I used to reset my watch
when flying over la Manche
An engineered engagement
of small clicks and twists –
spinning hours from the east
to Greenwich Mean Time

Our first rented house
was about a hundred yards
from that scientific mark
which cut a line through
my old school atlas
of blushed exaggerations
and empirical remains

This trip was a reset trick
of handheld smart devices
which knew the differences
and needed no fingernails
to lift the watch’s crown
and turn back lost time

At three thousand feet
I peck at a tray of crap
as the girl next to me
pokes her laptop

Her typing is rapid –
she’s re-writing scripts
I rinse food with wine
and leave the worst bits

A man swings his baby
in a hipster sling
parading his manhood
as an accoutrement

I cannot sleep
even drugged by booze
on this return
which I do not choose

In this removed state from sleep’s cycle
I wander drunk down the high street
picking my stick tick way past the woken
to sit in a barber’s chair and almost doze
through clippers and cuts of grey hair
to then return to the air and blown rain
to confirm I am here back in England.

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”.

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.

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

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.

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

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

I touched down in Bucharest,
for my connecting flight,
on to Tel Aviv’s equal distance
of foreign placed-ness,

at that point, where I stood
in a terminal, sparrow-spotted,
and under the guard of men
in serge uniforms, weighted by rank,

chairs also stood, imperial, ragged,
as if waiting for the return flight of
a poverty-struck Ottoman Emperor,
equally stained and dusted by time.

The couple stood,
him a gruff man,
she with her layered,
read-long suntan:

There holding up all,
at the boarding gate,
demanding to stand,
and to debate

their low place stood
in the boarding queue:
We paid for priority,
that’s what we do!

I swayed behind him,
on my wobbling body,
his complaints were valid,
but manners quite shoddy.

On the return flight,
we watched with a smile,
them embark from the front
jumped to first in line:

Paid for Priority,
they marched to the gate,
and EasyJet profited,
from their not wanting to wait.