunker,
now forty years later, I returned to him;
we shovel-filled my black coal scuttle:
He’d have never commented
about the bloody tang of damp and steel:
Dad’s metal was clean – submarines and guns,
polished and oiled, triggered functions,
only ever working if maintained well,
ready to reduce – their design to kill.
The stove in my studio, that scruffy servant,
would have been buffed and dusted
if my father were that burner’s owner:
I drop in a fire-lighter, the too-easy ignite,
tip coals over kindling. Warming my own shift,
my dead father and I still work late for our kids.
Platform
Unexpectedly
on the platform,
our meeting,
with two languages
our common enemy,
but also an equaliser
to tie our tongues,
before they move
with each other,
and I find, again,
your mouth on mine.
First Love
For NK
Ten minutes past five
30-11-16
That date to be etched
The timing – pre-teen –
verging on adult –
he told her he loved her
with a kiss and a grip
His surfacing from under
where he’d long hid
with his mumbled voice
to be heard in this world
above that white noise
He sensed her missed beats
and then brought her love –
his simple offering
which was more than enough
E090819
Origins
My three brothers are dead,
but two remain quite alive:
Here in my small town
they will never arrive;
both hunched back in Surrey,
they’ll not communicate,
much like our mother,
with her acidic berate:
I am, for forever,
the accidental one,
being that, her error,
she shuns her third son.
First Fall
That white fall
outside my studio,
which kids
had anticipated forever,
now lay wet,
unhealthy, a let down
on this small island
of crap weather.
A Drowning
I stand and consider myself,
again bared by the common ritual
of the shower, my stripped admit
with this steam-blushed soaped nudity.
And an idle thought:
I am so far removed from the sea’s wash
which once set upon my ship-wrecked
predecessor, Edwin Porritt, son of William,
lost off Sunderland, there taken under:
He drank pints of brine, the choked round;
lit and directed by the full moon’s
weighted pull? Her, the false emitter,
the night’s harvester, the cutter of men.
I’ll not be dragged under by this pathetic wash
off the shower head, descended from Edwin,
my great-great grandfather, ship’s engineer,
struck from the family tree – ‘Drowned’.
And I step out, clean.
From this road
The razored lawn cemetery –
there – down from this road
with lonely St Dunstan’s
always kept distant – beyond
here – as a fixed backdrop
on the near-blind cliff-top –
a far sight now reduced
by a short-lived sea fret
as gulls in the foreground
rain-dance on the turf
to bring to their plate
too easily fooled worms
E090819
From the Road
Woodingdean, Brighton.
The razored lawn cemetery,
there, down from the road,
with lonely St Dunstan’s
always stood distant
as a fixed backdrop,
on the near-blind cliff-top,
the far site reduced
by a rolled sea fret,
as gulls in the foreground,
rain-danced on the turf
to bring up fooled worms.
West Pier, Brighton
Along the beach
to Kemptown,
the long way back,
beyond the curdle
of murmerations,
that over-shoulder
look to the sunset,
at the skinned bulk
of rotten dark piers,
with a low tide touch
to creme caramel sky;
bursting in and out,
the flexed shadow,
and translucency,
of clouded starlings;
their murmerings,
such sung things,
followed me home.
The Vicar of Newick
I drank with God’s labourer
in Newick, last night,
him without dog collar,
instead with a pint;
he regaled the fire-sided,
with joyous laughter,
as he heated over coals –
a forestaste of life after?
There stripped of his woolly,
sweated in the snug,
if Heaven were on earth,
his Heaven’d be a pub.
The last time in The Crown
we met up with Christ,
bearded, skinny,
a nice Jesuit type;
but that wasn’t God’s Son
who stood by the Vicar,
but a Nazarene-alike,
a slim, bearded hipster.
The Spirit was stronger
later on in the bar,
a quart of Jack Daniels,
over pints of Dark Star.
