Rhyl

1.

So the father and baby room
wax face boy-man
danaiad typanum skin
shoots up and exits with his fat friend
down to Queen's Market where
the air rifles are all sat up nice
and what a smashed nox glass smile


2.

The sea wall is the wall
stumm
stumm

Lupine gull whiteeyes up
my cheap cheese sarnie

Brassneck calls above
lift dry heraldic breast

Fine cream throat is tense
till the salted us tongue chant

Behold:
they're letting the slow breeze lift them
then turning
to puncture
and through
in illegal sodality


3.

He walks past with smudge moustaches
his Sindhi cap
with silver stitches

What is this place here

ident tremors

prior tender embroidery

Everybody's got a few paper cuts it shows


4.

The radio tower is made up of squares
the edges of which are oxidised

joke flowers

Think of the sea
being empty of expectations: a picture
or not

Boy turns his wind-up gun and fires

Mum calls him a little cunt and drags
her menthol till it's at the tip

The Green

3 drunks we

in remnant heat

blistering

arrangement bench

say story time
is sung blown glass

piss wet
dust stretches

shady picturing

and 4 worn leaves

lift up defeated
lift up your downy head

O Willow

From Smethwick to Wolverhampton, Birmingham Canal

Piebald pony in sham heat
roped to a lamp post
on a Tipton verge

*

It isn't love if it isn't love
goes the switch box

*

Bullrushes
compact
dark
on pen stems

definite

*

Coseley Tunnel
kept air sharpens
with droplet calcium

The front light's swamped

*

Forgive-me-nots

He's crouched by the bank
with a thin stripped branch
as if half divining

Weeds in the water
are half seen
Are they creaking?

Crickets are all
a shook
their organ legs

We PAN, with slowly streaming weeds

*

and blackberries blacken
past black to rot dust

*

At the outskirts
inflammable tanks
will dissolve
halfarsed feathered mysteries

*

well there is
no rain just
whitened sky
     

Reservoir

Back fence second coming clock growls low

offering a fistful of wet Jesus slips

I used to paint the horizon at the embankment end

There was always too much sky

Below, the wharf with oxide fur on barge remains green smears

on portacabin walls

Crowmobbed heron pierce air to bleak

Hands dripping with autoimmunity

a face liquefied

the skin hospital’s lamps

Dead cygnet bones somewhere

and the nest open mouthed

Boy run off by swan in bestial glory

Cup ring on the bench will disappear

Water drowning

baby trees

My monstrous crust lips twitched

The heat my body made

is saying so insect ears tune in

the rushes O

Rhythm of the wires against the mast

Games

Dense ropes from the ceiling are evil.
Are we small? There are teacher monsters
in thick alien cotton. Pervert hair curls.
Mouth in a beard. Our thin flammable shirts.
English mud sticks fast. Hidden hollow
of the goals where my boy heart echoes.
Give nothing. Let Caesar's tight old bladder
past the post. Sisyphean medicine ball.
Shin kicks and bastard jabs. Walls
are chromatic ills are rock. Porno slits.
All the dick glitter tucked in. Be delicate.
Breathe badly. Empty face. Be ever the last
in the line to be called.  Fit for nothing.

The Arts Centre Yesterday

Baby girl pushes the chair
across the floor till daddy
sits his old fed weight there

He lifts her up and she says,
Put me down. She has her saw
-tooth squealy demand and
he has big fuck off hands

The air's all of a class here:
it wafts.
Man on news says,
I can't breathe.

I will leave skin flakes on
the table top. Squash crumbs
to nothingness.

Coffee cheerless like cheap fags.

My face is on fire never being
one of them really.

And another face falls.
This fallen face.

Say hello to some bad past rep
and pretend I haven't
forgotten her name.

Well Groomed

The positive psychologist
talked about happiness
his hands very small

Outside trees slept thin fog drifted

Over the road Witton Cemetery:
two men washed a gravestone
to a white fixed point

He told us that we shouldn't
think too much