Revolving towers,
Spinning tops on,
Anonymous office blocks,
Kissing cranes.
In a rooftop terrain.
Fireescapes' fingerprint,
Fine as filigre on a night sky.
Smoke-free chimney pots,
Stoutly silhouetted in the sunset's flame.
Victorian spires and rusty gutters,
Shuddering in the wake of passing lorries,
Aerial aspect of Cockney magpies.

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Never having set fire to a pile of papers before, I was surprised at how difficult it was to get the first piece to blooming burn.
Nine matches gutted before a flame took hold. So much for the graceful, symbolic act.
The papers sat in the bbq's breeze brushed ash.
Not just paper scrawled with childish, badly written sentences.
The garden had been left feral for six weeks.
It was August, quantities of rain and sun had made the garden green and full as a bowl of chorophyll.
Grass stood ankle deep, the bitter vine choked the back door, more leaf and twine than ever it was grape, and the patio was a flood of weeds, barely stone at all.
Having seen cathartic paper burning in films and not thought it could be nearly as meaningful an act as it appeared.
(Nothing is ever as meaningful as a well acted, intimately shot movie scene makes it seem.)
I now realise I had underestimated the symbolism.
A small pile of papers.
All full of boring, heart breaking lines.
Tatty tan lined notepaper,
Folded a4, lined and plain,
And the back of torn envelopes.
Packed away for ten years.
Initially carefully packaged - their neatness a stark contrast to emotional incontinence.
Then the packet just became part of a bigger box, stashed under different beds.
The letters have blurred where oil or perfume has leaked in the box of odds and sods.
I remember what happened and some of what I did but thankfully not how it felt. The feelings have been stubbornly wrought: beaten, fired, beaten again then cooled to form emotional alchemy. Shit to gold.
The letters are a little self conscious and lean to drama rather than essential facts. That's emotions for you, dramatic.
Speedily written in an outpouring of self conscious shock.
The odd line filters through: to be reread one last time.
Was all this helpful, doubtful?
But it's what one does, in novels, films, poems and life....
'Do you remember when we used to....?' 'I just want it to go back to how it was before you were so cruel'.
Thank god it never did; go back to the way it was or how it used to be.
It's good when the flames take hold and the paper layers quickly blaze and bloom to a burnt, brown rose. It's really good.
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20 met 16
Together for ten.
Apart for 5.
Stole a few days.
And nights.
Apart another 2 years.
In which a letter was written.
The letter took 2 hours.
A love letter.
A letter that could have gone either way.
It took a moment to read.
It could have spelt out a lifetime or another year.
But the timing was wrong and the letter's buried.
Wondering what if? through the years.
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SaturdayIIII August

The hairy woman
Getting out of the pool.
Is walnut brown.

Tanned and toned.
She's a regular.

Drenched pageboy hair drips pool water down her neat vanity free cheeks as she ducks to find footing in her flipflops.

She has a smiling, sideways mouth.
Turned towards familiar staff.

She moves irregularly, in clumsy jerks.
She has a sharp sense of who is where: a shy, human radar.
She has wolflike patches of brown hair on her left wrist and ankle.
She slips into the water's rhythm.
Speedily spears through the water arms and legs jackknifing.
The hairy woman who can't half swim.
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FridayIIII August

The Stroke

The stroke struck:
In the upstairs granny flat kitchen.
On age-brittle plastic tiles.
Between the gloss white kitchen wall and enamelled cooker.
Under a pan waiting to heat an egg.

Straining to voice angry panic.
Immobile muscles in mute motion.
Silent words ricochet as impotent bullets.

Wondering what your rolling eyes really can take in.
Knowing at times you know.
The cut outs Emma brought propped side by side,
The garage bouquet in a cut-glass NHS vase,
Or passing sky through the ward window?

When the supermarket aisles changed
You’d stamp and feel unhinged.
Only because Peggy was waiting, home alone.
When the waitress came you gave her the Spanish inquisition,
on the state of the restaurant kitchen.
Only because you wanted the veg to be just right.
When you looked at your family your eyes were lost in love.
You once said: ‘I don’t care what you do as long as you do it with pride.’
At the time that made everything seem alright.

Now straggling tears make me weep.
Your aching yawns of speech.
Wiping slimy white from your lips
Holding tight to your large hand.
I think of all the pride.
Of you with pride.

