Hypnopompicture XIII

The wheel spins
People run
Everything precipitates 
In Winter's frozen sky

Hypnopompicture 12

Yesterday in the night I was
So light
Humming over
The crest of the water
And the roar of my life like a hurried ocean

Today I walk again my walk stroking the Earth
The ghost of the feather of a seed
And my heart so heavy with thought
My body so heavy with blood
Do not touch the ground

The Beach That Is My Sill

From where I sit in my deep sand-coloured armchair
It is but a dusty plank of wood
Muscovado ridge gleaming in the light
Beyond the western wind
Waves and waves through the elders leaves

I come here in the morning dusk
I watch the seagulls as they circle past
The scaffolding of the blue gas lace
Sometimes, when the world is quiet
I walk along the window sill
And I collect the washed up drifts
From the night ebb and flow

This is to the transmutant Orbitor
Come ashore here in October
I had wedged it in two thousand and six
Between Crusoe and The Stranger
Somewhere else in another house

Three months ago in January
Irving's Owen Meany ran aground
A few inches away
Sandwiched between Child Gardens and
Inheritors by W Golding

Just yesterday breathing the night
It was about bed time
I stumbled upon Kafka's Castle
Lost to the sea ten years ago

I picked it up. And here I am
All my best reading plans upset
By a night stroll on
The beach that is my window sill

Third World Britain II

A Train's Weather

On August the fifteenth post lunch hour the air
Over the rail flutters, of a lover the skin
The steel track swells and twists like a monstrous snake
Comes alive, scales screeching, slowly stirs
The Extreme Summer Heat has jumped to thirty five
On this moving body you puff, too hot to ride
And your metallic wheels on its metallic spine
Come to a stall

It is October now and the track is so wet
Inexhaustible rains of unexpected fall
On the railway the leaves weave a papery shawl
Such feast of colours - yellows and browns and reds
From untiring skies, coal-coloured, water-clogged
Relentless raging rains drizzle down on the rail
Metal in water rusts ! Your wheels on it derail !
With such Extreme Weather your body cannot cope

January fifteenth - they say Winter Has Come
The Cold Tightens Its Grip on the metallic track
It is Minus Zero ! There is snow on the track
Your metallic lungs freeze and your engines succumb
This last breath you exhale you exhale every year
Christmas in December is no bigger surprise
Than to see all winter these tracks covered in ice
Would there be a pattern to such Extreme Weather ?

So many things have changed since you first saw the day
The seasons were better in eighteen twenty five
Now, twenty thirteen, Britain is in dismay
There is no money left on which you could survive.

Third World Britain I

The Potholes

I am riding my bike around Bell Green crossroads
The surface is porous and crumbles like a cheese
It is what it is not as well as what it is
The holes are so many, oh! English holy roads!

South of Mayow Park is a Disney set of chess
Kingsthorpe moves to Queensthorpe and Bishopsthorpe awaits
Exotic front gardens framed by brick walls and gates
Where potholes and tarmac draw a grey board of chess

Now my legs push north strongly to Ladywell
Her name's a shining bug, her name's a flying song
On my bike my back breaks and creaks riding along
Potholes digging deeper than an old water well

Britain! Glorious age! Scorn all that is foreign!
From your padded car seats, exotic front gardens!
What happened to your roads, your streets, and what happens
To your schools, hospitals, trains, tubes, to your children?

Great Britain you were once, Britain you fight to stay
On top of the (third) world

Lost and recovered things - November

This month I have lost - at least
A black hat, a red scarf
The hat was woolly, and itchy, and stinky
The scarf was a part of last Christmas costume
A bright yellow jacket which I wore on my bike
A pair of sunglasses, from our trip in America
The same month I celebrated
The return of a beloved book
Hadrian's Memoirs - or Memories
For the French title is ambiguous
Since then, my bold head exposed, my throat exposed
My eyes unshaded
Blending in the dark I have
Reveled, carefully
For, as it is said on page one hundred and eighty
Any happiness is a masterpiece.

I wish to always see...

I wish to always see
The beauty of the tilleul tree
Under a wet autumn
Its bark dark ebony
Its leaves a blazing gold
Alike some Egyptian vessel of gods against
St Paul couleur blanc-gris

Hypnopompicture11

I heard say               that a man
Could not stab himself to death
                So I tried

I found it untrue

John Milton Passage

John Milton Passage is in a state of perfection
Its cream facade stretched in straight lines
So beautifully angled their ninety degrees
Moving as I go by in meaningless fashion

John Milton Passage is so short
There is just enough space for a long cold white hall
Framed by four pillows each as sharp as the law
That four bushes ornate, green tough spheres cut tight

In John Milton Passage its unique empty hall
Moves with the pictures of three giant screens
On the left on the right charts and figures compete
The one in the middle reports child abduction

White John Milton Passage cares little for this crime
It's enough for a street to keep straight in the wind
Between two stiff bushes, against the first sublime
Pillow, wearing brown, a single woman blinks

She smokes. She blinks. The smoke curls in the wind
Soon explodes in a cloud, tenuous like a breath
In John Milton Passage a woman breathes to her death
Her brown coat, her big breast, her old face, all, sagging.

