Category: Poems

Track Inspection at Swanwick

We saw them approaching through the mist,
two orange points of light enlarging as they closed
the distance and clarified as men.

One paced the four-foot, head low, spanner eased
high across a shoulder, as if marching the roads
to war, gun slung as they slung guns then.

He searched for cracks and the odd loose bolt,
the lookout had sighted an oncoming train
blowing a warning. They stepped into the cess.

When the train had passed they resumed fault
finding. The morning mist had turned to rain.
It streamed from the luminous coats, caressed

their leggings, their waterlogged hobnails hugging
the ballast. But his eyes were back on track, head
swaying like oxen, ploughing. Sleepers slipped

passed them as they made the last miles, lugging
their legs, thinking increasingly of bed.
It seemed like many hours since they had slept.

Gordon

Gordon, from the house across the road, lives on his own.
His long grey hair skitters in the early morning light,
like clouds released of rain, as he bends to pick the bottle of milk
from the step, looking up quickly as I shout a brief 'good morning'.
His answer can be hardly heard above the autumn breeze,
gulped back in through shyness, shame or lack of confidence.
He's lived here since his mother died while pruning roses
at the back, his naval pension and savings barely meeting needs.
Every day he mixes corned beef mash for feral cats
and badgers from the wild fields out beyond his bottom
garden fence, green with spores of lichen, like a rug.
His days are spent polishing the absences he feels;
the rigour of a service life, parades and, still, the rod
that cauterised his young flesh into weals, offered up
as love for all he knew; ships and those thrilling trips ashore.
Some days you'll see him on his bike returning from the shop,
upright as a saint, freewheeling down the hill
to home, hair flying back like the tail of a bolting horse.
And then he's gone, disappeared inside his house to spend
more time with emptiness, peeling back the shadow
solitude brings, offering to himself these hours as gifts.

Zeno's Paradox

Bewilderingly, the tracks converge to a point
somewhere beyond sight,
the distance obscured in light
coverings of air,
as though some tedious print
quavered before a tired and vacant stare,
almost focused, in mid-trance,
but not quite.

Bewildered, Short set out to trek,
to halve the distance,
then to halve it again
until he became, like Zeno,
just within reach, a dance
step or two away from infinity.

As if he was to know
what it is to be
becalmed in paradox, to wreck
what common sense is supposed to mean.

Whether

I try to keep up with the flow of these things,
the flow of the weather and news,
whether it's raining or whether it snows,
the wars that are raging, a song Dylan sings,
whether he's folking or whether it's blues,
divining the things that he knows.

As decades pass by it's increasingly hard
to remember events gone before;
the wars that were raging, the deaths that occurred,
who played which hand, concealing a card
to give them advantage, to propagate war
when the arms dealers signalled the word. 

I might be forgiven for memory lapses,
how some of it's there but not all.
The constant bombardment of most of the senses,
electrical fizzing inside the synapses,
reduces the deftness of instant recall,
destroying my fragile defences.

But whether I can or whether I can't
is irrelevant really, I know.
Bad things happen to people, to others, not so.
So, whether I pull up or whether I plant
the flowers that peep through the crust of the snow,
disasters will come - and will go.

Always Summer

Because our memories tell us so,
the air is always blue with summer,
yellow gorse explodes as heat
deseeds the grass and skies wobble
in our swimming eyes.
No matter how plain it is to see
snowdrifts piling against the hedge,
voices, pleasant with reassurance,
announce summer, somewhere deep
yet irretrievable,
somewhere we are never lost
and always children, insubstantial,
light with weather, like our songs.

Out on this point of beach
I walked to as a boy, bright days
of breeze and shingle in my toes,
I visit now as pilgrimage
to remonstrate with memory
the way that rain and days of grey
are sublimate to blue and dazzling light.

I have no understanding,
no knowledge of the memory's
transformations, how perhaps
it was winter once or autumn
leaves were trodden underfoot,
ponds were interlocked with ice,
robins frozen on the lawn
or foghorns sounding from the coast;
how summer infiltrates our sense
of what was always once our childhood;
how our children's futures fill
with certainties of light.

Making a Clearing

"The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep.."
(Robert Frost)

These woods we stopped by,
pushed in, parted brambles
that hung on our stung hands.
We smelt like a compost
of leaves after hours
of slow tramping until
we lighted on the place.

This was the spot
to start the cutting back,
clear enough space
to see stars by,
build a fire for bracken
burning, pitch a tent.

We circled slowly outwards
clearing the undergrowth.
I cut, you burnt,
for days we breathed woodsmoke,
wept continuous tears.

