Main Residence

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Your grave is warmed by odd summer flowers, 

a parade of jerry-rigged suns,

 

underneath, roots happily knead, strands

of monotonous ants are rosary beads

quietly working through hands,

all composting needs met by a skeleton workforce

of migrant worms.

 

Those decade long stretches: you limbering-up

to create boxed and bespoke

fossilised shapes, by swimming against 

the sullen currents of earth.

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Never ending life will be faced whenever buried in the ground.

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This poem was nominated for a Pushcart Prize by Black Bough. ​

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Waterloo Bridge

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On My Son’s Eighteenth Birthday

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We find ourselves

staring over the bridge

while evening waters spread:

technicolour reflections

laid flat

as a slow

unbroken slick

 

till a pissed pleasure boat

pops out underneath,

like a wobbling key

surprised

to find the door,

 

a gorged bus

bothers

on the road behind us,

elephantine,

thundering too close:

the lit faces within

one hundred different blanks,

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constant shouts as well

of a revelry-artillery

crossing overhead,

fired

from both banks.

 

We stand quietly,

separately,

not connecting,

within the mangle of many currents,

till you start on the selfies;

but all these many passings

mean

I don’t dare to hug you

even

awkwardly.

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The Pine Dresser

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Dismantling

the pine dresser (put up in ’74),

I am stuck on a last warped

hinge.

A lone bolt

writhes like a maggot,

burrowing deep

holding onto the shelving

for never used plates,

when my father’s cusses

return again.

 

Back then,

a brace of strangers

delivered the jaundiced wood

in two parts:

the younger leading but unspeaking,

the other

cigarette bobbing,

brusquely bossing,

and me being ushered away

while my father strained and swore,

breaking the likely

same askew

fastening.

 

So now

I connect once more,

my struggle to reverse,

to undo.

Each laboured

half-turn back,

along the gnaw of a crooked path,

refinds the thread

of an afternoon’s strain,

preserved

so unexpectedly,

in the unforgiving

amber grain.

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Secrets

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Who has carriage of our best secrets?

A grilled priest, hot under collar,

or the primping fingers

of a teasing-out master?

Learned and forensic counsel

or in the post hoc curl

with a lover?

Some nodding note-booked shrink

with only fifty-five-minutes

to re-plumb kinks?

Or whispers for places, not people:

the spill of words across a lake,

their tangle round a tree?

Maybe, it’s just the waiting hospice nurse,

who turns over

that last part of us;

complicit in the shedding

of all our abraded

and redundant

skins.

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Forest

 

The forest is unshaven land,

a bristling made

ten thousand ways.

Light smatters:

its coalescence beyond this place

too weighty, excessive,

an entirely

unnatural state.

 

Few creatures reach the overt,

only sending their sounds

to scurry, flap,

or just unsettle;

everywhere ancient twigs

snap

their arthritic knuckles.

Any clearing,

just a trapped bubble:

exhalation

but no escape,

from gloamy primeval

hands.

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Paddington

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A station

behaving like an ant mound

kicked.

 

Quavers and minims too

interweaving,

lost

within this orphanage

of sounds.

 

A tannoy startles,

drowning,

gurgling out numbers and places:

drifting coordinates

for its unplotted

rescue.

 

This city’s faceless, timetable-bound:

the spewing source

of so much

blank and unstoppable 

ticker-tape

found.

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Squall, Bedruthan Cove, Cornwall

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The sky

is suddenly shuttered,

a god-fearing,

if futile

attempt at boarding-up,

then raw

incomprehensible torrents:

the rushed pulling-down

of hazy blinds.

 

Not weather,

but mile-wide, 

a shared bereavement

begun.

 

Below a perilous cliff path,

the self-flagellating

bash of sea:

dented

and scored enough

to be willing its own collapse,

while

hovering over the gap,

(a chomp of fallen, now gushing rocks),

blackened birds

must cope

with the stifled chokes

of wholly

inconsolable

winds.

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Empty Cove, Gower

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Returning provisioned, cliff winds boss me

over fumbling paths above my son and wife;

(raindrops merely insult, casually thrown as peppercorns.)

 

Hand-in-hand, they goad the waves till the sea snaps back:

half-cowed, a chained dog, in toothy flailing surges.

 

Only the sharpest peaks of screams catch

but witnessing such unalloyed joy hurts;

 

up-ended: so far from their self-contained perfection,

I’m washed away, as if suddenly homeless,

soft and unshelled.

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Carriage Return:  Dream

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I return to old workplaces more than

any previous lover.

 

A dry tobacco-light rustles outside,

sat at a known desk,

under spitting strips

of neon bulbs,

whilst a clock pendulum

paces,

theatrically.

Beyond the door

the vagaries of office-sound:

swooping phones with gullish rings;

the keyboard band’s

rattling percussion:

pomp

for the oddest

strands of chatter.

A pipe behind my wall

jangles

tinny migrations

from an upstairs source.

That dusty rubber-plant’s familiar stare,

I bequeathed, hand-painted even,

its skin of motes;

one of a long line

of graves

of mine.

 

The churn of dreams:

prisable cracks

in the past’s patina.

Wherever these wanderings take me,

a realisation:

I have made

corridors

instead of rooms.