Bashing
Crashing
Smashing
Clotted-cream tongues
Lashing
Cathedral hulls
October’s chop
Out to get
Lifejacketless him
Cityboy him
Neither’d gone beyond
His breezy smiled
Awrigh’ my lover
Up to their eyeballs they’d got now
No chance now to break
The awkward ice
Outside the breakwater
Never ought’er  
Hunker down
Turkeyland yelled
Ride the swell
Cradle orphaned beef
And if you don’t  
Incubate the rough
Earthed nests of wine-drowned potato
And proper job swede
And if you don’t
You won’t make it


*


Oggies  
Never take’em to sea
St Anthony’d decreed


But Master Herd, he hadn’t heard
And he’s too emmet to question.

Schizophrenic Rain
You hurt my brain
Please refrain from staking claim
To tiny changes in the blame
I’ve won for myself
To tame
The cats and dogs that
Preen and scratch in my outrage
Spitty spots of ***
Blushes and rushes of blood to the tips
Of fits of that’s so unfair

Rain

You foist your stubby fist into the tryst
I’ve got with Him upstairs
He hears
The sacred notes of ‘who actually cares’ if I’m
Low or high or mashed or smashed
Some sorta daughter-enforcer
Your pifflely drops
Tingle my locks

But  

What starts and stops,
For missy chubby chops
I’ll say  
If today’s tides subside,
Or turn me flip flops
Insane
Rain

The ***-bellied Mercedes squealed
As Meursault withdrew and
Marvelled at the flames
Licking
The air
Like marigolds on Ritilin.
'Raymond would have no reason not to admire this act.'
He stopped by a shimmering sea of Ubers.
The scrape and drawl of siren made no impression on him.
Leaking smoke reminded him of
Snow White’s Cottage
Where he had taken Marie when Lucie was born:
The place where he would go out at dawn to chop wood.
He liked the way her roses played
With the restlessness of children.
Then he thought: 'if only mother could see me now.'

It’s beautiful, Beta
Such beautiful flowers there
Excellent place, five star hotel-kind of  
You don’t want to know how high it was
Such a kind man helped me come down
My legs were hurting too much Bita
That gadi no good what did I tell you  

Ha Mummy
(lips spin into jalebi smile)

Whole new world open up,
Baaji so tired
You would not believe me, he did it didn’t he
Yes, took Baaji a lovely cuppa tea
Just the way I like it
You know I didn’t have no cake because of my medications

Ha Mummy
(cheeks go RAC orange)

I must go there again Beta
Go on
Book it for Baaji
Go on  

Ok Mummy
(cheeks go coconut burfi pink)

The doctors said you weren’t allowed
To see Mum in her final hours;
It wasn’t safe to will her on
Nor wet her lips with stolen snow
In case the virus you’d bring in
Might claim asylum on the ward.

Behind her mask Mum couldn’t tell
The story of her party trick:
Apple Pie with packet custard
Baked to death and turned to cinders,
Fed to Dad with stoic humour.    

No doubt it’s best you hadn’t seen
The carnage of the resus room
The febrile pumps of hand and nail
The gasps of good-intentioned strain
That reached a pitch at ten to three
And then from shrill went monkish silent.

On Barn Hill snow is falling thick
The Gaderbrook is filling up
The numb routine the porter starts
Now takes disfigured life away
And Northwick Park can breathe again.

Forty yards from Haribo Heaven,
They took flight,
Mocking the clouds of traffic:
Faster and faster,
Faster and looser,  
Faster and freer.

But then the Saxon ground
Came out in revolt,
Saying
Their covenant with gravity had been violated.

All sound was muted.

Heads struck at thirty-three yards;
Backs cracked the soil at thirty.
In his heart,
It was her finger that he felt,
Arching over the G string of her violin,
Like the neck of a flamingo.  

He mused:
After the sound came back,
Would she play a gigue or a dirge
To accompany
This ignominious moment?

When her sullied, muddied, mossy eyes looked away from him,
To her, had he become a lesser man?

Faster and faster
Faster and looser.

Had she now glimpsed a father’s struggle
To piece together what he thought he knew?