I WISH THAT MY DUSTBIN WAS THE DUSTBIN OF HISTORY

Once in a while, I poke my nose outside of my front door,

That’s almost all that I can do any more.

I step out onto a city street,

Where herring gulls scream in the sky,

And cranes slowly turn above the rooftops;

Building more storage flats for workers,

So that they can eat, sleep, wake and work again.

I drag dustbins around to assigned locations,

Now that my detritus has been taken away.

But something has been left behind today,

A soggy bag of shiny magazines

Commemorative editions

Full of pictures of the new king and the old queen.

And their crowns, palaces, shiny white teeth and offsprings.

I delight in hurling these images into my dustbin.

I’m sad that I can only throw away photos.

 

 

I write about sandwiches and skies

 I write about sandwiches and skies

Although I now know much news about how

Exploding death drops from above onto some

How human limbs and bodies are shattered and torn

I hear children shouting with pleasure

From the neighbouring school

It’s their playtime.

I seek dreamless sleep

Or mindless routine tasks.

I do little bits of campaigning

To salve my conscience

But I can never unknow

Whilst some are stopped from knowing forever

We live inside a sandwich,

 We live inside a sandwich,

The bees, the birds, the beasts, the birds.

The trees, the cars, the plants, the ants,

And the people, the buildings, the steeples

And the mosque domes,

The nests, the pests,

The aerodromes, the care homes.

Then I could add the sane and the mad,

The sober, the drugged and the pissed.

Suffice it to say, anyway,

We all live inside a sandwich.

 

A slice of sky above

Sometimes blue and bright as love,

Sometimes obscured by cloud.

Or black and denying any light

Or sometimes letting stars shine through.

And a slice of planet

Beneath our feet

Solid ground or shifting sand

Or granite innit?

Or seas or oceans or lakes or mountains

All soils, terrains and H2o too

So, what are you going to do,

When the only place you can be

And almost all that you can see

Is inside a sandwich?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

sparrows

 In a strange railway station

I await a strange train

Five hundred miles from home.

Then I hear bird calls

That I have heard before.

One note from house sparrows

Echoing down

From iron rafters above.

The song that once

I heard every day,

A sound that I had filed away,

In a deep dark archive

In my skull.

Now it fires some neuron or other,

And I see a suburban street,

With sparrows nesting in every gutter

Of every house.

I remember sweeping up the nestlings,

That fell straight from the egg

To death on a pavement below

Never having flown.

I’ve sipped tea,

In cafes in London parks

Where the ground was hidden by

A mass of sparrows,

Hopping between shoes

To dine on dropped crumbs.

These birds were always there,

Everyday everywhere,

Until one day they weren’t.

The air was empty

No more one note song,

And I never knew that they had gone,

I was always too busy to notice.

But now sparrows are back again,

Long may they remain,

Singing a simple song,

Surviving in a city.