Poems

Waking, you swivel on bum and hip, then dropyour legs below the knee to the floor, the fightagainst gravity half-won, like a workshopusing prefabricated parts, the bed’s height helping. None of this lessens the jeopardy.When you thrust yourself up onto your feet,you need to balance your whole body adroitly.If there’s a handrail to take some of your weight, use it – not only for push but to steadyyourself. Press your panic button to call,if you panic, whoever is standing by. Whatever their struggles, anyone maydrift off in sleep. But some just die, then fall;and more, like my dear father, fall, then die.

Everything waits. The lime trees in the park never more solitary. A moon parabola’s its passage, its slow arc, its high full toss; by the end of night hits the midwicket centre of the silhouetted trees, wedged in the blackened branches.In life, like the moon, we are all one day bowled back to earth. Lean light days. Enough stillness to sense the future beyond this future; hours that will live (and die) beyond these hours. But for the prancing magpies, solitary crows, the park has shut up shop, people pass through quickly as though unwelcome.The lime trees are obstinate, indifferent, taut as tuning forks. The days lose themselves easily as lost change. The blood slows and the pond stagnates.

All this – of course – was heaven when I smoked.Standing under the trees,my sweet asylum,resourceful and joyful, and dry. Once – when I smoked that is –the people coming up the pavement –people with great lives ahead,cheered as I stood there.A Bohemian, they said. Truly.Notwithstanding the rainwe observe a man with a cigarette.  Like Baudelaire in the suburbs.Reeking of nicotine.Awaiting his horse-pulled limousine.

The rustle of coarse, carded yarn, through fine taut cotton, pulled to a point: tense, hoarse, a wordless whisper, saying something sexual.

i.m. Mick Imlah There is a brief respitewhile our lives are held suspended.We’ll laugh when this is over,wiser for this glimpse of the abyss. For now, we go to work as usual,a zigzag route through the estates,our own private shortcut,till they close the gates at night. We leave behind the Florence, the Alhambra,their dreams of domes in amber light.The way home is due north,King’s Cross by way of Scotland, streets alive with her familiars:the Angus house, the Flora, the Loch Lomond,emblems of proud Caledoniaflaunting their two stars. Argyle Walk, tarmac breaking into cobblesshiny with night and rain,a murky sodium glow, a kind of false dawn,where we come to a halt. ‘They think I may have it’ you tell me,London’s rivers rushing below our feet.

Beeston Castle, English Heritage event, 2023/1265 The castle is perched on a rocky sandstone cragabove a moat of weeds and shadow-fields of flint:a subterranean memory-bank of history and hurt. A banquet of burdock and wild boar is being servedto the fingertip-march of a minstrel’s plucked lute —though I am stationed in the silt-flushed basin below. Today I refuse the role of the slave for the soldierto brandish a sword that cuts deeper than words;a shield that protects more than any page could. Granted a gambeson and a loose-sleeved shirt,I billow between the growing crowds and cracksof moss-flanked flagstones as light as a ghost.

‘Love and war are the same thing...’             —          Miguel de Cervantes Somewhere over the tiled foothills of our council estate A man and a woman are arguing. The focus of the argument is something brutally trivial A TV programme choice, that sort of thing, Yet the air is a hot Isandlewana of big and small wounding And a silence follows, with one avoiding the other While the battleground wounded are hauled away. Unremarkable people go to war like this, see the fracture In the fence and tear at it Making broader access to unremarkable places Left unguarded. (Who slept on duty?

Open the front door into waterBrown water with no heart in itOne side of the street to the other – Small shops drowned in itOur car drowned in itThe sun gleamed down on it like a joke Unseasonal, climate change thingAt an upstairs window an old womanStaring down like a question Water in the hall, the kitchen, floor-Boards bending, everything meltingOr seeming to, the roof crackling – The thin river was fat and roaringUnder the block-stone bridge and thenOver it. Reek of old mud. By evening the surge was downThe flood was a lover reachingFor a cigarette. It got what it came for.

The gutters glutted:rusty, fallen, ferrous stars. An avenue of beeches,gaunt, grey, naked, majestic on their red carpet,in a dream of dethronement.

I’m sailing to Tarshish as usual. The air is thick, Its walls are greyish white, This desk light flickers intermittently. Let me be plain: Being good in your sort of way Does not appeal to me. Why would I go to Nineveh? The parking’s diabolical And the people there Are not my type. Some send out for Domino’s every night, Most have no notion of eternity. How could you care for them? I have a feeling that you prefer them Which doesn’t seem right. They have no ear for music And why should they need to hear my voice When there’s always a catch to it? No one likes me on this ship But I’m indifferent. I’d rather suffer as I want.

Some endings have such richness in their flow,the night taking its temper from the day.You sport a smile when love gets up to go. Mirrors of time hold all you need to know,haloes of stars sustaining casual clay.Some endings have such richness in their flow. Far-off appointments, comet-like, will growinto your week-to-view, pointing your way.You sport a smile when love gets up to go. Sweet long goodbyes precede the sharp hello,foreseen, embraced and prompting one to saysome endings have such richness in their flow. Your hearth and home’s an archipelago,wild oceans calling all the while you stay.You sport a smile when love gets up to go. Resting, you relish teeming tides below,a gathering of kin, a quietening of play.