A CUT ABOVE

‘Pollarding encourages new growth and maintains trees in a partially juvenile state.’                                   Wikipedia

The time has come to move. Uncleared for years cut short,

our loft like unkempt pollard is outgrown, cut short.

I must prune the thickened boughs, bear with me only

leaves that memory will condone and not cut short.

Now in a homemade box compact my paper life;

jam-pack it full with keepsakes, touchstones to cut short.

At this set height to clear the head and light the path,

give underbrush its space, in overtones cut short.

Today the loppers turn on friend and family:

every corner of their postcards, far-flown, cut short.

Jumbled bundles of varied gloss and clarity -

the squeezed dispatches, long disowned, become cut short.

Right angles frame the lost face values, and I too -

beset by reading their halved backbones - am cut short.

This is my forgetting: choose some scaffold branches,

a gnarl of moments to retain, be known, cut short.

Pledges, protests, pleas and censures. When winter-made

these wounds save sap from weeping, as it groans, cut short. 

The lid creaks closed. Held in a knobbly, ivied trunk,

such unfinished contexts as Mark alone cut short.

 xii.2016 - i.2017

Passing through Friday Street

What place is this? A quaint name out of sight,

where the future once was better.

Just spitting distance beyond the by-pass,

at fag-end of a long night’s leaving party,

Friday Street is getting some kip.

Friday Street, that whimsy English fiction:

all thatch and whitewashed local stone,

wisteria, greenhouses, and village GPO.

Where children sport Start-rite sandals

and jovial bigots recall The Woodentops.

At arm’s length, lies a further Friday Street

hidden, up gated drives, in shrubbery.

Tennis court, pool, bedrooms enough

for no end of minimum pay Romanians,

fully furnished and tax exempt.

Friday Street once more is left on the corner:

a one-armed sofa spews its cheap synthetic guts

like candyfloss, while scrote kids spray abuse.

Tin city Health Centre, all out of staff,

is boarded up. The reek of livelihoods pissed away.

Flags become curtains, not waving but drawn.

Three threadbare crosses, each on each;

no sharing skies concrete with foreign stars.

Stop. Don’t hang this sour self-portrait.

When Saturday comes, with croissant and espresso,

I filter sneering column inches, then

over my shoulder look: the past’s already here.

vii – x. 2016

SQUEEZING OUT SUMMER

We have been here before, prodding at the precipice of a new term. Dog days, the silly season, street corner boredom. Elsewhere riots.

Hedgerows are ripening. Crow armies manoeuvre, black on gold stubble. Thistledown drifts in stillness. Ragwort runs to seed.

Cycling back from the beach, flush with swimming, wheels scrunch on old ballast. In failing light, thoughts scurry home to not be caught out by rain.

A dredger returned, has disgorged its scrapings. Bait diggers harvest the year’s lowest tides. The last, deep salty draughts.

Evening settles in a blackbird chorus cut through by whine of scooters. Bank Holiday sees the first rally of starlings.

Scratching at midge bites, feel the chill on bare limbs. Reach for sweatshirts sooner. The death of a naturalist. Tucked inside his cover, so long forgotten, your letter.

I am taken aback at that courting gift, the insight of its guesswork. Old fence posts burn in our firepit, and we are putting socks back on.

ii.2015