Sky: a repository of adjectives
―land's fast mirror
―stripped of uniform
―thought to body.

Greece: a repository of alternatives
―Civilisation’s fast mirror
―never fully constituted
―thought to Europe’s body.

And all this water between us
―greasing the dialogue
―speeding up the dissolution
―co-operating.

Isn’t it always cooperative?
After all, the trickster
is nothing without prey;
the entrepreneur nothing
without an audience.

This all started as a song,
a song that built identities
then laws and empires,
fuelled by material wealth,
upheld by vague data.
Wherein the song was lost
and here we stand
on the crest of sound wave,
a vertiginous ***** before us
beyond which are better words
than the unfortunate love.
Given pressure and time we find
the impression of a memory
that has its end in a song.

Still rolling
With innocence

The times can ****
Your unborn heritage

Paper years
Still gather

The duty stopped
Before it's paid

What I have is a pitch
angled at nothing
and I envy the limber crowd of bees,
and I envy the spider’s easy meal.

The low hum of a wash cycle
competes with, then dislodges my dirge,
gradually builds a golden,
natural looking wan expression.

Diffident? Go out and meander
content to accept the indifference of meaning.
This walk is not a protest.
This work was only ever play.

Suitable for all skin types
our explanations can’t help themselves,
run like British accents on trade
and explain away any need for help.
Non-streaking conceits
you know best how much you are worth.

we use a cheap language full of facts
spools feeding nightmares
in our grisaille history painting a flat canvas
every thing reduced
the door said open
and you opened it

so much of what we are
is not about how well
we do it
but how badly
we want it
the promised future never came quick enough
and we are left asking…

the phone wants constant interaction
the builders drill, drive the caterpillar squeals
the kids on the trampoline howl
the dog whimpers like Miles Davis on his horn
a more authentic expression than
the smooth pop jingles
from a lost youth

zero — expression from nothing —
the background radiation —
the song of yes — I am — I want —
all this noise against the sense of lack
now we know why exhale follows inhale
and all things seek to return to their natural gravity —
observations will be made by the still articulate
of the tiny ecosystem of a forgotten pond
the silence after this will be immaculate

The rain gives way to blossoms and blossoms
give way to snow that never drifts but scatters.

In this way now the weather intervenes;
the legacy of a child’s breath upon a popsicle.

With only one hand on the steering wheel
we still find it hard to let go our designs;

a glance in the mirror of a mirage, of carnage?
The territory swallows us all the same,

only the precision of the map is at stake:
how well the landscape bends to the road.

To be lost in this world and not afraid
is a skill we have yet to remember;

to master life in the ruin of life: life
dissembling in the rings of the ash tree.

What looks like rot is just the caterpillar
giving way to the nascent butterfly

but not like your smile gives way,
breaks, before the latest tyrant.

1.

The light that agitates the equator
bounds across your southern frontier,

and being higher in the wage scale
enables trips there to be easier

than the odysseys of those passing
away in the opposite direction.

Where once bandaged soles went
now many machines tie the stitches

between the divides where once again
bandaged souls will traverse.


2.

Our footprint will be larger than life
and beat the earth to an abstract plain.

Where once many names were needed,
our editorial, read as obituary, will need few.

It’s a recursive gesture to prune in order to grow
but who’s hand truly closes the symphony?

Here I find legumes, tubers, a display of sage
and a cold comfort in my palm.

The perfect chicane of the fern’s stem,
tributaries unfurled, reflects in the plastic bucket.

So many relationships like bad business partnerships:
green bottles falling from walls; messages stuck in bottles
rotating in great gyres; swallows never at home North or South.
(Anti-Confessional? — It’s a fashionable trend just now
and yet what is it not to confess, when we claim authorship?)

Suburbia’s flat evenness suffocates (but I’ve repeated this
so many times and I’m still here!).
We need to find the cracks in which to grow, in which to place,
our errant thoughts like rude whispers in a darkened room,
and nobody about to hear you anyway!

We express ourselves well in silence but me, I gyrate,
not quite on one side or the other, a kind of even fullness,
or, that’s what I like to think, let’s get this straight:
I’m an uncouth wind against plains that offer no obstacles.
Better to wear me that way — it saves the snap under pressure.

