Sunday 29 May 2016

1 New Poem

High Street Signage

Glinting in the Arabic numeral light,
it’s an Anglican cobblestone’s throw away
from ordinary, from eight pieces of broken
Cadbury bar you share with sweethearts,
in dinner jacket spaces for greenery
knotting contradictions as fishhook collapses,
‘til you get a timely toothache
from the broad cliché of it all.

I wasted visions,
they fade in splendor shades.

Those gaudy calling card posters,
to Poland, Latvia, Bangladesh,
stood for that sense of finding self,
that sense of taking cross-eyed punches
from summery states of grace, worthwhile fights
to put up in pleasured spin of mountaintop,
Primrose Hill declarations standing cool
light of wished unending,

in warming flicker of Tesco red.

Sunday 22 May 2016

1 New Poem

Second Act Slumps
Stay there, still in dying battery static,
with drowning echoes of Shard-spun dusk
time, the elongated brick window shading
of mobile factory signage and the next
seven stops on ways from keeping even-keeled
to madly stamping in grate casing bar floor
for notice amid dinning guitar plank-plucks, as you
only want to shout how much you are in
love with love with political posters and forgotten
romance lyrics from transistor tower bridges.

New grounds to be broken, the discovery
of hanging white cream bed sheets on pudgy
underskin of plastic-faced self-reflective
sentiments, the kind you bring as flash grenades
to pocket switch-knife knuckle brawls,
that rehearsed little pitter-patter of tim-tam
shimmy the schoolboys became so unpredictable
with that valedictory premonition had to tear
bracing maps to pieces and fall back on song-spun
courages, the kind you let in some evenings

to cool the room from all this wooden pacing.

Monday 16 May 2016

1 New Poem

Undiscovered Shimmer
Ricochet of signal towers,
kindly bent licorice twist
of steely Singapore’s modernity:

Clean-lined, pressed sheet crisp
and orderly, ever orderly
to choose the broken cycling
spokes of four degrees past
boiling point in summer sticking
evenings.

Puddle bending, the jump-splash:
let’s go to back page administrator’s
leaning to one side and other,
while you talk out the hasty implication.

What you say in without thinking,
in Tokyo light parades,
in Kowloon market stalls,

where we had sketches made to
full of face, confirmation gowns worn
there, tempting the fate-logic of
dawn’s Dreamtime. 

Saturday 14 May 2016

1 New Poem

Sun On Nice
Wastes of time and space,
blank expanse of still evenings,
creep up grassy ground in need
of spacious lightning, downpour logic;

that tin-eared taste of ocean rings lip,
lemon scent in water cooler dissolving,
for ramparts there in hindsight
crackled of brushfire maple.

Enjoy the Riviera’s signature tie,
split separate from the whole ride
home you make a point of
pinning to glovebox map line;

Isn’t anything there now,
more shocking than turning
reveal for showman’s pride
that keeping of amusement portraits,


I had but use of quick-spark for.

Saturday 7 May 2016

1 New Poem

Spain in Heart

Life becomes binary series:
some welfare office file folder
laid end to end, flung between
hands, hastily shipped, shining
bright in steel city ‘til the
shadows come as half-moons,
stars hand as sticky-tacked together
makings.

Without that same withered spark
to speak, that same unchased dream,
that same unconquered hill with
gunnery’s plume,

without that same reason.

You don’t run
as black,
as red
and all that
khaki-crossed mythos,

all that fooled,
“could have, if only . . .”.

Live with glass splinter
of months as Catalonia,

the next five years as
reactionary bayonets.