10,000 POEMS – Posted freshly most days
Their work is a helix
of holding patterns
A vexed blackhead on
a narrowing radar
Making no sense
to us
Look across its eyes
at your broken reflection
Pass over its light speed
of thinking centrifuges
Be left behind
on our side of thought
We are not quick enough
to read their flight plans
We are fixed lives –
we are their filth givers
It is impossible to maintain
a rooted perspective –
Heraclitus observed
as he openly wept
It is not the same river
but we are also
not the same people –
that will be my shooting stick
to lift me from stiffnesses
of age and old iniquities
Those rivers now rise
under too-warming urges
My car’s curved high glass
requires less screenwash
through summer-flown months
There are no insects to smash
All through it my kids sit blind
behind their bright-eyed phones –
we do not know how much less
they see on their screens now
It once had a name –
by dint of those
orange-tipped wings –
and on my tongue’s tip too –
a too-rare flitted hurdler
of garden hedges and fences
No one else cared
Such is our loss of simplicity
that even a vibrating bee’s hum
seems misplaced – mechanical
Our young dog was spell-bound
by a fat black house fly –
I no longer swat them
Their massed die-offs
are merely statistics
fixed by white-suited
pollinators
in huge trucks of profit
who are forever re-filling
their hired-out hives
between pollen buyers
and ramping-up bee prices
Colonies will collapse
under modern diseases –
by man-spread illnesses
and by slicings of trade
Neonicotinoids may kill
the striped-arse armies –
but other – larger forces –
shade their sun-dance ways
A pint on a Monday – at lunchtime?
Things must be bad – Michael –
And so they are – but I only offer lies
above salted crumbs on my table –
small pieces – but shiftable boulders
to summer’s soon-invigorated ants –
able to heft such burdens of others’
relative insignificance – of leftovers –
But that is a season away – along with
beer-swilling wasps and longer days
of enough light to keep me
from the pub and beer on Monday
There was that microcosm
fixing my dawdled childhood
in which I centred myself
in a kneeled-to wondering
as unidentified insects
routed in and out – between
bent blades of variegated grass –
and in that airtight stillness
nervy sparrows let me forage
alongside their skits and hops –
until we were all fed enough
by the microscopic wonders
and then I unhinged
my tight focus – pulled back –
unhooking from nature
as Concorde halved the sky –
that white flechette – fustian –
slapping pigeons from the trees –
it was another sudden brutality
in my sub-sonic childhood
MIKE BELL | 10,000 Poems 