Seven lyre birds sang each in turn a tune
doing their tonal best to hone
the reproductive skills akin to a master
in the art of Japanese calligraphy
but all failed distracted by the majesty
of a high-definition sunset on playback in perpetuity.

the foxgloves explode
in infinite slow motion [silently]

from them also we can learn
the soft crash and save ourselves

from the genius suicide:
the brief fame of a supernova

…

intermittent rain keeps the land fecund,
a deluge cleanses to the bedrock,
rain in perpetuity is impossible
and we think we can control this

but we live at one speed,
and measure in standard units:
our language is insufficient
to give a precise reflection

…

to assume our laws are true beyond appeal
puts into question our democratic process

we forget the necessity of conversation
the original Greek ideal of the agora;

to meet friends and argue is the point, is it not, of life,
of all this noise, after all, what use is silence?

…

our luxury of having the exercise of our conscience
is subsidised by the suffering of a multitude other

..and yet

when we all speak with one
language / currency / voice
there is no poetry anymore
no rhyme, no metre, no form

in this Heaven only, [on Earth], we are united

so much time spent in forests
maybe it was natural to want these plains
of wheat, barley, rapeseed, concrete,
but then, we build cities
—we’re forest people still

after the cedar, the oak
after the oak, the pine,
after the pine, the palm, the kapok…
we’re good at turning things into names;
at coding the world, then remaking it:
we can cut an entire forest of kauri
into the image of San Francisco

waiting for minutes to deliver movement

two tennis ***** on the platform edge
unlikely random symmetry
maybe this is art?

when we arrive in another town
we face the same commands
BE THE BATMAN
BE A GREAT WESTERNER
—so many commands!

everything runs like clockwork,
until we hit the bars

A chorus of yellow trumpets
are held silently to a sun
that doesn’t want to play.

I prep a shoulder of lamb
for its ceremonial consumption:
a mid-week meat ****.

One eye on the clock (always),
one on the world-window:
I’m blinded by both,

as blind as the buttercups
that unconsciously reach
for a light that has yet to breach

our clouded notions of reality.
The birds are in constant alarm.

flat white light
a beacon against the world
reduces every colour to a neutral wash
against a background of
titillation for our twitter,
Facebook make-up, eye shadow,
no foundation required

moving all the time
on a sea of data
even when we are located
it results in the same,
nonsensical beyond time and place;
the moment is all and perhaps
in that lies the only real truth

ephemeral, we live or die in the euripus
of flesh and its needs

today that pull toward sleep but not-sleep—

rest

the coppice crowns a slide of green
—so very English,
as the seven-four-seven strikes a stave against the blue vault;
a tabula rasa for a new century’s march,
but the sky remains silent to all that effort
to get from one horizon to the next,
the day comes round soon enough anyhow
—so very now

the jet plane’s pendulum of time-equals-money
centres me and any thoughts I had of making
that walk back to Warwickshire and adolescence
vanish to be replaced by equations

of distance over time,
the number of seats for the lucky few,
the price we have to pay
to escape ourselves…

Two white French girls
smoke a Turkish hookah
and listen to three black
African Americans sing rap
the hookah bubbles
the mobile smacks out
the emasculated music
their mouths relinquish
their language to the jam
the pencil makes no sound

The clouds scoot
orange and pink bruises
across the skyline
like the weather can’t wait
can’t change quick enough
it’s October already
and we’re still not done
with summer;
cling to every humid evening
hang around every last beam
of the too punctual sunset
 
In the club the beats begin
but it’s too early; no one’s inside
One of the French girls coughs back a dud ****
the bar door creaks
the traffic whispers
with bored engines
the beats want to sail
off with the clouds
but are kept echoing
between four walls

Time overcomes space then
the beats are cut
a siren wails, a seagull screams
the traffic streams
the awnings rock little trees
my concrete idyll

……

Two Spanish men arrive
and have a three-way
food talk
with a mobile

A piano begins
to sound out
Aquarium by Saint-Saëns
the beats return
then stop
a door opens
a door closes
the hubbub returns
 
The Spanish settle on
an Argentinean
the French girls switch to
a chantress

I digress

[Humorous Intervention]

The seagull rendered sculpture
of discarded fast-food containers,

(early, Sunday morning leftovers
from Saturday night’s punctured remains)

the locus of which gives the value of
a ******, good night out.

It is left to the curator of found objects
to enshrine their cultural worth.