Miner

Passing shadows in the night.
And day.
Seasons in an earth-packed hole.
There are no canaries and
the oil lamps gutted long ago.
They’re the only ones to hear their cries.
Echoes down gasfilled seams.
On offer are pills and hope.
Mole blind.
Dreaming about the light.
Angry with their plight.
Mostly bewildered.
And bored.
Sustained by mealtimes.
Enforced intimacy
And an overpowering sense of smell.

WednesdayIIII August

Quiet Gaps

Ocean reach.
Bioluminous,
Winding continuous.
Circadian echoes.
Weaving through sea-dust.  
Infinity’s rumour.
Roaring from star to star.
Moon to moon.
The place where love sleeps.
Where souls speak.
Soft as air between clasped palms
As the tickle of stroking skin.
Silent as the mind unspoken.
As memories buried marrow deep.
Finally hearing what was always within.
Because spaces gave it wings.
 

WednesdayIIII August

Phrases in Time

Between here and now.
A lonely intimacy.
There in a minute.
Slip to running, fast.
Third time lucky.
Hopefully.
Lost in time.
A quiet moment.
Going back.
Living in the past.
Over in a trice.
Life.
Stitches in time.
Skipped by.

TuesdayIIII August

Fire on the Mani Peninsula

Post summer olive trees.
Sun worn kindling sticks.
Smattered with silvery leaves.
Blazing slaves.
Sunken wrecks in a red, red haze.

Flames tumbled from a single tiny spark.
A vandal’s clipper
Or broken glass?
Knees scratched by briar,
Hair’s slicked with sweat,
Tanned fingers flick the splint.
Or a careless cigarette?

Racing against each other,
Burning faster and faster in firey free fall.
Flame haunted rocky Spartan land.
Enflamed land of honey bees and olive trees.

MondayIIII August

If I were a mobile phone text message receipt bleep
I would be the standard, old fashioned, bell phone tone.
If I were a superjet coloured fax, scanner and printer,
I would be reflections on water or a trained carrier pigeon.
If I were an ipad scroll button,  
I’d be corners of rough Egyptian parchment.
If I were the components of a dynamo driven tea-making pouring machine,
I’d be the gnarly bones of a wizened bint bent to hold the sugar spoon.
If I were a robot’s feeling heart,
I wouldn’t be an identifiable circuit.  
If I were the miracle antibody for noxious biological weaponry,
I’d be the bergemot to the canker root of a witchy boil.
If I were young I’d look very, very old.

 

SundayIIII August

A performing seal.
Dressed in inappropriate unseallike attire:
A pillar box red bow,
The added chic of a tight hat.
Flippers clipped and polished shining grey.
Spirited away from natural habits and habitat.
To sit clapping to the crowd's crow.
Trained by a master.
Tamely turning tricks.
With perfect flipper flicks.
Forgetting in the busy midst: this small ring of water's not home.
It doesn't even resemble it.
The seal prolongs the pretence.
A docile, dutiful seal.
Quick to learn.
Eager to please.
Pleasing is forgetting.
Filling its belly with dead fish,
Speeding for another whirl of laughter.
At night dreaming of circles of widening mouths and bare arms.
Going through the motions.
At the end of the day the ringside is swept and the whiff of sweet popcorn fades to animal sweat and hay.
At night in the empty pool, the seal remembers who she is.
This is her life.
This is how she lives.
With luck this will change;
the pool will become a memory.
A place to be mused on during an idle float.
Her long eyelashes drying in the sun.
Large brown eyes reflecting the crests of passing waves.
Her belly a grey crown in water sparkling greeny grey.

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Camping in Britain

It's hot in here.
And it smells slightly.
Through the pegged flaps.
Past dew damp trainers and gristly, hastily washed dinner plates,
the grey sky's heart beat is lively with wind whipped leaves.
There's more than a chance of heavy rain.
A bedraggled circle of young men stand huddled over mugs of tea. Rearing with hungover, breakfast bright laughter.
In here you can hear everything from 12am, drunken hoots to a family's morning minutiae.
Late last night two couples in separate tents had spoken low and close. Now they loudly discuss the added flavour of butter in beans and mountain biking.
A smatter of drizzle comes and goes.
The inner net is as wet as rain drenched canvas.
And the damp wood's making more smoke than fire.
Now the thick bottomed pan spits fat.
The bacon's frying. And the tea's turning tangy in a plastic cup.
The sky's still unremittingly grey but it's going to be a rather wonderful day.
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FridayIII August

