Neptune

Dunking jams jars into the sea
the slot binoculars held my image,

as I came to the shore

In days of linear quiet

flat, shaken, mediocre,
so the ritual went,

in falling rain and white noise

the sea eye looked upwards,

as I picked up the jar named 'endless flat'

and with a maddening sense of disquiet

I gulped the salt water quick,

winced,

and I felt nothing at all.

The tree is a

clock and

a ticking heart.

1983

In saturated mornings

by the front gardens

children pass by,

fresh as cut grass

grey heads set in curls

pop up to say, hello, cheerio!

tending lurid pansies

sitting neatly in bare earth

like dusted ornaments

reminding them, how

time has lengthened

joys and griefs mastered

the bloody thing almost done

time to pass them on

Night pool

How cold the air, burning, spitting fire

illuminates, casting circles like an echo

and you strapped to my back,

chattering, happy demon

our shadow zig zagged with frozen blades.

Reaching the waters edge

we look in, 

and how peculiar, unreal.

The moment we first met,
we fell, down, grabbing handfuls 

of sunken moon
tied to my front that time

in the pool that birthed the first eye

you peered back in, we spent time

until men and women fished us out

It was there that you accepted your fate

and watched as a black bird flees upwards

and rests on a branch,

its looks down at the blackened margins
and feels herself to be her.

Budgie

Streak of luminous green and yellow,

tiny feet landed on tarmac,
a lost budgie has flown on the road outside my house
The window divides space between myself and this budgie, the window is like a screen between fable and truth.
This is real,

Grandma inherited a Budgie named ‘Beauty’,
it belonged to her old friend,
who had repeated the words,
‘sit down George’, so many times,
that the tiny voice box spoke them,
it was as reliable as the habitual scenes of suburbia
that she watched from the still side of the dividing glass
Since George had passed away,
those echoing words, tormented,
an indiscriminate reminder of her loss, 
like a clock with a faltering minute hand, 
that splinters time like a broken protractor

So Grandma took the memory, shouldered the burden.
The Budgie on the road is pecking at the tiny loose stones, 
the weight of its small body, balancing.
I know these two birds are not the same
but the memory it brought to me was like a parcel
all wrapped up in the flowered paper of Grandmas old house

Yet I did not expect its end,
after the gift, came the jolt.
The blurred lines and moronic roar
the oblivious car dealt its inane violence.

Instant smudge of luminous green and red,
2 feathers sticking up from its flattened mass. 
No question here, no uncertainty.
Heart into brain, bone into blood.
It took 2 days for Budgie to be flattened and thinned no further, 
road coloured now,
a passing shower washed the grey smudge clean.
Entirely. 

Cottingham (In memorium of Philip larkin)

Whilst you lay in silent rows on the village edge

a hundred yards away, we sat upright 

and watched our natural joy siphoned into pyrex jars 

(and stored for educational purposes)

dark prose presented in purpose built code

no entry for unauthorised personnel (or children)

yet, they kept you hidden
dandelions and sticky weed, poor sod

there you were, underneath it all

holding the slim volumes tightly to your cold chest

I was 30 years late, when I found you, winter time, dog eared and fragrant

you didn’t seem to mind, it’s not as if I kept you waiting

and it was there I watched the words billowing in opaque clouds

before returning again to cold

The central reservation

I took a walk

along the central reservations

like the minds neglected pathways

I walked through the parallel conduit

I was there, immune to the clock,

reels of tide and undertow

The scrub underfoot

cars pass like sips of tarred water

Not even a drunk would dwell here

of all the noon places, this is forsaken

yet, I saw a man standing there oncemw

staring through me and then gone