Category: Uncategorized

It is not heavy, the egg.

There is a teenage boy

in front of me. He shows me

the egg, his face all

contrite – cheeky fucker.

Then, splat. It is not heavy,

the egg. I’ve literally got egg

on my face. I’ve never used

that expression and it doesn’t

work now, not figuratively, anyhow.

I’m a little disappointed.

Why did you egg me

boy with a furry upper lip?

Another of his crew walks past.

“Hey, you look eggy.”

Very observant, child.

The stringy goo of the egg

drips down my forehead.

It keeps skin firm, blemish

free and can also prevent aging,

according to The Times of India.

Now, I see, the boy just pitied

my haggard face, managed to guess

that I have very few cosmetics

at home. So thank you, misguided

adolescent, for egging me.

I’m just sorry I washed it off

so soon. I should have rubbed it in.

Feel it. Leave it.

Don’t lurch for the easy copy.

That pretty book.

That cliff-top, overhang.

The island and the bay

Where jellyfish sang chorales

and brushed the underbellies

 of the yachts. Let the

maritime fly-tippers

sink to the old life

on the ocean bed –

divided lovers mixed with

togas and low density

polyethylene. I took a walk

on Sunday to the Manor Woods.

Some part of the water

had really taken to the trees,

like they had a shared taste in music,

enjoyed getting half-lost in cities.

Feel it. Hold it, that memory,

retrofitted each time you discover it,

that horrid leather sofa in a dull little club.

A night spent in a clay-coloured square.

A group buy pastries and coffee in the morning.

Two of you sit and twist leaflets

into neolithic origami, agree to meet

in Costa Rica in five years time.

But you mean tonight. You mean now.

Feel it. Keep it, somewhere

stuck to the sole of your shoe,

down the back of a pub bench,

in the fist of a statue,

as it plays hide and seek

with you in the wreck of the week.

A big rock in the water.

The water smoothing the rock.

The rock is here, waiting,

like a monk or a customer

or a citizen submitting

an application as the

bureaucracy flushes past.

The water moves the tip

of an ivy stem, the ivy stem

strokes the water. What moves

what, when we are touching?

A Labrador in the water.

The dog with its paws pressing

the stones. I scrape the mud

from my shoe with one of the

stones, throw it in the water.

The river gulps burbles sloshes

murmurs glugs glugs and shhhhh,

runs runs runs past, watches me.

I am a tourist here. I keep my

scrap words and memorabilia

in this book that I will file

with all the other river notes.

These rocks keep together,

a slow community. That big one

there is the bruiser, those little

yellowish ones will never grow up

until they come apart, and

the other bank is another life

across the gurgling traffic,

light snapping in the greenish

greyish crossover currents.

The ink thickens in the water,

gets carried away. The rocks

do nothing. I am the tourist

with a fever, on a minor tour,

The rocks look and turn back to

their own work, gradual decay.

A family makes noise behind me.

The dog is back, slipping up the bank

like a mop or a starfish sped up.

Buzz in the pocket, hand on the sphere.

I can feel another look close by,

the admonishing tone of a parent,

the quick response of a child.

The stones sit here and I sit with them.

Three on the roof in the rain.

Coffee and a soggy newspaper.

Little rivulets run by the kerb

like animal tails, and baby

clothes hang along cast iron rails.

A shop attendant puffs on a vape

and the days wear an unfamiliar shape.

They are growing. Soon, they will

inundate their own wardrobes,

the limbs of the hours all stretched

out in this sodden doll’s house.

The three descend to drumming.

The tourists traipse in and out

of the coffee shops. This whole place

is dense with the weight

of those convulsing pipes and

the old metaphors underground.

A hatchback goes past with a lip

of snow on the bottom of its windscreen

and we slowly file off to rest

and warm our cold hands and feet.

Even the miserable puritans

with their dour black dress

and obsession with death,

even they continued to live,

though they will not convince you

in your cutout cubicle

ringed by this spasmodic

cultural geography,

your little unhinged

pile of the Midwest,

swinging your legs above

the harbour water, which vibrates

like life in close-up.

---

My dreams last night were caught

in The Large Hadron Collider,

sweeping close to extra dimensions

that hovered like small additions

on a restaurant menu – not

optional, but accidentally

blundered into at a small extra cost.

I woke up with my cheek

in a pool of my own spit

thinking of a trip to Geneva.

---

The manager of a beach café

bulk buys oil on a discount,

the manifestation of a bunch in the chain,

which is odd given the consistency

of drought conditions in the mediterranean.

But maybe this year

the groves will get enough rain,

or maybe the tourists will be

shepherded onto the beach, again,

carrying bottles of red wine,

behind a wall of smoke.

---

The kids in a small west country

village are prepping for the lantern parade,

as an awful poet recites

some hackneyed lines about the stars

in the backroom of a city bar

and the manager roles her eyes,

behind the scratched pumps,

beside the swinging door

of the kitchen, all white tiles

and chrome worksurfaces and steam.