He’d watched fire embers at the edge of the Niger.
He’d scrabbled over rocky mountain miles.
Flown aeroplanes over the Andes,
Gone blue in the Antarctic and blistered in the Sahara,
Jumped the Mississippi river,
Drank tea in China,
And danced in Monsoon rains.
He’d watched Australian snake skins shrink in the burn of the rising sun,
Eaten New Guinea crawlers whilst wearing a 2nd hand leather loin cloth,
Held hands with the tallest man in Vietnam,
And the oldest woman in Siam.
He’d drank the ambrosial cream of fresh Spanish almonds,
And lived for ten days on palm root milk.
But for the life of him he couldn’t work out how to navigate the Northern Line.

ThursdayIII August

Urban Kicks

A suburban house,
No.6 Magnolia Way.
Red brick with bay windows.
Tidy front garden.
Clipped privet.
Short grass.
A neat, gravel path.

It's 5pm on Monday.
Commuters will soon start to trickle back.
A man stands on the tree-lined pavement.
Watching No.6.

Kids kick a ball between parked cars.
A dog barks in someone's empty sitting room.
Listless surburban sounds:
Flotsam on the city's distant pound.

He steps up to the path.
The window of No.6 holds his reflection.
Behind him he can see:
Bright bonnets, multi-coloured doors
and wheely bins.
He stands watching the window.

The light's are off and the TV's on.
The room's filled with an unearthly blue.
Across the ceiling moves a jerky, kaleidoscopic flow.
The tail end of day time TV shows.

The man takes off his shoes and socks.
In his bare feet he creeps.
Edging across damp grass to stand below the window.
He steals a peek.
Then quickly turns and goes.

WednesdayIII August

Anyone for Treacle Tart?

The cook books all have a very traditional,
tried and tested, dare we say staid?
English recipe,
called treacle tart:

A prince amongst pies.
Latticed perfection,
Syrup'd nectar, hustler of honeyed sighs.

Beloved by old maids and school boys alike.
The ingredients rarely vary.
Even so: everybody’s tart’s different.

The kitchen:
Little red and white check curtains.
An open cottage window.
Picturesque mid-Summer view.
Complete with:
Hay-dusty sun beams.
Cropped fields and buzzy, green hedges.
All rough hewn oak, terracota tiles and enamel.
Very rustic.
Pie ready.
Ingredients wait for the whip and mix
Of the spatula and electronic hand whisk.

The cook's on the boil.
Wildly mixing the familiar dish.
Wooden spoon in firm, experienced grip.
Getting a little more confident with the spice.
Flirting with a slight, lemony twist;
a barely there tarty kick.
Golden, syrupy promises: slip across the cookbook's page.
Sugary anticipation: wets hungry lips.
Sacchrine sensations beckon: treacle slick.
All the spoons are out, hair's flying, apron's akimbo.....
The cook's really getting into this.


Padding,
Pounding,
Kneading,
Beating,
And finally
Rolling.

The exhausted pastry hits the dish.
Its buttery glow waits for treacle to flow.
It's poured: sweet and achingly slow.
Leaving the bowl to lick.

The oven’s warm, spicy air,
Rises and warps the senses
Pie shaped images drift.
The cream's chilling in the fridge:
Crown to a tart's hot glory.

Finally it comes,
With all the trimmings,
The spoon dips and rises.
Hot and rich.

TuesdayIII August

Get Down and Dirty

Dirty's better than clean.
He's more interesting.
Dirty's got substance.
He's loose and wild.
Clean's, clean.
Tight-lipped and highly strung.
Frightened of spills.
Lacking dirty's filthy thrill.

Dirty goes everywhere.
No door's locked.
His name's on every list.
Unforgettably smelly.
He saunters through each and every town.
Wearing varying shades of black or brown.
He likes it sooty, smudged and seedy.
Of course inside he's bright.
Don't scoff. He really is alright.
Have you never seen magnified microbacteria?

If clean loosened up a little,
Was a tad less brittle.
If she relaxed, laid back.
She might find that being dirty's actually quite nice.

