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

Stopover at The Hog’s Head

It has been, as they say, a while.

Elbows on grain of pine, with English pints we settle

to an earnest unfolding: the maps of our lives.

From a plateau either side of sixty,

we triangulate scarce-remembered reference points.

Draw comfort from the parallels.

School geography – “Never write a word

across a line”. Now I follow contours where bitumen

seals the cracks of least resistance.

A door swings open, slamming closed;

the candle gutters. Wax spots stick to varnish, turning hard,

and my pig’s cheek is wolfed without remark.

Our empty plates are gathered up:

time to pay and go. Pauses signpost then uncharted shores

where old age crumbles into sea. 

But anecdote is not data;

you (as I would) point to local redbrick history.

It says that as things have been they do not remain.

vi.2016