JUDGE AND JURY

Cream tea in courtyard:

magnolia arms reach over

social service tales;

from cop shop particulars

commonplace half-truths surface.

Magenta or shocking pink?

Nature’s candelabra

sheds pear-shaped petals;

we argue the fading hue

of under litter.

vii.2014

BEACHED (Scotts Head from Hayling)

Washed out, a beach of stones
warms in the callow heat of spring.
As pebble to horizon cast,
by shallows’ nibbling watermark
I gaze the blue distance
to my island.
                     But think of yours:
its dazing sun an axe
cleaving forest to the shoreline.

Words skim the waves to where,
at higher tides, two oceans kiss
and turtles slip from sight
beyond the coral shelf.
Our scorched contrast of salty skin.
Sandbars emerge like chest
from a shirt-front, the frill of surf
their sibilant unbuttoning.

We hear the shingle's grating roar,
the same unsure job prospects
heaped up by undertow;
in dolly mixture beach huts and
one-stop only white cruise liners,
pleasure's unlike trappings.
Yet slaves to surge and spill
ever tides' cadence bends our will.

vii. & xi. 2014

Nuits en Marseilles

African cloud unloads
its burden: teeming rain
that pelts the pan-tiled roofs.
It washes pavements clean of dog shit,
sluicing my prejudice,
as unowned refuse, to the drain.

Awake. Streetlight through shutters
bars our bedroom wall.
From the all-hours web café
below, a hacking cough explodes.
I picture Monte Christo
above his vertical, looking out:

a long way to fall.

x.2012 / vii.2014