MondayIII August

Eagles’ tireless eddy,
Regally reeling,
Stilled, effortless, movement.
Half flying, half floating.
Feathery tack against an icy wind.
Perfectly pitched for a hungry descent.
Plummeting with eagle force, pulled by weightless gravity.
Turning in a breathless, death defying, merciless descent.
Precise and invisibly quick.
Prey twisting on a nerveless, icy talon.
Waiting for the silent kill.
The eagle’s awesome ascent,
Aeronautical king claiming icy air.
Soaring over,
Frozen space.
A frigid impasse
Ravine a thousand rivers deep.

SundayII August

One hour.
Momentarily slipped.
Out of all time.
Time forgot to look.
One hour, full and free.
Millions of time-fillers filled.
As this one one hour stood still.
Sixty minutes and three thousand six hundred seconds.
Never seen again.

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SaturdayII August

Oh yes I am like a pebble which the river flows over....yes I am.

A good man
Bobbed around.
Staying afloat.
Looking for a bloody boat.

Striking out to front crawl when doggy paddle was a bore.
Where on earth was he?
Where did this bloody water start?
Swimming really was becoming a chore.

If he stopped he'd sink.
And this made him think.

Life was a great cosmic fart.
The universe's belly laugh.
A case of sink or swim.

Out he'd popped.
Thinking the water was all his.
In fact he'd be swimming 'til he dropped.

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Friday 13thII August

Twilight Tarmac, Tailors’ Premises Part 2

The tailors’ premises are four floors below the bedroom window.
The yellowed red brick wall winds dizzily down.

Fingertips grip the sill, pads pressed firmly against imagined free fall.
A spiralling peep is enough.
Coming to a concrete stop, a patch of eight scrubby slabs.
Enough room for a clothes line and a rotting, potted palm.

Over the garden wall is the tailors’ forecourt.
The mid 18th century building used to be a church.
Its vaulted roof, with a stained glass porthole, still has a cross.
The entrance and its wall have been ripped down and replaced with sheets of thick glass.
There are no internal walls and a polished wooden floor stretches from side to side.
Rails of clothes have been pushed to the edges of the room.
Desks, cutting and design tables are randomly positioned throughout.
And mannequins stand around in various stages of undress.
There are no people in the building at this time.

It has been raining, summer rain, briefly lifting the wilted air.
The damp tarmac steamily emits curls of evaporating rain,
which wreathe in a cropped blanket over the forecourt.
Industrial-bright spotlights chase up the reinforced glass walls.

The beams of light pour through the glass, searching out the building’s inner angles.
Meeting corners it turns to contours and bounces back, with its new partner shadow, leaping to the bedroom’s open window.

ThursdayII August

The Tailors Part 1

The medium sized Tailorship,
resides in an old building in Kings Cross.
Its forecourt is surrounded by a grey, grilled automatic gate.
Employees arrive between 8am and 10 and leave about 7pm.
Some drive, arriving in shiny, rich looking cars.
Others arrive slightly flushed from the tube.
The man who tends the business’s evergreens and flowers.
(Of which there are many; some in a bed, others in tubs)
Is a dedicated gardener.
He could be the boss.
The beds are always packed and are regularly watered.
Almost nightly cans and takeaways get dumped in them.
On a monthly basis idle, drunken hands rip out a plant and leave it on the pavement.
Its naked roots trailing clods of earth.
In the beds the flowers make sense.
They look unusual in the concrete ferment.
Always perky. Common garden flowers not easily ignored.
In the evening the tailor can be found hunched down weeding.
Other times he stands staring into space, the leaking nose of the hose dangling from his hands.

There are other businesses in the row:
A hostel, an artist’s studio, what used to be an architects, the Ethiopian Christian Church and the Musician’s Benevolence Fund.
Snaking in one long human hive toward the Station.
Where one begins and one ends is not clear.
The architects went bust last year.
Its grimy windows a showcase for dead palms, blueprints and broken chairs.
The hostel sleeps a mix of recovering, just-released drunks and kids taking a look at London.
The Ethiopian Christian Church is full on a Sunday.
Its large and ardent congregation spill out after each service to the bus stop,
conveniently situated directly outside the church doors.
The smart young kids tear up and down the street, dodging buses and pedestrians,
running rings, round a well-thought out game.
Never can tell what the musicians are doing. Not playing music.
The reincarnated building’s sandy red bricks are in varying states of repair
Or disrepair.  
It could have been so many things to so many people:
A missionary hall,
A workhouse or a dairy, given the peeling, pale blue ‘Dairy’ sign at the end of the building’s row.

