Bloke

When football’s done, he folds away

Until next season.

 Sometimes, you see him in the garden

Not doing much:

Scraping the rust off the barbecue

Or swapping round pots;

There’s the drill that starts up some nights,

As if he’s forgotten

That life is perfect.

Apart from that, it’s just

The odd word in the street

Or chin-wag at Sainsbury’s.

Let’s face it,

If it’s not about Rovers, it lacks an edge.

There’s not much else, is there, really?

Albion Nights

There’s nothing so lost

As a small town at dusk,

When those who can have gone,

Leaving streets to their fate.

Kids, skateboarding by the mall,

Perfect a geometry

That says little of school.

For them, tomorrow is a long way off.

In pubs, locals hoard

The day like change,

Tending a world where

The one thing you trust

Is your average pint.

A St George’s flag

Flies from the Norman keep,

As sunset brings ruins

To life.

Night stretches

To pull down the blinds,

For tourists with time to spare

Despite every plan,

While darkness succumbs

To dreams of Full English.

Pond Life

Someone sent me a box of frogs

The other day.

Point taken.

What do I do with them now?

Untold Story

For Stuart

A friend reminded me

Of a woman long ago

In Brighton days

We called the ‘saucepan lady’.

Unkempt in Kemp Town,

We’d watch her hurry by,

Pan tied on her head

With coloured scarf,

Defying our student theories.

If someone asked,

We’d smile and say her name,

As if we knew her.

When they found her dead,

Some said the pan was stuffed with cash,

Though personally, I wonder.

What we can’t take with us,

We leave behind

For others to ponder.

Bath Abbey

August 2011

That person tapping at his mobile phone,
The woman chatting in the pew,
Will they still be here
At evensong?

Hurrying from tomb to tomb
The young with backpacks - getting in the way
Of that old codger with his telephoto lens,
Stalking stained glass –
Are they all part of one great story?

An effigy arrests the eye:
Five hundred years of still
Devotion wait
Among the hordes
For silence and the darkened hour,

While human voices rise
Past columns
To fine traceries of stone
That bear the weight of time
For now, if not hereafter.

A candle flame reveals
The lighter's face.
Unlike the tourists milling round,
Souls sheltering from life or rain,
Our prayers remain invisible.

Brotherly Love

Gestingthorpe 2011

I won’t call you eccentric,

Though we are related.

Your house is full of shards

Gathered from feudal fields

Whose names you know:

Cracked pots and cauldrons; rusting scythes

That would have done a revolution proud.

You sit by the window,

Discussing love, divorce,

Beethoven’s debt to Haydn,

And the fusing of plain and mannered style

In Shakespeare’s verse,

As acres turn dark.

I ask what you mean

By filling your garden with rocks,

Glacial erratics:

Remnants of conflicts

That progress ignores.

Feng Shui, you say,

Hand sweeping the night,

As though that were obvious.

Outside, in the moonlight,

A shriek owl responds;

And the long walk home

Appears less travelled

Than before.

Geek Chorus

Sex is “the opera of the masses,”

They say:

“The poor man’s café.”

Though I love a good breakfast,

I’m an opera nut,

Following the music,

If not the plot.

Each act is an awakening,

A form of rebirth:

Moving the scenery,

If not the earth.

For true fans, opera is everything,

And you know it’s not over

Till the lady sings.

Life Lines

Great Ormond Street, 1987

You don’t recall, being so young,

The spectre of each cot:

Wires straggling up to screens

That told some secret story;

The hurried smiles,

Eyes grim with care,

In your first moments;

Willing science to mend

What nature had left unfinished.

Technology can’t heal

The hours

That fear for breath.

Pacing that ward,

We listened for the note

Of lives so small,

Now amplified

To fill a room:

The message of each heart

Defining a universe. 

Riot On

They’ve been rioting for centuries,

Though no one listens;

Britannia has gone to sleep.

Looting is the new shopping,

Tonight, at least.

A city, for once, united

To get what it can take.

This nation of shoplifters,

Napoleon might have said,

Where even those who’ve made it

Are on the make:

While London is burning
At the stake.

Final Vision

A prophet on his off-day

Has few friends:

Visions tumble,

Believers run,

Even the wind deserts him.

That Ark you built

Rots in the backyard

Unnoticed,

As the earth burns.

Your miracles have come adrift;

Your prayers returned

Unopened.

Now, on the highest mountain,

You try to make amends:

Opening your arms to the

Clouds

In search of rain. 

Making Sense

Our ghost liaison lasted seven years.

Luck or damnation, I’m not sure which.

I still find ectoplasm between my toes

And, now and then, sense

Your image in the glass.

Beer glass, you’d probably add.

I can still hear your voice:

Who’d love you,

If they knew you first?

Mistakes do happen,

Of course.

You spooked me out,

While teaching me the secret of the universe

Amnesia prevents

Me from recounting.

No help to alchemists perhaps;

But what makes me glad

Is that, for a moment in time (where else?),

In your ethereal arms,

Mortality made sense. 

Exceptions

For imperfectionists,

If things go right (for once),

You change the locks.

Catastrophe is endless:

There are always new mountains

From which to fall.

Conceived in error,

Life implodes:

A marriage made in hell

And ending in oblivion.

Fate, like a time-bomb, self-destructs;

An own goal,

Waiting to happen, as the cliché goes:

A trophy room full of disasters.

Meeting you now makes no sense.

Dreams of incoherence

Turn Shakespearean,

Disproving life’s equation;

You are the exception to the rule.

Endurance

They wheeled you down lanes
You knew as a girl;

Your voice rose with the sound

Of circling gulls

To cliffs climbed long ago.

You read the borders on the way

Like pages from an almanac:

Wild thyme, lady’s slipper, moon daisies,

Herb robert, old man’s beard,

Hedgerows stained red with valerian,

Fuschia stealing down limestone walls;

You smiled at it all,

Shaking a white convolvulos

In the August shade.

Back home, you labour up familiar steps,

A path you know;

But still, when days lie overgrown

Or clasped in memory,

This lasts:

A song repeated.