Routes
For CB & Flint
The briefest of expeditions –
gloam-reduced on unmarked
rough paths below Uckfield –
in frost’s shade – a steep
cut-back – a scuff of lost road
on our tugged walk along
the dip of a redundant drove
Sussex verges are now myths
of ribbons – tied-to mournings –
of days-limped bunched flowers –
of candles – air-pinched – below
roadside oaks – elms or beech –
there her young life leaked
after a deceleration – a kid
cut out by the steel saw and car
Our return home is assured
under our slow-stepped walk
on a lost-name route
on the lingering histories –
yet to be found – laid under tarmac –
only touched by the clod-split roots
of the oaks – elms or beech –
those tied-to fingerers of ghosts
E080119
Nil Health Service
Jeremy Hunt,
stand up you c*nt,
our #NHS is
not yours to spunk;
health is taxed,
not privatised,
fettle through rights,
not your lies.
Objectors
My father – his own father
was a conscientious objector –
My grandfather laboured
under a slow faith – assured –
by the Peace Pledge Union –
he mumbled as a lector
when turning – digging – veg
in the later world war –
and then in my early life –
Both battled the last century
over their long-dead causes
E07012019
The End of the World
Those men of Darwin do not dance
They prop their upper weights
on tanned arms over beer-glossed bars
as turned-from Sheilas oscillate
in hip-twisted-girl disco shapes
We had them – almost – choreographed
moves – swifter than drinks poured
by locals – those lit-girls entranced?
As if by us thin white English hordes –
we rout of travellers on their floor
I woke late to feel an end of my world
with a forced order to bed rest –
that night had left me pain-curled
in a ghost town – now unimpressed
by their ideal spot for a nuclear test
Days later you met me limping
under Uluru’s sunken otherness –
floored by my jiggering injury –
found dropped in her shaded base
as white men – white Australians –
shimmied across her pained red face
E271019
Fermata
For FM / FF
You looked from under
your fermata brow,
there over your right eye,
your cast unbowed
to time’s reduction,
or to time’s recourse,
as seconds stretched,
four senses soft-paused:
I, an Asura, stared
at your slightly dry lips,
eyes to your neck
past pearls, yet kissed;
I trailed down your throat,
I wished to cusp,
but only with sight
could I ever dare touch.
The sixth sense failed me,
that night sophime:
But under time’s arrow
you then became mine.
Out-patients
That underfoot scrape of vinyl
over the higher whisperings and
mutterings from around corners,
as ill trolley wheels, out-of-sync,
rattle off, out-of-sight, carrying stuff
through lazy automated doors,
which compress in slow motion,
those last few seconds before closure;
quick-step nurses and slower assistants
move between rooms and offices,
directing the sat-down, long-waiting,
the late-keeping and the early-attending:
Others, like me, unmoved amongst this.
Decoration, no OBE
You want to remove
our angled dado rail,
the one they fitted
(‘far too parallel’)
up the first flight
of carpeted treads,
I had agreed,
but now reverse
what I said:
It is to be replaced,
by an uglier design,
a Stannah stair lift,
to rail my climb.
Bell Hole, Isfield, East Sussex
At the confluence
of The Uck and The Ouse,
below an oak,
they scuttled a bell,
not quite like Dhammazedi’s,
not one requiring
a dozen white oxen,
as directed by
the witch of Slinfold:
But still equal to others’
sunken peals,
for children swallowed
on dared boat trips,
across the floods,
their names rung out,
by Saint Margaret of Antioch,
that nearby shadow of cross.
Gong
The British Empire’s gone,
stop pinning medals
and tainted gongs:
Yes, do reward our fabled,
but please remove
the Empire label.
Peace and War
Dad never tossed politics ‘gainst Him,
never pitched loud against Our Lodger,
perhaps that’s why He located again,
my liberal-leaning Grandfather,
who moved on quick, so soon after
He won a third wife, and her home,
a short cul-de-sac in Ottershaw,
embracing a widow, no more alone:
A new step-mother for Dad to endure,
for Dad to meet, and to peacefully enure.
