Lances of evening sun run through trails
Left spearheads of gold behind water rails.
The dene smell that came from a hawthorn on
The turn, had lost all its putrid scents
Of spring. Blown in the night, echoed
By the corpses of snowberries, marble
Spoils of fungus adorned the rorqual’s throat
Of ridged bark on the trunk of a fallen
Tree. Two blackbirds in a drunken squabble
Over fermented windfalls, were just missed
By a pushchair where a low flying toddler
Extemporised words into birdlike cries.
An umbrella was caught up and fluttered
To dry its wet wings like a cormorant;
As mopheads in the shrubbery tumbled
From sky hydrangea to rhubarb crumble.

For lived experience beyond the carnal;
Topknot explored an inner life.
Then with Slipknot who was his wife,
They embraced art rather than artisanal.
At first their dream fell flat in liminal
Where worm cast actors played the fife,
And whalers waved a flensing knife,
And stoic chic was seen as criminal.

A wall dive away from the stepped revetments
Of leggy fledgling skipped ropes of foam,
Where deep blocks slowed down coast erosion;
(Despite negative equity and mad investments
In sand-sunk rubble from a broken home)
They found a world beyond shallow explosion.