Poems

What luck that Sweatenham’shad been flattened, its concrete baseremaining: the perfect spotto sit the works caravan on blocksand our paint shop beside it.Ern and Jud deftly navigatedthe Land Rover around dead tyres,mangled iron, sprouting steel rods,backing it into positionin full view of the Newcastle Street shops and the windows above them,all day traffic to Burslem or the A500:the security of countless eyesto save it being torched or toppled.Here we slump to the drumming rain, take turns to sleeve off condensation,watch the cars heading elsewhereoblivious to this Calor stove hissingon its one good ring, our used matchesdrowning in the tub of Swarfega.

Last night my wife and I went to Asda, And – among other things – spent eight pence on a Bag for Life. The bag is guaranteed to last us a lifetime.  Every day we will look fondly at the bag, And recall that evening, All those years ago, When we held hands and strolled through Asda, Stocking up on milk, eggs and lightbulbs. The side of the bag has the legend: ‘If this bag breaks or gets damaged, We will happily replace it free of charge.’ These little gestures give us peace of mind. If I am involved in a horrific car crash or a dreadful fire, My wife will be able to take the tattered shreds of the bag, And return them to Asda,  And the staff will give her a new bag, And they will do this with smiles on their faces.

I arrived in Lhasa by train in freezing weather. From what I’d heard, my father would be there. Outside the gaping entrance all was dark,snow falling quietly like owls’ feathers. In the bustling concourse, doubling as a market, just as I’d feared, my errant father was nowhere to be seen. I knew he was dead but that didn’t seem a proper excuse. I had in my pocket a bronze coin he’d given me from the reign of Tasciovanus, and his last letter telling me, while in Dublin, to visit and give his love to his old friend Joe Bewley ‘who ran a marvellous place on Grafton Street where they made jam and sold fine coffee and tea’. BEWLEY’S ORIENTAL CAFE, he’d scrawled in capitals.

The beach magician’s vanished, gone home. Now it’s my sleeping cousins’ turn to disappear.                              Out of the creaking depths of old deckchairs their teenage spirits rise, drift down to the shore.                                                    The mackerel are in. Helen’s in blue, Cat in her yellow dress.

I probed its crown with the tip of my tongue and it creaked like a bough a boy swings on. Then with the pincer of finger and thumb I plucked it from its loose bed like a bud and set it on this oak table now a desk. It was taller than I thought and like a blunted tusk, its ivory inlaid with colonnades and courtyards, and trees bearing the semblance of fruit — still but ever-moving like that temple frieze of rounded lovers wreathed around each other in tireless ecstasy — a work of art, thus by definition useless. And so the other, older teeth went back to their task of tearing the flesh of fowls and grinding wheat.

Hong Kong A fan on the ceiling.  The parlour full of drapes and towels.  A pianist plays behind the curtain. They call him Liverpool.  The cat mooches. The woman puts her hands together in salutation.   A man on the chair, legs stretched out. The woman kneads his feet. The boss takes the money.  Sometimes yawning,  sometimes burping, sometimes farting. Her chakras perfectly aligned.  The man on the chair floats above Tung Street. His feet are factories of pleasure.

Good morning. Perhaps before I am old, wandering on the face of the world, lost, you could suggest an open place of grass and curious trees where I walk barefoot as the day cools under a massive sky, with a herd of something I can’t quite see moving slowly over there on my right, the earth beaming up the fragrance of life and the loud ticking of benign insects. Or I may consider a warm ship’s rail at the same time of day after the glare, all the other passengers somewhere else and my lone cabin prepared behind me. Yes, I’ll go for the first option. Thank you.

Holding the glorious heap of her black hair away from her head for the heat, the tall, young, I’m guessing Italian woman swivels her slender torso with such a sweet nonchalance that the no less glorious clump at her armpit is rendered unignorable. Degas might have done a sketch then and there, and Hardy was a man who used to notice such things; but that was the nineteenth century, and to do so now would be deplorable.

The decision, now my mother’s off her feet, off her food but not, thank god, her rocker, is for a rota of nephews and nieces to drop in  and keep an eye on her so she’s not alone.   Unshod gypsy horses cropping the grass   of a traffic island in autumn’s last-blown leaves (from my Uber window) ushers me home as evening brightens Whitley Hill and Bearley. ‘I left Afghanistan when I was a boy,’ the driver tells me, catching my reflection.  ‘I just walked out. I was lucky! A social worker  found me foster parents in Coventry.  They kept alsatians, lovely dogs, and we drank  orangeade on Fridays.’ The house is full. My sister, her oldest son. A brother or two.