2016 – British View
#Cameron did a runner,
#Corbyn did f*ck all,
St Theresa’s scared to do anything:
This year’s highlight? Ed Balls!
Value
I am humiliated by this decay,
its dragged moments I can’t avoid,
it lessens me, I will slope away,
to be cloaked in the duvet’s void:
There my limbs are less employed,
as am I, in a short-lived suspense,
over sleep-engineered springs,
to a place of brief recompense;
but with my being there I shrink,
my devaluation, one lasting thing.
Warehouse Lad
This is a return to hell,
sitting in a warehouse
of soft-play constructions,
and other people’s kids,
re-fueled by sweet drinks,
and me, here, trapped,
in seating which complained
under my current weight,
sofas impossible for a man
to rise from with any style.
Another dad, rather anxious,
up among the ricochet of kids,
in the net-safe towers of foam,
as we sat adults observe
his mismatched socks on show.
In the roof raw strip lights,
and foil-wrapped air-con,
take me back to other hours
of square feet, of a life spent
working in commercial sheds,
equal scaled-down hells
of my previous employments,
in look-alike high structures,
now called industrial units,
the new measure of lost time:
A lad clears the tables,
tipping purple drinks, chips,
and piled, untouched food
into a bucket: an hour of his life
equal to the remains on one plate.
The Old Boy
Grandfather was of a slipped generation
with his Bakelite-twirled-to radio stations –
tuned to his low-hums with orchestras
and his wound-up clock – that western sutra –
its regular pendulum his hands-free baton
conducting his lonely tea-mornings taken –
until he rolled his guard-rattling Raleigh
out of the garage – always wordlessly –
for his brief progress to priest-led prayers
down to the hymns and those-who-care –
His trouser leg rolled – clipped – chain-safe –
he pedalled away to kneel at God’s place –
I re-delivered his Guardian newspaper
to his emptied room – our in-house neighbour –
In such regular times I’d take a sneak –
a look inside The Old Boy’s suite –
His life with us was lived behind two doors –
the only bedroom with parquet-floors –
in that other place – not fully his own –
in his free chapel – there prayers alone –
beside his shelves of impossible books –
Schweitzer tallest amongst the hardbacks –
Some with his dead wife’s dated name –
but no further indications of her ever being –
That forensic examination of his living space –
with my untrained eye – I made mistakes –
I never read well his folds or light marks
which re-leafed books do often impart –
I now decipher those responses I get –
I am near his last age – and he gains my respect
041118
Frost, Australia
I was not disturbed
but soft-woken
by her dusted frost
blown in from England
as I was slow-coached
from behind her bare
pane-press of chills
waking to a cold face
Risen to climate’s change
in New South Wales –
it reduced my thin
expectation of clothing
E010219
Putin’s Law
Multiply subordinates,
not your rivals,
as Parkinson’s Law
stands, as it applies:
Nothing to do with
shuddered disease,
more about huge
bureaucracies:
A law equally applied
to the world’s leaders,
with their hidden desire
for sinister pleasures.
Putin has studied
this arcane resolve,
he’s running America
through Trump’s arsehole.
Distance
The distance, my distance,
on our late-traipse home,
we split, slipped in time,
stonewall of town’s slope,
to the bells’ commands
of Holy Cross Church:
with books, our language,
of moments mis-heard:
This distance, my distance,
you shall have to forgive,
as long as such distances
are not distances long-lived.
Gifted
It will be another end
to another slowing year –
my tightening body
under pain’s besmear
A letterbox drop –
cards on my hall floor –
there to remain
as I can’t bend any more
Christmas on pause –
slight hints of freeze
until the carer’s arrival
to attend to me –
if she turns up –
if she’s the same one –
my hour will lighten
and a bath will be run
A text from my child –
now a mum on her own –
they’ll be here by three
We are never alone
One lesson I’ve learnt
under disease’s deep rub
is that life is still wonderful
when treated with love
Better Lives. Together.
