Reaching

For the virtual blood beyond the pale

There's all of us
from every other place
in our smashed up boats
throwing the weathered ropes
across dead water
to the verdant,
mapshy dark
of harbour.

Bus notes 8

Each time the bus goes

past the City Hospital

     I find myself naked

     in the UV light

     but for the one sock on

     and a visor over the face.

The good laughter

and wrong comic turns

of the nurses hoped me to

a new kind of humanness

     before I walked, shining,

     on to work’s baby doses

     of quotidian disgrace.

Anamnesis

At the chain restaurant (trussed up French), she told me
she hadn't prayed for months. I said I wasn't praying too.

Here's us then, happy that with our bit
of unhappiness revealed,
we're one person closer to a common custom.   

     no instructions or magic patterns to make

     that old old sort disappear

     no holy potion to make us throw
     our own darts into the nothing there

     all smiles

Only the empty glass of average wine,
and the impatience
of the waiters sensing an hour extending.

Nobody ever gets the wage they ought.

Bus notes 7

      Three old women sit 

      beside themselves.

      One of them half smiles;
      the others won’t.
In singing together, “And can it be”,
they’re at war with the official exorcists.
      They could make a gold light
      burn all of us up
but they just keep on
with the song, wholly lost
in the tonal holy work 

and the remembered words.
      People are finding different ways
      not to hear.
The bus turns from the park
toward Winson Green
and the long, weighted line
of the prison wall.
      What on Earth is a hymn for?

A Postcard

                           We’re where we ought

                                                         not to be

                              All along the esplanade

                                               the heavy weather

                                            disregards our

                                                         little faces

                   big waves come       explaining nothing

                             We’re here with the old new sun

                                                         and sandwiches 
                                and cheap spades and the given time
                                            all turned over to misrule

                     On the beach

                             there’s no corners 
                                            where we're hid
    
                                   There's nowhere
                                                    but the lines 
                                                            are all rubbed out

                                                Our blue and dying anoraks 
                                  Our fresh skin clinging 

      
                                                  Us as aliens         

             
                                                                                A great bell is rung
                                                                          some place far off

                           The tree’s green spasms bless ache
                                                                          stain some and then
                                                                she goes back
                                                                                   to her shivers
                                                                 and bent branches
                                              A big shock of fuck off hair

             The counting songs won’t work
                                   with the rain going on and on
                              stuttering





                          Each wave does break

                                              all in a tempo still
                                                      
                                     The sea is not an animal at all  

                                                                  Here’s crashing for

                               the easy yoke

                                              the jokes unstopped 

                                        the tinned cream        

                                                                    the truth of eczema      

                                    the wet, dark slate

                      the old man’s first tongue lost

                                                the near to broken bellowing clock

                               As Taid types praises of Germania

                                                              tiny fingertips make pictures

                                     on the clean white wall      


                                                   Us as kids
                                                              in time
                                                    will come unstuck        

                                                  

   

Bus notes 6

The boys at the back are laughing
as if their laughter
ought to be heard.
They make it sound like pretending.
       Phone music scratches
       the people done in
       by a waged day.
There’s some showy book in my hands;
these eyes slip on the spilt words

to fall almost to sleep.
       Everything is knackered
       with it so close 

and the stated heat.

Tomorrow, couldn’t you just
not go in?

This is history! The next installment

I bet you were gnawing off the fingertips in expectation. Well, the waiting is all done now, little ones. Come slake your thirst at the Bard's own Bong.