JAZZING UP THE EMPIRE SUITE

We are painting over your past today,

with sweeping statements hide its pock-marked face.

The paper scoured for loopholes, rips and flaws,

we’ve felt for cracks and polyfilla plugged them,

then sanded smooth the seams to barely notice.

So thinking all’s wiped clean, we’re primed to start;

but first must argue out which tone will turn

the smear of bilious pink to sunlit room,

a place where you may set yourself apart.

The favoured pigment spreads, blots out betrayal;

for truth gets brushed in corners, hard to reach

those angles overhead and at our feet.

Our sights are set on coverage, wall-to-wall,

no under-bubble or peeling edges.

Yet this is a rush-to-judgement job:

you’ll choose the gloss, add final touches, later.

 

iii. 2019

 

 

Handbook for 2021: the Bread and Roses Poetry Award Anthology

Didn't We Have a Lovely Time?

 

To guess the welcome that awaits

you may retrace our steps,

find the terraced door, which we set out from

set in the pinched dimensions

of two-up, two-down with bath out back,

along the street with corner store

where once romance was near

as packets of crisps – your favourite flavour,

the kind they no longer make.

Always leaving later than planned

to explore some water’s edge,

by stream and tide settling on nicknames:

Sweet Pea and Stick Boy

assault the boundary of playgrounds,

walk beyond a pushchair’s limit

scamper past museum explanations,

try costumes on instead.

We spread out our picnic

go underground for the first time,

taking rides, feeding geese and goats,

making a day of it.

All outings have their ending,

each different yet the same:

most exit through the gift shop,

trying not to dilly-dally

over pocket money limits.                        

Our share of souvenirs

are the stories heading home;

for if you leave the way you came

you will return to light.

ii. 2019

HARD DRIVE, SOFT OPTION

Its jumper pins pulled out,

from currency removed,

this slab becomes dead weight

between your moving hands.

Paperback thick at most

but smooth and dense with glass,

ceramic and rare earth:

a cache of detail, spent.

In files and folders viewed

as list – with icon, tile

and content organised

to ascend or descend,

by name and date and type

according to your whim –

the stuff you thought you knew.

Or once upon, felt need to.

For we’re held hostage now,

afraid to be forgetting;

though this magnetic coat –

written on by arm’s length head,

then via spun mirrors read –

is not how memory works.

Secret contexts lie beneath

the surface marks we leave.

Our web of recollection,

fertile with unknown ties –

circumstance becomes remade

each time we draw on it.

Choose well the threads you weave,

the clues you carry forward:

capacity can’t be

relied on, still less foretold.

ii. 2019

ASHES TO ASHES

I‘m burning apple boughs at evensong.

While still shrill blackbirds linger, the path’s flagstones -

by turns - become first chapter and then verse.

My bonfire keeps the day’s half-light alive;

the sweet twigs placed so they’re not blown off course.

Its glowing core is kiln of afterthought.

In the smoke, a ritual of remembering:

how, once a year, we went with chastened hearts

and smudged foreheads, smouldering to school.

The mark of otherness unrecognised,

until – in the nearest glass – we washed it

from our skin, to sidestep explanation.

When flames die down, the bark cast off rekindles

what has lapsed. I hear a sizzle of held sap

and watch the embers slowly choke on ash.

x. 2018

 

Twelve Rivers - Autumn 2023