November is National Family Caregivers Month. The Parkinson’s Foundation is here for care partners and family members with support and guidance to help you build a better life with Parkinson’s.
E141119
Last Minute
‘Twas the last Saturday
before Christmas,
and a panic ensued,
a present for his mother,
even though she’s so rude;
you dive into Smiths,
lacking Xmas inspiration,
you come out carrying
others’ foul perspiration.
Instead buy a scarf,
from the crap-gift store,
but such selfless endeavour
doesn’t bring you rewards.
You’re home, empty-handed,
so knock back the red wine,
after all it’s Christmas,
you’re meant to unwind.
Open Ebay, hit ‘Search’,
and find her an online gift,
Christmas has been sorted,
now forget the old bitch.
NOE
The fret cut letters
should’ve spelt ‘NOEL’,
but were marked half price,
missing the ‘L’ now spelled:
‘N-O-E’ – it stated,
from a low-shelf place,
but ’tis the time of sales
and bargains are chaste:
It got snapped up
by a lady full of fun,
a Valentine gift,
for her man, her O-N-E.
Stations
There’ll be no guard
to help me board,
There’ll be no carer
to ease my sores,
there’ll be no beds
in a calm hospice,
there’ll be nil left,
no trace of grace.
4,000 Weeks To
And how to use
this allocation
well: Connect
with the same,
do not allow
any form of abuse,
become a philosopher
(or a published poet),
evacuate your mind
of ill-thoughts,
whatever you do
don’t be efficient;
meditate daily,
embrace all love,
do not delay
and waste less time:
Always avoid,
whenever possible,
an early death
(look both ways).
Five Bar
At our five bar gate,
with the quick-trap latch,
uneven in closing,
mis-fitted, ill-aligned,
is where I stood,
with a long view of your
approaching sadness,
and you stopped to talk,
after a usual pleasantry;
but then you gave to me
your knave-held cards,
a pair of bastard men,
living in different houses:
There I stood equal
to their low value,
in other dealings,
under different stakes:
I had to express doubt
in your maybe-boyfriends,
exposing their bluff,
as mine was once dealt.
Philipshame
Mr. Philip Davies,
Shipley’s own MP,
always votes to deny
womens’ equality:
There are many concerns
on his To Do List
(his Ladbrokes punts
are a bit hit-and-miss*).
Now sat on a committee,
one which he detests,
I’ll wager he’ll reduce
its odds of success:
He won’t help Parliament
smash any glass,
instead he’ll get
the ceilings reinforced.
Digging
With these lines, today’s commitment,
I revisit burials I have turned from,
the lowered place of shovelled history,
which, even under my reduced recall,
are things that shouldn’t have been:
Those minor indiscretions
which if dug up, levered, exhumed,
and stinking of the past’s decay,
would make you think less of me:
Those shallow graves best undisturbed.
Prison Riot
G4S,
a cost-cut solution,
taking a profit
from brick institutions,
except when the clients
create an affray,
this is privatisation
failing to allay:
the scrawl on those walls,
graffiti and sense,
underlines the obvious
political mistakes.
Commuters
Stationary, white
towel-wrapped,
having exited
the shower to stand
there for me,
before our drive,
a shared journey;
she dripped beads
off her bared calves,
marking the carpet
with spotted stains,
falling, raining,
as she rubbed, flicked,
her crop of dark hair,
then her right thigh
was glimpsed, exposed;
I sat, entranced.
A later time
I leant over her,
as she soaked,
the return trip;
I bit her nipples,
wetting my chin
in the clear water,
I bobbed for her then.
But she was always
the fruit, to be left.
Freunde
No kisses for St Theresa!
No Euro hugs for her!
