SOLSTICE 2021

 Why is that grey pigeon

Sprinting through greyer and greyer sky,

On a dying midwinter day?

As I see it dive between the two houses

Opposite me,

It looks desperate,

It looks like it’s making an escape.

Yet this is not the weather

For hawks to hunt.

It’s a time to run home,

It’s a time to feel

Fear and despair

If you’re alone.

So, fly home to some sort of safety.

To a place where you can

Huddle down

And wrap your feathers around you

To keep warm

Hide from harm and wait,

Now it’s getting late

But soon the days will become

Longer and lighter again.

plughole

 

It’s time to go down the plughole,

Where the whirly waters whirl,

And vault into the vortex,

Where currents continually curl.

It’s time to alter your orbit

Like a star approaching its end,

Or a hair floating in a bathroom sink,

So you’ll get pulled down the black hole,

Where both time and light will bend,

Then travel by drainpipe and sewer

Be riverbourne into the ocean,

Evaporate and fall again as rain,

Back to earth, where more plugholes await.

Cheesage

Swifts have all gone to Africa again,

 Summer starts to die

 But I'm not growing old. 

 Instead I've decided to mature

 Like a ripe old cheese.

 So I start to smell and

 Small black flies gather

 To hover above my head. 

 Every morning 

I scrape Blue mould from my knees.

SEVENTY

 

I begin a seventh decade

With a will willed

And many plans made.

On a planet where many never get so far

I’ve never owned a TV or a car,

But I’ve still consumed a glutton’s share

And most of the time

Just sat on chairs.

So I leave to science one fat cadaver

With its arthritic joints

And clogged up veins

Let my body be a lesson

To those who’ve outlasted

As they cut the guts

Out of this fat bastard

But there’s a spirit

Buried somewhere in the adipose tissue

That might roll on the wheel again

So let a red kite snatch

One small scrap of me in its claws

And carry it up

Towards the sun.

Greater Spotted Woodpeckers

 

Since my planet is burning,

I decide that I need to attract

Greater Spotted Woodpeckers

To my suburban garden.

I open a box of suet balls,

And it’s as if every suet ball stares up at me,

From many approximately circular fat white bodies.

Black seeds embedded in the suet

Appear to be eyes.

The suet balls look up and say nothing.

They have all embodied

An idea, that I, and thousands of others, 

Have used to categorise other people.

The suet balls gaze up and I see that

They are the proletariat, the infidels

Or middle England, or the saved.

An undifferentiated mass

They are not individuals

But an agglomeration,a collective or  a class

An idea in any theoretician’s mind.

They could be conscious,

But I’m not sure

And unless some magic Marxist spark ignites them

They will remain suet balls in themselves

Not suet balls for themselves

And hang together in wire cages

To be pecked to pieces by

Greater Spotted Woodpeckers.

 

Walk out to the bins

 I carefully carry them down the stairs,

The containers that contain the empty containers;

That might still hold some residue or DNA

Or be marked by smudged handprints.

I open the front door

Walk out to the bins

And put the containers inside.

I am as careful as a prince’s butler,

Or as his majesty’s personal protection officer

To ensure that no fragment slips out.

I wish to maintain the proprieties of this suburban street.

Also, I oppose climate change

And know that landfill can be dug up again

But once something is made into something else

There’s no going back.

Any evidence of any alleged wrongdoing, which never took place,

Is now a traffic cone.

THE GREEN ROOM (for Noel Lynch)

 THE GREEN ROOM

(for Noel Lynch)

 

This shop is so full of miscellaneous things,

Unassorted and assorted, that,

Its customers can barely enter,

And they must shuffle along,

Its narrow corridors sideways,

Canyoned in by incredible merchandise

Hung from all available walls,

And stacked ceiling-high.

 

An inventory of its stock would be

An epic in itself, including:

Desiccated dinosaur turds,

And Rubber hot water bottles,

Fashioned to resemble infamous politicians,

Giant butterflies in varnished collectors’ cases

Piles of football programmes,

Unique coins, and fossilised fish.

Texts in every language known on this planet,

Portraits of Macedonian aristocrats,

Necklaces fashioned from polished bones,

Texts in languages not known on this planet,

And several pairs of boots…,

 

And in one corner,

The shop’s owner presides,

Like a benign dragon in a second-hand suit.

A druid of the discarded,

A trading spider spinning a web of contacts,

Linking, deals, politics, culture and commerce

With invisible threads

Cemented by endless anecdotes,

Joining everyone together with shared humanity

Working to make all our worlds better.