POSTCARD FROM LONDON 29 DECEMBER 2021

A leafless tree

Writes a black branched script

Against a winter sky.

Then a crow flies in

Perches on the tree

And changes the whole story.

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.

Toenail

 The blades of the Podiatrist’s

Toenail clippers close,

Detaching a chunk of yellow keratin

From the extremity of the body

On which it growed.

The surface of the Podiatrist’s

Toenail file rasps,

Removing little bits of dryskin

And more particles of keratin.

The edge of the Podiatrist’s

Sharp scalpel slices slivers

Of dead calloused toeskin.

And all this detritus,

The yellow keratin chunks,

The bits of dryskin,

And the calloused toeskin

Will be incinerated.

As will the body which generated it.

Atoms from the incinerations will

Float and merge universally

With water, with gases, with air,

With plants and fungus,

With birds and beasts

With rivers and seas.

And one day

On some planet somewhere

It will again grow

A toenail.

A truely free lunch

 

It is not an admission that,

I would ever have knowingly made,

Unless the information could be used,

As part of a trade.

I never give away any part of myself,

To anyone else,

Without some sort of return,

Immediate or, long-term,

Because I am

An economic man

Every single situation involves.

Expenditure and exchange.

We don’t always know it.

But we are always constrained.

Yet I never stop seeking the loophole,

Looking for the edge

Which will give me my

Pie in the sky

So, one day at last

I can sit on a cloud and munch,

That heavenly thing,

A truely free lunch.

 

 

dream within The walls of institutions

 

I can only dream within

The walls of institutions

And these are not always

Walls of concrete, brick or steel,

But they have become

So built into me,

That they contain

Whatever I think and feel.

I always dream

Of fearing that I might

Break a rule

Or fail to carry out

An assigned task

And  I always break and fail,

Until  I wake

Then remember what it is

What I really have to fail to do

 

Life eats life, and that is the law

 

I love pouring olive oil

In and out of bottles,

Because it is liquid sunlight,

I love drinking red wine,

Because it is the blood of Christ,

I love eating black pudding,

Because it is the blood of the Pig.

I love eating the liver of the lamb that died for me,

Because it is bloody.

Life eats life, and that is the law

I eat cheese that is alive,

I drink beer that is alive,

And death will eat me,

Render me down

And feed me back to more life

GLOBALISED

 

 My toothpaste comes from Romania,

 My bed comes from Vietnam,

 My coffee was packed in Spain,

 My hand sanitizer originates from Utrecht,

 But my headache pills are British,

 Handpicked by loyal yokels,

 In the paracetamol orchards of Devon.

 I am about to eat some Polish garlic sausage,

 I have just eaten some French jam,

 And sadly,my international consumption

 Could be threatened by a container ship,

 Which is as long as my street,

 Loaded with containers.

 That are full of containers.

 And is jammed in the Suez Canal.

 I need more vaccine from Belgium,

 To ward off infection by a virus,

 Allegedly originating in Chinese bats.

 In fact, I am so globalised that,

 I am becoming spherical in shape.

 Nonetheless I remain.

 Stubbornly almost monolingual 

 And forced to inhabit

 A xenophobic island.

A SADISTIC SALAD RECIPE

 

A SADISTIC SALAD RECIPE

I love torturing vegetables

I treat them worse than the KGB, the Gestapo,

Special Branch or the CIA.

I imprison them in a dark cold fridge,

Then I roust them out brutally,

Screaming things like

“Where are you?

You can’t hide at the back of the shelf,

Come out, you mangey tout!”

Some I seize, and throw immediately,

Into boiling water whole.

Some I slice with sharp blades,

Then hurl them into an oily bowl.

Some I skin, and some I scrape,

Some I even eat raw,

But none escape my greedy teeth

And my ever-chomping maw

THE REGULAR SEASONAL ORGY IN DOLLIS HILL NW2

 

The garden plum tree

Is provocatively starting to dress

Its long slim smooth erotic limbs

With white blossoms.

So, soon it will all kick off again,

Hormones, pheromones, bird song,

Lots of colourful visual, oral and olfactory action ‘

Frogspawn, nectar, courting displays.

plenty of thrusting, budding and flowering.

I'll peer out of my kitchen window,

Like a pervert,

Using my binoculars

To zoom in on the best bits;

But sooner or later I’ll have to go out,

With secateurs and shears and a rake,

To tidy it all up,

Because we can't have

This kind of thing going on,

Unregulated and unrestrained.

After all this is suburbia.

 

SHEILDING

 Waiting for my vaccine,

Waiting for a jab,

Scuttling around my lonely flat

Like a homeless hermit crab

Watching bollocks on the box

About unshaven actors

Fighting inner demons.

It's all a load of cobblers

Pissed up, pissed off,

Locked down and  burned out,.

Gazing through the window

At the birds  down there

Feeding on the feeder

at least They can fly  away.

Lucky little bleeders

I have another drink and.

Wonder what I see?

A spirrel or a quarrakeat?

In the garden tree

do I see a sedge harrow?

A coldwinch, a pood region

Or a fartling?

I don't know.

I don't care.

I wander round.

From room to room

Not going anywhere

Waiting for my vaccine,

Waiting for a jab,

Rattling around my lonely flat,

Like a homeless hermit crab

 

presents and parcels

 

Once presents and parcels were special things

Only arriving on certain occasions

Carefully wrapped in layers of paper

Secured with sticky tape and string

By your friends and your relations,

Then opened to reveal objects of delight,

On days of celebration.

 

This is how It was long ago  

Now in middle class utopia

Traffic jams of delivery vans

Clog the crescents and groves of suburbia

Each vehicle driven

By a most miserable man

Overworked and underpaid

By the number of drops he does

A pittance for each delivery he has made

 

Meanwhile nearby the High Streets die

Shops coffined up by shutters,

Their doorways once carefully swept,

Are now niches where are rubbish collects:

 

And in Bleak Fields

Where motorways intersect

Large sheds have been erected

Computer governed inside

And roboticized

Here goods are packed and selected

With lorries streaming in

And the vans streaming out

Tons and tons and tons

Of stuff is moved about

And delivered to destinations

Where packaging is ripped off

And thrown away

As we build an all-consuming future

Living on top of garbage hills

Unpacking endless artefacts

Of course, this can last forever

Surely our planet cannot be finite,

If our demands are exponential