This is us – Brexit Britain,
soon to be shown the Tür
You
You,
the seventeen million,
really f*cked it up,
by returning your decision
to vote f*ck off;
there will be no cash
tossed from that bus,
instead we will ooze
xenophobic puss:
Now long-term unwell,
because of your vote,
this country is broken,
your choice is no joke.
Rogue One: Review One
A sideshow, a bit part of the story,
in a galaxy far, far away;
never closer to any ending,
and Troopers’ aim, as ever, astray:
Rough Rebels yell loudly for glory,
with occasional laughs at their knobs –
lit buttons pressed too randomly,
but, still they do the job.
A gathering of weird alien species,
stood around their circular table,
future knights, again myth-making,
think the Force is more than capable.
With a cameo from a long-dead actor,
heavy breaths from the ever-buffed Darth,
Rogue One sits nicely in the box set,
big returns on a brand we all love.
Neoliberalism – The Box Set
Democracy is now a box set,
an entrance and exit farce,
a short comedy of situation –
laughter at Ed Balls’ odd dance.
We – the strapped-in audience
– with our contract, paying-to-view,
watch these series evolve,
produced by the political few:
They’ll direct the rape of services,
and write-out aged stars,
they’ll script the tawdry screenplay,
and expect us to play the parts.
Our rights have been lost to our stories,
no repeat fees paid for mistakes,
the masked bureaucrats run the studio,
they sweep aside the costly out-takes.
“True Democracy – A Filthy History”:
We sit before our sixty-inch screens,
we are dealt the marked House of Cards:
On sofas no one hears your screams.
Wardrobe
For BM
She is the girl next door,
there, ever-mirrored
either putting on
or, unequally, taking off
the considerations
of make-up, between
the piled demands of
revisions and homework
and the shouldering
of pressure – be correct,
even among friends:
her childhood is now
hung, stored, boxed;
she, these days, dictates
her wardrobe choice:
of what is to be kept,
or what is to be thrown.
An Apology
Aleppo, this day, will be
our unspoken apology
to those children gassed,
shelled – small witnesses
to our huge mistakes,
bearers of the fall-out,
each one reduced under
our ancient-held belief
of war within the cradle
of their civilization:
Our solution for peace
is to stand-aside,
until one side has won.
Retirement Plans for Nigel
Oh @Nigel_Farage
you are such an elf,
a giver of presence,
but only yourself;
a true little helper
to Euro-wide gifts,
what will you do
when no grants exist?
Off to blow Trump
-with other white men?
KKK calls,
a new outfit then?
When you’ve got a medal
off Donald-the-Trump,
(for services to freedom,
and great sucking up),
will you retire
from your very public life,
with your chain-smoked-fags
and warm British pints?
Hang the Barbour up,
next to a migrant,
make your German wife
re-do your ironing:
sharp creases down
your best baggy cords,
and a lovely trip to Spain
with your Tesco Rewards?
Margaret in Leather
She wears leather flares,
and fashionable loafers,
St Theresa of the nation
reclines on her sofa:
She’ll stretch for the Saudis,
the ones who arm-deal,
she ensures they crave missiles,
she sells righteous thrills.
Sniff her crossed thighs,
calf-sweated, hide-moist;
she has Thatcher’s eyes,
she has Margaret’s voice.
St Theresa will command
her ministerial messrs,
they’ll bow to her cries,
‘cos she wears the trousers.
Passion Notes
It was in local woods,
a tight thicket of birches,
where we went, as three
boys, over a silvered heath,
to that last kick-of-leaf place.
Here I was cast as a victim
in your impromptu war:
Your third, or fourth stone
caught me on my forehead,
in a thick-hit, spun at me,
bowled sports-fast, pitch;
almost a third eye opened
on my hand clapped brow,
no blood, but that helped me
to see I wasn’t wanted.
Pooh Bear Travels
Cameron has spoken,
but not to us,
instead he’s been paid
by the rich in the US;
his career rebooted
on the speaking circuit,
that place where failure
is circumvented.
