I am online,
disembodied in a shallow sense,
constantly drawn elsewhere.
The internet is
majority crap
minority gold
and it always seems
as I click and surf and scroll, that
I am searching for a way back,
like a migrating animal
mystified by the glow
of the border,
so strange and banal
and dramatic.
I am a pigeon.
I am a dormouse.
I am a driving licence,
tissue paper, crowbar.
I am the tension in
your neck, snow drift,
laughter, what the heck
I am a Wyandotte,
laptop, red fox.
I am two coffee stains
on a yellow table cloth.
I am leather, plastic, stroganoff.
I am beer, I am
neither there nor here, but both.
I am Schrodinger’s cat,
tea-cup, apple, pipistrelle bat.
I am the swollen dawn.
I am a smelly fart,
I am a fake yawn
that is infectious, catches on,
roving across the crackling grass
of late summer lawns.
I am a late arrival.
I am the early bird
and the worm, I am “Watch out!”
I am the ornate urn.
I am a dollop of sun cream.
I am a swig of whiskey.
I am the bubbles in your soda
I am tango, foxtrot,
Motorola. I am a call
across a thousand miles,
I am under sea cable
and microwaves. I am Jupiter,
Saturn, Macclesfield.
I am the scum in the turn
of the river, I am
the microfibres in the ocean,
I am the sanitiser and the lotion.
I am black mould.
I am Aphrodite.
I am the smallest thing
and the largest.
I am a cup of water
coffee, sweat and touch,
I am language
and I don’t say much.
I am automation, progress,
ash and dust. I am strobe light,
fig leaf, jungle rain, I am
powder, ice and rising pain.
I an relief, stolen traffic cone,
leftovers from a conglomerate
conference. I am oil rig, rubble,
injustice. I am Spring, Summer,
Autumn, Winter. I am bluebell,
gravy, porridge, sugar, salt.
I am tired.
I am tired.
I am whatever, I don’t care.
I am neither here nor there, but both.
I am a subscriber.
Names fix things
in our imaginations.
Class Arachnida
Order Holothyrida
Family Holothyridae
Gardiner’s giant mite
Extinct. Full stop.
All sentences end:
The one you are reading.
The one you are speaking.
The one you are fixing to start,
like a spark or a flash in the brain
throwing a line out
for the name of a story
to rest on, briefly.
I imagine someone new
has just moved here in five years time.
The District Heat Network is complete.
There are, of course,
some portions of land
ring-fenced, where people
throw old clothes, chunks of MDF and
crumpled cans of Stowford Press.
The world has breached 1.5 degrees
of warming once more
and there is still this crisis
of knowing how to relate
to each-other, to specific things
in the world. A cigarette
tumbles from a balcony
like a toy soldier,
carried by the wind.
It settles on platform 1
of Bedminster Station.
Am I still here? Perhaps.
Perhaps you are, too,
your five-year-old cagoule
no longer protecting you
from the rain, as you carry
shopping home in two sagging bags:
one hessian, one ‘for life.’
There’s a love heart of vomit –
last night’s chips – that you
skirt round, beneath
a vandalised advertising screen.
Attention continues to be a commodity.
There is some distinction
between now and then,
but also an elasticity
that conjoins, that seeps into
the “How are you?”
and the “I can’t be fucked”
and the “Where’s it to?”
and the “I’m bored, let’s go”
and the “I love you”
spoken in all the incongruous spots
as the ice sheets calve
and the headlines file in
and developers haggle
over the next vacant lots.
There are shadows on the
northern side of the buildings,
in cold, quiet January,
cooling distended cut-outs,
as the light streams past sharp edges.
Hidden rivers run beneath cities
like little lost things,
satin gloves, diamond rings.
A ubiquitous tyre lies
half-submerged in dark-grey silt
in the Malago.
Attire: a dress for a wheel.
Now discarded, not fit for function
dumped twenty feet
along from the junction
of the river and St John’s Lane,
sitting there like so many other outfits:
a sock impaled on a railing,
a soiled jumper draped on a gate
next to a plastic bag,
the sun hugging the frame
of an unfinished block of flats
like a jacket. And all the Sunday strollers
in their Sunday clothes –
worn, fresh, tatty, borrowed, new, old –
waiting for the warmth
of something that hasn’t happened yet
of someone they haven’t met,
walking in cold, quiet January
watching the terraces roll
over Pylle Hill like a spine.
Development is a euphemism
and the land so dear
especially here
and there
where the dictates
of the charity commission
require us to sell.
Money disappears into the land
like smoke into the sky
like sand into a lake.
“The congregation has sunk”
and “We had to make this hard decision”
and “This used to be a pub”
and “Where are you from?”
and “That’s been closed for years”
and “I don’t begrudge you, you know?”
And “It is
what it is,”
this borrowed condition
this slow violence.
The condensation
pools on the windowsill, and
soaks old birthday cards.
The white foam
localized
near the source of the discharge.
I am little hunger
Great Hunger
near the source of the discharge.
I place my feet in the water
I am little hunger
Great Hunger
repurposed, stolen, airborne
near the source of the discharge.
The surfactant invites the foam
localized
near the source of the discharge.
I listen at home, diffuse, localized
listening to the sum
of the tested engines discharging
their noise
their gas
the colour of piss or irn-bru
but now, see through
into the atmosphere to become diffuse.
I am little hunger
Great hunger
feeling the surface tension reduce
and seeing the city
split off into tiny bubbles of light
near the source of the discharge.
This city, she said,
is just full of the rich trying to be poor,
and others said it, too,
though it’s easy and cheap
it’s worth saying again, as when
some silly boy
made boyish by timidity, in a dream
spends an inch of life
in a foreign place.
Everyone knows why he’s there but him,
though he seems
by some trick of position
to have made this choice
but most choice is only a fiction
(when will ‘they’ realise?)
and that’s the truth of the matter,
which by chance, makes it much easier
to act with intent
and bring down the government.
It’s been gusting in
the Bristol channel.
Henk has whipped
the silted swill to peaks:
a danger to life
a good chance of power cuts.
His name’s been ordained
in advance, a sign
of recognition,
an acknowledgement
of the likelihood
of potential impact,
something we want
to know, to call,
in the trashing night
and the squall,
as the Severn bursts
its banks in Worcester.
Tomorrow, Henk
will have passed on
dissipating somewhere
in the North Sea
having torn the last
of the Autumn leaves
from the standing trees.