WAKING WITH THE DUSTMEN

a birthday poem for TJS

Moonset, out there.

Already they are on their way.

Maybe women also wheelie back and forth

with bins to empty, and return.

Settled, foetal, you cling to the cardboard hem

of flat-pack dreams:

an unfilled mind riding the Alpha waves.

A slant of light squints through the louvres of your blind –

darkness begins to lift.

 

There is juddering outside.

You’ve seen that monster – lifting, tipping – eat before,

and turn deaf ears on it.

But all your time-torn wiles to win back sleep

are useless as a punctured tyre.

From under snugly covers, grudgingly

you pull yourself up, strand by strand;

realise that comic handstands are a skill

beyond your years.

 

iv. 2024

 

Twelve Rivers - Spring 2025 

the last ex-pat in Costa Del Sol turns his thoughts homeward

with apologies to Leonard Cohen

 

Come, my sisters and brothers,

let us govern Britain,

let us apply our best minds,

let us discharge sewage in Downing Street,

let us make the Lords a torture chamber

      until – one by one – they all confess,

let us purge the Labour Party,

let us make Europeans speak English

      not only here but everywhere,

let us promote the dark races

      so – when they take control –

      they shall be magnanimous,

let us make content for TikTok,

let us all be tourists,

let us float across the Channel on a Li-Lo,

let us whisper sweet nothings to the enemy,

let us cast bullets in men’s sheds,

let us sell Irn-Bru to the Third World,

            (Do they know three of our national leaders                                             were women?)

let us terrorise our colonies,

let us merge republican with royalist,

let us not show a white flag,

let us demand a written constitution

      sponsored by Bet365,

      with prize for the most ground-breaking                                                        suggestion,

let us threaten to join the U.S.A.

      then chicken out in the nick of time,

my sisters and brothers, come,

      our best minds are waiting for us

      like sleeping bags abandoned in shop doorways,

let us give them purpose soon,

let us keep a world-leading silence

      beside the Thames.

 v. 2024

Culture Matters 

fridge poem for May Day 24

BETWEEN WIND AND WATER

 

Don't tell me you don't hear it too. Rising out of sight, it sweeps around blind corners like a noisy broom. Tugs at tangled strings, threatens our torpid silence.

 

I know how hard it is to draw breath nowadays. Like a beak-held branch, my pencil stalls in the turbulence. Hovers, veers. Looks for a place in some woven nest.

 

A helm bar forms along the ridge. Rain is coming. Its track is fixed; we can only trim the sails before it is an overhowl. No shelter found in the ribs of a broken umbrella.

 

You keep saying it may not be so bad; yet spring tides are also lapping at our heels. Get in the swim. Take a life jacket from under the seat. And don’t forget to remove your shoes.

 

iv. 2024

THE MEETING OF WATERS

Close by that joining, the swamp-dwellers grow:

a grove of young alder.

Catkins – saffron, pendent – are but scanty

shelter from the wettest month on record.

Here, where the Lark and Linnet meet,

we watch their confluence –

a swollen, muddy gluggle jug.  

 

Mull over what each brings, what together

these veins bear away: drainage and discharge,

none of it can be turned back.

Yet this flow is failing; from chalk-fed springs

gin-clear, to tainted last outpouring,

abstraction, impoundment, heatwaves

all inflict some loss.

 

Still, we hope for mayfly clouds, know

that upstream, in cleaner gravel

lamprey and bullhead breed.

Later crowfoot flowers, also starwort.

The rain eases to a smur. We question

how different future-not-yet-come could be

from one which is no more.

 

iii. 2024

 

Twelve Rivers - Spring 2025