So was it clearance we did
in the wood that year
or a quest for clarity?
Whatever it was
that space is now regrown.
We slept little,
we promised nothing.

Overgrowth

Where fields were
an industrial estate
is seeding
like wild grass,
avaricious as
a speculator,
eating, omnivorously,
both land
and creatures.

Plant replaces plant,
tower cranes
swaying like stamens,
snooping in the
undergrowth
for the sabotage
of badgers,
as hedgehogs
and battalions
of moles form
unlikely alliances
of blind resistance.

The horizon is as flat
as an empty sack,
the earth fluid
as a river,
isolated trees like
languid giraffes grazing.
The sky is a
blank stare
devoid of light
and, in the distance,
taut as treacle,
the sea.

Factories are things
the neglected soil
failed to think of
fresh as they are
to this slow landscape.
It was only, it seems,
when the momentary
things called men,
lethal as love,
considered manufacture
rising girders
glowed with rain,
roads tarred
assured of new traffic
tailgating through
the overgrowth.

The Old Road Sweeper’s Brush

Now I'm sixty-eight or so
the skin is wrinkling on my arms,
my feet are numb, my mind is slow,
I'm losing my, what once were, charms.

When I was only seventeen
my eyes were bright, my skin was clear,
psoriasis I'd never seen,
I suffered neither hope nor fear.

As I approach my final stage
I feel I need be more discursive,
(I hear Sterne made it all the rage),
either that, or more subversive.

So in this state of befuddlement,
(increasingly it's got a hold),
elucidating what I meant
by insisting on becoming old,

it's necessary I think, or not,
depending on your point of view,
to indicate now how one got
to the point of being 'you'.

We know that every seven years
your every cell becomes replaced
but the history of your hopes and fears,
once added there, can stilled be traced

and tracked to make you what you seem,
an amalgam of your every act
and thought and every single dream
you've not been able to redact.

So what we are is not the heart,
the brain, the blood, kidneys, skin,
but something else that's held apart
we keep our understanding in.

(Camus, well, he would object to
prioritising the Essential,
argue we should not neglect to
campaign for the Existential).

Then let's imagine a collective vault
where every memory is kept
with no apportionment of fault,
particularly by those adept

at sniffing out a world of sin
held only in their imagination.
(Where, in truth, do I begin
to penetrate their flagellation!)

I think this was researched by Jung,
(a colleague of that Sigmund Freud).
whose formula, when once begun
began to get his mate annoyed.

Not that I know much of this,
snippets only I have read,
but Jung, he seemed to find a bliss
like state by following this thread,

this dive into the deep subconscious,
collectivising every stream
of consciousness, it made him anxious
to so interpret every dream,

discover what it was that made us,
levitate so from our skin,
finding shadows that would shade us
as we fought the shades within.

(I said discursion was my forte,
wandering off and coming back.
It's a kind of prolix foreplay
lubricating every crack.)

Then what is it I'm trying to tell you
in this self-indulgent verse?
(Self-indulgence is my milieu,
other sins are less a curse.)

Can you spot procrastination
when you see it in full view,
putting off this obligation,
finding other things to do?

Enough! What is it to be human,
animal, with a pulse?
Surely very little more than
a cluster of cells and little else?

We're just like every other living
organism on this Earth,
fucking, fighting, grasping, giving
love to those we've given birth.

The question of our cells' replacement
each and every seven years,
just describes our outer casement,
never why we end in tears,

or the reason for our dreaming,
the character of love and hate
or the striving for some meaning
or any other human trait.

Quite so. Now I'm sixty-eight
with wrinkly arms and muted ears
I'd like to try and demonstrate
how we remain all though the years.

For this, the comic metaphor
about the old road sweeper's brush
attacks the question at it's core;
enlightenment comes in a rush!

He loved that broom with all his heart
as he cleaned the street with steady treads.
He used the same one from the start,
with it's seven handles, fourteen heads.

In the Pub

There's nothing like just sitting in the pub
Contemplating frosty winter days,
Supping ale and ordering some grub;
Chips with something is my current craze.

A pub that has a crackling, roaring fire
Exudes an atmosphere that's hard to beat.
There can be nothing else you should require,
Except some company you'd like to meet.

For some, though, drinking is the major task
And who am I to disagree with this,
Especially when all that one can ask
Is sinking several pints into the bliss.

Yes, let's sit here in the pub on winter days
When sunset is at four and darkness falls
All around us in a way that says
'Drink up your beer, another tankard calls!'