---

Even for this, people will applaud,

whilst they are somewhere specific,

casting small screens

onto bigger screens,

daydreaming of city breaks

as the dust unsettles and,

despite the lack of an agreement,

things continue and continue

until something cracks this

extended moment, and

the weather swings too wildly,

and dimensions collide,

and the price of oil

becomes exorbitant,

and the poet is booed,

and abstraction is overcome

by the necessities of shelter and food.

There was a dinner party. A friend of a friend turned up in a diva’s fur coat. Underneath this, a leopard print shirt. She wore rich red lipstick and black boots with thick soles that gave her an extra two inches. Instinctively, I disliked her, but I wanted to give her the benefit of the doubt. Canapes were served in the glass conservatory, strangely reminiscent of my grandmother’s bungalow extension. A magician with a speech impediment pulled cards out of the air. Each time he spat his words out I moved a little closer to him, until he stopped his tricks and began to explain to the small crowd that billionaires weren’t so bad because their wealth was mainly in fixed assets rather than sloshing around in their bank accounts. He smiled at me, patronisingly. I imagined throwing him through the fixed asset of the window, but then the host brought out olive tapenade on cheap white toast, grilled chicory, and fizzy wine. I smiled back as he spilt the wine on his white shirt. In the distance, purplish flashes lit up the horizon. The champagne flutes rattled on their plastic trays. The diva appeared beside me. I whispered something in her ear about sulphates being sprayed into the stratosphere, slipped a photo of an abandoned town into her pocket, then excused myself and stepped out into the warm air. I had expunged the word ‘unseasonable’ from all the books I owned half a dozen years ago. The magician had restarted his routine. I walked away from the window, about twenty yards or so. The light of a few stars wriggled through the faintly orange night. I picked up a stone and threw it at the glass.

I wrote one stand

one stood

one under the hand

of a city

coiling like an ammonite

in the pixelated evening

while my eyes were closed

and the god with a wide gob

yelled into the stars

dragging their giant feet

over the membrane

of our dreams.

You heard a song you knew

once, soles skipping

over hot sand,

all these empty isles

in demand,

all these sparks in the

gutter oil slick

signs for shops

reading “Get rich quick!”

I held on to the ripping seam

as the streets scattered

eyes rolled back

and the present shattered

and the present shattered

and the present shattered

and I almost can stand

under its pieces,

almost,

a pen, a book, my hand.

The long r

rolling out on a wooden bar

the easy drone of a rock guitar

Phil Collins in a vest

log fire

gambling machine

plastic plant,

the men in a row

sinking pints, dressed

in combat trousers

and dark sweatshirts.

A distinct voice rows through

the chatter like a canoe,

the clink of glasses

out the dishwasher,

the steam rising up

to the glass lampshade

where the bartender

banged her head.

Every other thing is a joke,

every body, every stool,

every flute glass,

plays a role, plays the fool.

He rolls a cigarette

from borrowed tobacco

That’s a bloody Cuban cigar.

The single ice cube

in the whiskey glass has shrunk

to a transparent claw.

Sometimes the interiority

is squeezed out of you,

in the off-guard local,

a larger living room.

A place contains its own point,

own hook, fishes

whatever is in isolation

out your mind and sets it

in the brick and wood’s own time,

the babble and flash and flicker

of the flat screen TV,

roman numerals on the clock face,

the evening fractured and warm

our arms crossed

another Monday gone.  

In the seventies

there were dozens of cathedrals

in the desert. Meridional,

unfinished projects

gaping windows

money embezzled and lost,

the wind racing over

whitewashed walls and through

the sockets of windows,

rattling piles of unused steel.

This change is a sprint

on a geological timescale –

new relics, footprints floating

off the tarmac, thickening

the atmosphere. But

sitting here, a billion Canutes

before the slowly rising tide,

sweltering as the mercury

creeps upwards, we begin to

inhabit myth, our smiles sticking

like the flat trace of fossils

in basalt. I take a walk in the slow rain,

this laconic cloudburst, almost

somnambulant. There is a bundle

of bottles, all pointing inwards,

half damming the river beside

Hartcliffe Way. A car showroom,

other low-rise warehouses clustered

close to the road, at the base

of a shallow valley. In the re-use shop

I look at an old mirror,

badly painted pink, it swings

all the way if I nudge it backwards

and has lost most of its

orange wax lining. It is

splitting into the air, It is

fixed to this place here,

on sale for one pound –

no wonder, it looks shit.

But, in another second split

from this place here, I am

walking with it to the cashier,

thinking that I will keep it

till the monsoons drench the land

from Porthcurno to King’s Lynn,

which might not be so long.

When they do, I’ll be sitting

in that other place with my crappy

pink mirror I bought for a song.

We were in the back garden.

I hit the stumps in with a mallet,

drew my foot across the turf

to mark the crease. The trains

rattled past behind me. We

were playing with a real ball.

All the cheap tennis balls had

been swallowed by the garden bushes,

which were an entire other world,

deep and unfathomable.

I started playing block shots, but

then – and this is when

I really should have stopped –

the garden grew into an oval and

I could see the ball my friend

bowled was screaming to be driven

for four, which I duly did,

straight into the French windows.