Enquiries at Swanwick Station 'You've been here some years now. I remember your hair dark, how you were a younger man'. 'I've become rooted I suppose, manured in by a steady wage, that and just a mile from home, handy to see the children grow, plant and water shoots blossomed now away mulching makeshift gardens of their own. And you've changed too no doubt, although I cannot place, among the many passing here, your face'. 'Well, I only travel twice a year and sometimes less than that, according to the flow of things, how much I need to get away and other small dependencies. So what time do I get to Milton Keynes'? When the stars fall and more grey dust is scattered here among the platform-edge high ferns.
Black Rocks in Oriental Bay, Wellington
Black Rocks in Oriental Bay, Wellington Could stillness be converted into rhyme and age become a rhythmical address, with weight a simple synonym for time, darkness for that lacking emptiness, I could then do no more than wish my days encompassed by this eloquent repose, enabling me to contemplate the ways I might have chosen, and the way I chose.
When you have slept
When you have slept When you have slept and I see you wake, your limp and lovely body lying there, my senses girdle up to undertake the prospect of your lemon scented hair. The picture of you dressing stirs me so that all my skin is somehow set alight; see visions of the urgent to and fro partaken in the crevices of night. For there, in shadows, I could feel the heat the friction of our flesh materialised, with you above me reaching the complete abandonment of all we've rationalised. Then I myself awoke and daylight shone upon the empty truth that you were gone.
Retired
Retired
I've been attending work for fifty years.
I started slightly damp behind the ears.
I've hardly changed from first to second gears.
I've never been ambitious.
I've seen the climbers jumping through the rings.
I've never liked the bosses panderings.
I've kept my counsel for the peace it brings.
I've never been ambitious.
I've spent my life not wanting to be seen.
I've seen the signals change from red to green
And back to red to stop what might have been.
I've never been ambitious.
The bosses come and go, pass through my sight.
They've ranged from fearsome to the merely trite.
To see the backs of them is my delight.
I've never been ambitious.
Ambition, I have seen, eats up the soul.
Invisibility has been my goal.
I aim to congregate where tapeworms shoal.
I've never been.
Losing Things
Losing Things
Remember how our bodies once were thin
reminders of our later flaccid skin,
my paunch cupped in your lovely lap.
Our liver spots co-mingle, creating
a small universe of moons setting
where the bed's edge collapses in shadow.
A perfumed candle illuminates
our illusion of youthful coupling,
your taut breast, now a pachyderm,
offered gladly to my unfilled mouth.
And now we find that losing things
rarely causes any pain,
for what we've also lost, along with youth,
is the need to, every time, succeed.
Sensing You
Sensing You If asked how to smell you I'd say move in close, touch if you dare, ignoring the danger overwhelming your reason, passing through brief states of ecstasy. I'd say take but the slightest breath, inhale the fecund fragrances, the deep aroma dances. I'd say move just a fraction away, see the sweet sensation fleetingly on your face, hear soft exhalations of relief.
Mill Town
Mill Town
Spun cotton casts a web upon the town.
Dust arising from the yelling looms
infiltrates the workers' living rooms,
the soot filled smoke slowly settling down.
Across the terraced houses, ranged in lines
on cobbled streets, they hear the hooters blare
signalling a change of shift, the hardware
of machines are worshipped in their shrines.
The mills are like cathedrals of the cursed
louring over Rochdale in the rain.
They hear the manufacturers refrain,
From labour, we get profit reimbursed.
Yet during the American Civil War
they refused to work with cotton picked by slaves
and wished plantation owners in their graves,
though they were hungry, out of work and poor.
The towns of Lancashire were built by mills,
the labour of the spinners toiling there;
their ghostly voices permeate the air,
rise from the plains into these Pennine hills.
La Viree de Galerne October 1793
La Viree de Galerne, October 1793
There were at least thirty thousand of us armed,
not to mention the hangers on coming
along for the craic, a gaggle of everything
you could think of, lads only half grown
and beardless, banging on incessantly how
they'd screw the Reds and fuck Robespierre.
Kids too and tarts hitching their skirts
when we wanted it. We'd fought through a dozen
towns and killing makes you want cunt.
And the old men there to make the soup,
ladling it into cupped hands as we marched.
Bread we stole and wrung hens necks outside
peasant farms, plucking on the move.
We crossed a river, the Loire someone said,
through Normandy and, up ahead, Granville.
The Brits should have been there according to
Monsieur Henri but, shit, they weren't.
We'd been suckered and then we were surrounded.
We beat back, forcing the pace, the fucking cold
killing half of us. The rest were hunted down.
The civvies were butchered in thousands, kids, women
and the old ladling men mown down, great pools
of blood, brown as their soup, crusting the earth.
Christ, it wasn't human and the end came
finally at Savenay. We came out
of the woods at last, screaming our surrender.
The frost melted as they shot fifteen thousand.
For two days the guns were never silent.
Mercy is not a revolutionary sentiment.
Gift
Gift
If ever I explain to you
how roses leap and dolphins bloom,
don't think the things I say untrue.
The framing of a small conceit
is offered as a gift, a treat,
a tiny piercing of the gloom.
There is little that I understand.
I try but words seem to defeat
attempts to name these grains of sand,
to find a single, telling phrase
that means exactly what it says,
a gift to you that lacks deceit.
There are ways of staying in the light,
there's sanity in things that craze,
blindnesses yet always sight.
Accept this gift I offer you,
these leaping roses dancing blue,
these bloomin' dolphins flowery ways.
Gone Viral
Gone Viral
The corona virus, Covid 19,
attacks all the organs including the spleen.
The splenetic response of the government teams
is making it not what it seems.
External threats are always required
to keep us in check, making us tired
and sick, not from virus but hypocrisy
and capital's complicity.
The bastions of privilege slam down their gates
to keep out the proles and other ingrates.
They're scared they'll succumb to a horrid infection;
"Give us vaccine; a crooked election!"
The disease that they fear is not the corona
or other like virus that apes it's persona.
No, it's more a political, alien schism,
Democracy and Socialism.
So whilst we, the people, look out for each other
and treat all our neighbours like sister and brother,
the oligarchs, those who live over the tracks,
are busily watching their backs.
Yes, they'll launder their cash to beat back the threat
of a small revolution designed to upset
hegemony that is stitched into their spleen.
Nowt to do with Covid 19.
Poems, Polemicks and Licks 