London leaves and I stay

Sur Bow Churchyard un rayon de soleil passe
Il frappe les carrés rouges de l'église de briques
Sous son porche imposant, plain-cintre de pierre blanche
Une grosse lanterne pend
Elle est en verre épais et en fer forgé blanc
Dans un style qui rappelle celui d'une acienda
Comme le faisait l'Art Nouveau
En 1910, dans les vieilles rues de Lisbonne
Tandis qu'à Paris une poésie fleurissait
Eblouissante
C'est dans ces années que furent écrit tous les textes que j'aime
Les Pâcques à New York et puis la Jeanne de France
Et Zone, tout Alcool
Et Pierre Reverdy depuis Narbonne
Arrivait dans le nord
Dans les journaux on lisait Cornélius, la magnifique Guerre du Feu
Le fantôme bleu Fantômas
Sur Bow Churchyard autour de la dentelle d'une lampe
En fer forgé blanc dansent tous mes fantômes
Chansons, écrivains, mondes qui se bousculent
Sur quelques mètres dallés entre un fleuriste et moi
Sous son toit de toile verte que tiennent des poteaux minces
Le fleuriste, seul, travaille sans relâche
Il assemble en six mouvements un bouquet de roses blanches
De roses roses et de quatre fougères
Il en assure les tiges d'un petit cordon vert
Et encône le tout d'un plastique transparent
Puis il prend une feuille de papier crépon pourpre
Y enroule son bouquet
Avant de le poser dans un haut vase en fer blanc
Il y pique un gros lys crème
Le vent s'engouffre sous sa tente faisant claquer le toit comme une voile
Car Londres n'est pas bien loin de la mer
Le vent couche de beaux iris, la longue crête des glaïeuls
Arrache aux boules de neige quelques flocons de pétales
Il neige en septembre sur Bow Church la Rouge
Aujourd'hui mon père a soixante-neuf ans
Tout le ciel de Londres vogue, bleu et blanc
Ouvert comme un sourire quelque part vers le sud
Le vent frais (brisk) est plein de l'odeur d'un seul lys
Même l'ombre du platane aux formes noueuses
S'étire vers le sud
Septembre en attendant que les beaux jours reviennent
Tout Londres veut émigrer
Et mon coeur toujours plein de l'appel des voyages
Cette fois me dit: reste
Londres est un port: reste
C'est un navire: reste
Sur son pont si tu restes tu t'en iras toujours
Car Londres tout ouvert s'emplit du vent du monde
Et j'entends toutes les langues
Dans les cafés les serveurs ont épinglé sur leur poitrine
De petits drapeaux d'acier peint
Espagne, Brésil, Grèce, Paris, Auckland, Roumains
Ces Roumains qu'on chasse en France
Qu'on appelle Gitans
Tziganes, Romanichelles
Qu'on insulte, qu'on accuse, dont on dit qu'ils sont sales
Et voleurs, et menteurs, et puis quoi d'autre encore
Qu'ils ne se rasent jamais ou qu'ils ouvrent des gorges
La nuit
Qu'on juge, qu'on condamne et qu'on renvoie chez eux
Ces Roumains qu'on Interdit comme on a Interdit
           Les Juifs
           Les Indiens d'Amérique
           Les Noirs de Partout
Ces Roumains à Londres viennent et je pleure
La honte de mon pays
Debout sur Bow Churchyard dans l'odeur d'un seul lys
Où le vent tourbillonne
Où sur la crête des glaïeuls un toit de toile se gonfle
Où les nuages filent tout joyeux vers le sud
Où la ville comme un navire titube sous l'automne
Je pleure mon petit port apeuré
Mon mouillage que le monde emmerde
Ma ville que tous les vents évitent
Aujourd'hui comme sonne le chant du voyage
Je reste
Ici
Et j'attends passer la Terre.

Why I prefer London to Paris - Reason 3

On rainy days London sails by

Ship of iron and stone
Hooked to the clouds by Wharf and Shard
Soaked to the last of its rats bone.

I pass a bridge wide as a deck
Choked by winds at war
London wobbles, this drunken wreck !
Its empty streets ajar.

Hypnopompicture 10

Sun and rain
Mere stain
On a still sleeping mind
Deaf and blind
Cannot find
Their way to an escaping train

Hypnopompicture 9

Standards of Summer !
The Earth shakes under the Sun
Worms, snakes scrape its
Hot burned moist skin
And the rusted glories of man
Rise into the sky

Hypnopompicture 8

Summer anger / anger summer

Colours cut like shadows

The dark sharp blade of shadows

Why I prefer London to Paris - Reason 2

Nunhead Cemetery, up the hill
Flowers open from the graves
On my bike, through the rain
I take in their fragrance
Mixed with flesh decomposed
Like the whiff of an island,
Cold, from the Caribbeans

Why I prefer London to Paris - Reason 1

I stop and watch big barges sail up the Thames from the estuary.
Their wake is brown with silt.
Seagulls follow them; they fly over the City.
I can hear them shriek.

The Metro Crush

As a nation we are
Drinking 143 million fewer pints of beer
Smoking 51 million fewer cigarettes
Eating 75 million fewer takeaways 
Every month
One in 11 people is turning vegetarian to save on the weekly shop after meat prices rose by 5.7 per cent last year.

As a nation we are also
Dodging 25% of our rounds at the pub
Leaving 0% tips at restaurants

And giving up 100% of our donations to charity

The Law - aka Survival of the Fittest
Mother of Liberalism
Father of the Holy Crush
Mother of the Law

Hypnopompicture 6

Spring is out
He tells me
Big white bricks of sheet
And the sky
Almost as bright as light

Hypnopompicture 5 - Orbitor

Who sits here and sleeps
Who lies there and speaks
Your life is upside down between
The city and the city

Hypnopompicture 4

And so Spring begins
Cold fever on a feeble day
Saffron azure