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.

Mutations

If you flew through the ceiling,

The world wouldn’t stop;

You could haunt me at leisure

Or we could just chat.

You could tell me about graveyards,

How ghosts really feel;

How useless a heart is

With just time to heal.

We could pull apart logic

And exorcise fate,

Unravel life’s mysteries,

Make light of love’s ways.

If you turned blue and vanished,

It'd be just like old days.