Through Warley Woods

Bent near naked
split oak utters

and the Wood isn't anybody's
secret anymore

Insects cluck from dead floored branches

thick grass in indifferent waves
soft green inhuman needles

Curled up beast sleep buds
pierce low slung air

Wild garlic is coming
until there are delicate wet stars

whiter than
blindness
or ideal teeth

ramshackle sing song       here and there

stickiness
too sweet

tenderness

We two, bruised up, begin
saying, "love", remembering

Woke up faces
are at hand

Up top

Starlings made of spectral metal
meat   they flit

Sticky town, you win
with hick intimacies
eyes   tongues tethering

old toot stalls      nylon baby dolls
(later aflame)    a cheap decent cauliflower
dog food         fish hooks
fucked toys

Woman calls me dapper
till I trip a step

line of the Severn         unromantic
definite    
hidden old industry silts
practical fish

Subject filter's bust
lets a personhood shimmer

Something's always carried over

thumb of mollusc

a scared hairline

White woman a statue you
look to in love with her
white stillness trick

lips press
bitterness kisses

Old beast making water
Jesus, he says. Jesus

Bus note 95

        Pink porkpie
        with plasticky dogtooth band.
Jacket's frayed
and heavy tweed.
        The falling down houses
        hold up just.
A swig of Frosty Jack's
        and another swig
down burnt red throat
with sparse white hairs.
        The mower and clippers
        he does the rounds with;
mensch testimony.
        Outside Wilf Gilbert's,  
mangy blossom petals
flatten beneath
shod feet.

Bus note 94

Sunrise Senior Living:
gilded piss pot palace.
        Faraway Sun drips cold
on boy's thick-knit red kapele.
        Finicky leafless twigs
branch against syrup blue.
        Remember:
        albino deer
        set apart
        in sodden grass.
The engine judders
        and sometimes
        by accident
        I happen

Bus note 93

Her white fur head band
with flecks
of red pollution dust.
        Broken diamante phone
is a mirror where
she does up her face.
        Insect machinery
        shows up at edge.
Her inch long gold nails
window tapping
        till she turns
        and looks back hard;
        eyes perplexer jellies.
The Camp Hill boys
with smooth wealth pallor
        tick off mini-cruelties.
Sweating Chinese kid
from some long bad shift
goes along to sleep
with head to cold glass.
        Where the magnolia
        flowers cup up
        now is here.
       

Going outside

Braised steak   hid mouth pink
opens and says open and


memory cult     thick paint signals

a glue coat of not-innocent fingers
blackened
chewy crumbs


sheer awning

on to Summer's swung futile
soft grease cricket bats

No supposers: mush of now
judder the sprung stumps


Thin rat skirts peeling wall


How up is the heating

for the game disassembled


Eye slits with human glaze around


sing song acetone (smelt drape)
veil and chrome green nails

The skin dissolves again

Portrait 12

    Plait
    her
    hair
  and mackerel clouds thicken

           Her teeth split this skin
     white roof of hand
            with ganglion curls saying   up

             The cup's thrown
                  and the big bent
        jack of so and so

        Her black plastic alice band
                 serrated        
                                           not holy

                  Incisors:
               thumb   tip   cut   out

             alive     alive

                    alive

        like a stab in the eye
                   thieved kiss    
    or bursting a blister

iridescent lid dark wickedness

   Sometimes the fits
           look like laughing