FRACTURES

Like an ocean freighter turning ...

today fades slowly, eases into night.

It carries a ballast of fallen petals,

has no pilot but the weight of hours.

About this pivot point we have lingered

outdoors. Tracing – for as long as we can –

the sun’s arc across a gasping planet.

Woken by an insistence of wrens, we saw

daylight moon rising over chimney pots.

We have freed a frantic butterfly trapped

by picture windows, watched foxgloves cast off

their white and purple vestment, seen cheerful

hollyhocks burst out like splashes of paint.

We have watered the persistence of poppies.

The year’s high noon unfolds in a flag-hung

horizon. Once crossed, there is no going

back, although we know what’s coming next:

summer will harden, tumble – like bombshells

dropped on purpose – down the keel of July.

Quiet as held breath, a bat skitters blackly

out of sight. Tongue-tied, we cannot name it.

vi. 2025

My Mausoleum

after a cartoon by Tom Gauld

is a teensy-weensy bookshop

no wider than its own front door.

Always has a queue of eager readers

entering one at a time. They may feel

themselves too close for comfort.

But find my suggestions

are more than worth the proximity.

Or so I have been told.

It would be impolite to say

otherwise. For this is England,

where all is said and done and dusted.

So few shelves, so many tongues

to hold. Yet each book chosen means

no-one goes empty-handed.

When my time comes, please seal me there

asleep in this uproar of language.

vi. 2025

The smell of stored apples

We knew full well it was a risk

to go back there. Break in.

No one would guess, you said. The old place

still vacant after all, porch light left on

as if to measure nightfall.

And knowing how to reach its bolt

the gate, hinge-loose, squeaked open.

A kind of mock welcome.

The grass gone soft where no feet passed,

trees grown crooked, or perhaps just older.

Inside the shed the air was sour

with smell of stored apples, long eaten.

Half-clenched, one soil-caked glove

lies on the workbench, a sleeping fist.

An unlaced pair of boots, gaping.

Already junk mail curls in the hall,

like unburnt leaves at a bonfire’s edge.

Cold tea stains cling to that cracked mug

left on the kitchen sill.

Dust collects. Our cast-off skin.

Briskly tucked in a mantelpiece

your last scrawled shopping list.

What it said, I didn’t ask – the silence was too full.

We touched nothing.

When dawn’s rain came, we swallowed

and were gone.

vi. 2025

painting: 'A Pair of Shoes' - Vincent van Gogh (1886)

As day retreats, lights come on in the pinched windows of edgeland. There’s a weary shadow play of sorting laundry, fixing meals before the curtains close. New build. Once marshalling yard, now space for one car each. More for a show home. No bus service.

The fen long drained, its waters tamed, is bound by concrete gutters. Rigid, barren. From the last teardrop of scrub, no-one sees the footpad. He finds the hidden snickets, cuts through dark back alleys. Road signs, all turned about, have just one direction. Out.

He doesn’t look back. Traipses through the town, admires its sandstone features. Cares not what crimes have been committed. Where derelict transmutes to real estate, there’s lure of breezy quayside cafes. Steel and glass. The salt air has no memory; nothing grows in it.