Poems

My lifelong friend, dear heart, these days you’re losing the plot: you’re a fish in a bucket, open-mouthed, flopping about in a panic, bereft of your sheen, all confidence gone. Examined in action on a black and white screen, every movement recorded, you’re haplessly tethered, chaotically jumping, locked into a pulse of your own. Tracked by the inks on that turning drum we see what will come if that spidery record persists Slow down then, no coffee, resist the enticement of alcohol, not even a thimbleful and I will net you, my flailing fish, land you without a splash into calm waters, weaving upstream, steady and breathing. Till the hook’s savage grab lands us both on a slab.

I am not jealous. If you arrived with a man on your back, or a hundred men hanging in the rigging of your hair, or a thousand men sleeping on the soft mound of your belly, if you were a river filled with drowned men met by the furious sea foaming at its mouth, by eternal weather – if you arrived with them all where I wait for you, I would not be jealous. We will always be alone. We will always be, you and I, alone on this earth to begin life.

One moment basking in the sun, the next knee-deep in snow astonished at the way these tracks must have filled to the top of their dry-stone walls during the April blizzards. To walk has been the idea since we were small, and so we go on along new paths and old, the way our parents led us, listening for a curlew, looking at a weird extended ash, checking our watches for the train, stopping for elevenses among the sheep-droppings. It is a rhythm that we require, that speaks of essences and immortality; not a pilgrimage because there is no aim, the route is circular, but a stay against age, climbing edge after edge, then out across the moor above Eyam, that hostel you think you stayed in once.

He said, it’s a structural workforce imbalance and I thought where’s the scope for a man of your talents? He said, it’s retargeting personal goals and I thought yet all human resources have souls. He said, it’s a preplanned executive cull and I thought you’ve a horrible shape to your skull. He said, it’s a labour pool surplus reduction and I thought I could pop out your eyeballs by suction. He said, it’s transitioned vocational severance and I thought that’s my cods in the mincer, your reverence. He said, it’s downsizing, dehiring, decruiting and I thought also strangling and stabbing and shooting. He said, you’re redundant, you’re done for, you’re dead and I thought same to you, squire, and cut off his head.

Invisible hand that jangles the lantern over the porch and tells the leaves on the pond to imagine they are clippers and wrenches the shed door , and makes leylandii lurch, unnerving the cat, wobbling the elderly; that viciously clobbers pedestrians at the corner, then snatches up bills and payslips put out for recycling and juggles with them; that gibbers and squeaks through gaps in your sealed units; that laughs as it swipes her portfolio of art, the pantechnicon of his life’s work, in fits when a cone skedaddles like a clown or turning Dalek wipes the smile off its fierceness and swivels a death-ray that hits your moped, your chimney, your safest nook, knocking over five centuries’ peaceful growth. It is its own blitz- krieg on the establishment. Respect it.

(after Yoshio Markino, 1911) Colours of women, a grey-veiled pink, a bloom Fading to yellow, stippled, dust-hung, flecked Soot startling white lace in summer gloom. Colours of trees, pavements sticky with leaves Trodden to blackened bronze, a patina Attached to every twig. The heart grieves, Colours the blood with fungus, smudges all Spires, bridges, waters, with its spores, Catches each raindrop as the bruised clouds fall. Colours — the names of them, the languages Seeping between — slip into sepia, Then steely white, as words freeze images. Colours of women, trees, blood, stone on stone Piled high, dismantled, crowded as a dream Night after night in London, and alone.

That ‘bullet hole’ in your bush hat, there should have been two holes — for the truth to pass through. I think you believed your own lies, liked how they altered the light on the bullet, as it passed through. Who fired the gun? Who died? Who prayed for the victim’s soul? So many questions, passing through.

Midnight for the squirrels and the drunks, midnight for you dear and your chest hair too, put your pen down pet and rest here. Midnight swallowing the mirror whole, swallowing my mother in her pale blue slippers, and my brother, my big brother in his too small bed. Bed, the longed for stopped short sound delivering us at last from sense-making. The trains are empty, the magnolia trees are still, the tower block has lost another dozen yellow squares but they’ll fill up and we’ll fill too, and in tomorrow’s morning we’ll awake, washed up again among the bills.  Meanwhile, the stars are queuing up to get behind your lids.  Come, give me your hand.

Fate landed us here by mistake, set us to walk Welsh hillsides with a plodding heart or paddle Essex estuaries under duress, our talk always of somewhere else (tacked to kitchen walls a Swedish lake, a mountain range in Switzerland). See us crouch in living rooms as daylight palls, an old draught trespassing beneath the door, the trick of day too quickly turning night, the radio’s relentless classic serial, that Sunday evening tick of now becoming then.

No angels listen when you cry out here, but seals rise up to see, and criticize perhaps, as you intone the omega (their favourite vowel) or the medical alpha (sticking your tongue out) for these gods of ocean. Words wouldn’t do. There are no consonants in the mouths of seals. They can appreciate only the modified howl, the growly roar, and perhaps the loudest purr a man can make. It’s not the singing; that just summons them. It’s curiosity that makes them stand in the water on their useless feet, to stare at the creature with two tails, unnaturally split beside its genitals, the loose skin, the weed that seems to be an ornament on the head. But when we sing to them, they hear pure sound without the situation for a howl: we’re standing still.

It came at last, the letting-go, Up over the hill and down our street — The end of time had, finally, been reached. There was comfort in it, the worst happening And it being of no consequence, since we were done for. What did it matter if our digital photo frames were lost, Our data-carrying devices? There was to be no cost Since we were going under. Two strange things: the dead were not truly dead — When our backs were turned they danced among the trees — And the tide kept battering the beach. ‘This is it,’ you said As waters took the Co-op, ‘Drop everything. Why not get started? The dead play a full part in it.

The mental battle over Sunday roast: mum, my brother and myself trying our best to look interested, so he wouldn’t be wounded.

I saw Christine Lagarde outside The Wellcome Trust with a trolley case. She was wearing my scarf — the scarf I had when I was thirty two: a scarf with white dots on royal blue, or should I say French navy? — the very essence of what a scarf should be, which, in red, would be the scarf of the swagman or children’s book burglar but in blue remains jolly while suggesting tradition. Now, I admire Christine Lagarde and I support her policies. I believe the life of Christine Lagarde is something worth aiming for. I admire Christine Lagarde, but that is no reason to confer on her my scarf — the best scarf I ever had, the perfect scarf, which I have looked for ever since. You have taken a liberty, Christine Lagarde, guardian, lawmaker.

(After W.S.

mooch about and waste time starting things they’ll never finish. The next world is nothing to them but shadows, some don’t have patience for any of that crap at all – What, grass, they say, waving their wobbly arms, You mean you actually believe in grass?