WednesdayII August

Friends, crowd and sun.
Flash-white rays’ thermal graze,
fractures and fills.
I sense,
freckles and fresh, wet sweat,
snatches of golden down.

TuesdayII August

Playground playmates of gritty yards
Pleasure and stains: Coca-Cola ring pull marriage.

MondayII August

21st Century Boys

SundayI August

Going back

Freewheeling through time.
The old's a new view.
People and places.
The mind's playing tricks.
As it walks through pasts
Pretending they're present.
A parallel universe.
Time's corridor,
Opening up shut doors.
Rebuilding ruins.
The forgotten remembered in present's spark.
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Saturday1 August

The remains of the night

In the first few am hours
A discarded high heel and some shards of glass lie in a pool of sticky beer.
Nocturnalised birds turn from the neon dawn.
Spangle brained and starry eyed the progressive, forward thinking, racy midnight tinkers glint home.
Buzzing on the ebb of revelry.
Propelled by banter and heartfelt meaningful chatter.
They float.
Before day sinks in.
Early risers glance bleary eyed as the starry eyed giggle by clutching last night's vim.
Alarm snapped from sleep they walk into a day yet to begin.

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FridayI August

Bra Lady’s Holiday

She is on holiday.
Not a grand vacances,
No great exodus,
Just a long weekend at home.
Lord knows she is owning her well earned break.

Expression expansive,
Arms akimbo,
Over a blonde demi or two.
Friends come and go.
A couple, possibly your daughter and her husband,
Join you for a few.
And the barman’s chatty.

It is all the same to you.
Holiday time is the one time, time doesn’t matter.
Usually it’s bell ring after bell ring.
Your hall full of bikes, brollies and coats.
Your house full of women after a piece of mammary magic.

Your big breasts are firmly stacked.
You wouldn’t wear grey nylon.
Wouldn’t even touch the stuff.
Your bra is purple satin
With a polka dot pattern.
Whale bone stays
And blue lacy bows.

You are the Ghent bra lady.
Welcoming the great unmeasured
Worldly underwear oracle.
With your left hand you judge the cup.
The rest is mammary alchemy.

The bra emporium is a legendary lingerie sanatorium.
Where all underwear crimes are gently ironed out.
The room is strung with selected fabrics,  
Trailing from ceiling to floor.
Brocade, velvet and silk.
A flowerbed of fabric.
Brush and cushion in the glooming hush of a down lit living room.

Her tarnished blonde hair is twisted into a perfect chignon.
And her deep brown tan emanates below heavy kohled eyes and thick red lips.
She is the bra lady and in her hands miracles are performed.
A mammery mystic.



------ End of Forwarded Message

ThursdayI August

The Artist’s Portrait of A Man

20th century man.
Over 100 years old.
Hogging his dark frame.

Sack-cloth clothes,
In oily blacks and reds.
Are grubby dark brown.
Scratched and dabbed the figure of a man.
Aping boxy city shapes.
His square head is bowed,
large limbs curled like a child.

Factory time.
Silenced by the din.
The model is deaf and dumb.
His presence pierces with a piston’s pressure.
In this image of public thrum.

With surgical precision,
The artist’s vision
Slices through the haze.
And explodes into 21st century’s day-to-day.

His hanging head in shining oils,
Hangs hard as hammer like fists anchoring
the figure to the bottom frame.
How is it that this big handed man
Has a quickening line to the heart?

WednesdayI August

A bar in Belgium

He still looks like a boy,
He’s only just pushing 20.
Boyishly brawny and very blonde.
Not pushy just feeling his way,
testing his weight,
weighing up the feel and look of adulthood,
sniffing the bar-room air:
Fried fish, cat piss and beer.

Sun reddened skin, raw from a recent shave and zealous scrub.
Clear-eyed and confident.
He scans the room.
Spots red lipstick.
A rag to a bull.
Tonight’s only Casanova,
throws up his feathers
and fluffs his chest.

Tonight he wants a woman.
Now he wants to spend his money on drinks
And a lady with red lipstick.
‘Let me buy these ladies a drink.’
A drink and no more.
The ladies just want to smoke in the sun.

They drink the drinks.
Buy themselves dinner and leave before his fun’s begun.