And his old neighbour,
George-the-disjunct,
is raking in pounds
also speaking in tongues.
Three Men
Three men in the pub
laughed at ‘Bloody poofs’ –
spittle off their words,
guffaws with it’s use.
Next subject: ‘Croatians’
and dark politics of race;
this place I drink in,
is a stale hub of hate.
I try to guide my kids
across the fouling of life,
but how can I succeed
when the world now lies?
Foreign Parts
The Turks have bought Illustrious,
Lusty – as known to her crews;
launched by Princess Margaret,
when only warships would do.
The Near East will get to break her,
she’s going to be shaped into tanks,
or cans of low-calorie soda,
produced to sate the fat yanks;
but neither tin will save us,
as our slimmed-down navy sinks,
minimal strength is far healthier,
with reduced-fat defence.
We’ll send them Boris (instead),
barking like a rabid pooch,
he’ll get back our oldest enemies,
every time he opens his mouth.
But St. Theresa’s had enough
of her blonde Secretary’s games,
she’s sending him up to Sleaford,
to fight UKIP’s foreign gains.
Projection Booth
In the airless cupboard
of our sixties new-build,
in that three storey house,
up on the second floor,
we gathered, brothers,
to delight in the wonders
of the boxed projections,
a Chad Valley picture show
of Thunderbirds Are Go;
with fat batteries loaded,
like dad’s shotgun cartridges,
in the spring-tight blue barrel,
and then, a twist of focus,
our slide show began,
on the whitewashed wall:
Us on a shelf, in the warm.
Heat Exchange
December bird song comes
through the slid-up sash,
cracked because of
the unbearable heat in here:
And I am advised
that I have too many layers,
which I am told to wear,
but ‘not now, my dear.’
I lie, a bed-bound choice,
under eyes so heavy they hurt,
as the house drains of voices;
I cool commensurately.
But I have work to do, as ever,
and I will recall reduced strengths:
I shall stand before my empty desk
to conjure, from nothing, creation.
Turn Off
Turn off the news,
shut down the feeds,
silence the radio,
unplug your TV,
look beyond bylines,
avoid the shouts,
blank out the posts,
turn from the crowd,
reduce all exposure,
pull down the blinds,
this day is yours,
remain safe in your mind.
Watched
Over the milky coffee,
at that scattered table,
he tried not to undress you;
he employs distractions,
but fails, again, to subdue
his notion of you stripped,
of your dreamt breasts
rested on that cold wood,
your ribs riding as you lift
the hot drink to your mouth,
and the finger that you use
to wipe the froth from your lip,
is the same finger yet to go
near his cup-rattling cock:
The dregs of his latte cools.
Angry Santa of Tunbridge
Today I met Santa Claus,
queued up for the 29,
off to Tunbridge Wells,
he was stood quietly in line.
I just had to stop and ask
how work is for him now,
he replied quite sternly:
They’ve removed the sense of wow..
..it’s a mad, mad world we live in,
child abuse… kids left to die:
I’ve stopped all home deliveries,
in case I’m banged-up Christmas night.
I’ve now outsourced to Hermes,
it’s as efficient as the sleigh:
And what’s it bloomin’ all about?
More credit cards to repay!
I left him, stood there fuming,
grumbling, quite profane,
I’m glad I didn’t ask him
if I’d be getting socks again.
Outside the Rest Home
Waiting for Mum
in his buffed-up car,
but she wasn’t impressed
by his Jaguar:
She only wanted
his undivided time,
no matter which brand
in which he arrived.
The Last Clown
The last clown in Aleppo,
Anas Al-Basha,
was today killed in an air strike,
those kids’ll laugh no more;
now there’s less space for hope,
one less star to play the fool,
for those kids less a parent,
Assad’s grip is hard and cruel.
MIKE BELL | 10,000 Poems 