Polyamory - of a sort

From a seed sown on facebook...


The Prince

“How often do you fall in love?”
“Very”, I reply.
“How much is ‘very’? Tell the truth.”
“Every day”, I sigh,
with a book, a scene, a character,
a passing patch of sky,
a pleasing string of numbers
or artistic use of line,
with accidental patterns
that grab and hold my eye,
in marble-veins or water,
or window-frosting rime,
with songs of depth and solitude
whose singers make me cry,
a glance from someone beautiful,
and more so if they smile,
with the sway of wind-blown trees,
moments out of time,
and sometimes just with strangers
who might otherwise pass by.
“So, should you fall in love less?”
“I suppose that I could try”.
“But would you really want to?”
“No, my love is fine”.

Kiss, rain, ghosts

OK, post-election rant over... here's a short observational piece.

In a bus shelter

A year-old impression of teenage lips
kissing perspex,
holes in the ‘No Smoking’ sign,
melted by cigarettes,
spider webs,
badly scratched graffiti
with no economy of line.

The water-torture drip
of rain between roof panels,
the green specks of algae and honeydew
dropped from lime trees.

A young mum with an empty pushchair
sits by the Sellotape ghosts
of a thousand unofficial ads.

Setting a benchmark

A work-in-progress... I'm mostly happy with it, but not sure about the last line. Should it end at 'replace' I wonder?


Exclusion principle

Stranger,
who, so the small plaque says,
loved this spot,
you could not have sat here,
for the seat was placed in your memory,
greatly missed by some friend or relative.
Did they share your view
over scrubby downs
and patchy woodland where coppicemen,
smelters and charcoal-burners
once fed those
hungry for iron.

I choose not to sit,
but stay to watch a hornet
scrape pulp for her nest,
taking papier-mâché mouthfuls
of you
from oak slat and upright.

If I return in a ten-year,
will weather, fungus, woodworm,
or vandals at play,
have done their work,
leaving just a level patch of grass
where council employees
tossed your remains into a flatbed,
for it is policy to neither repair
nor replace
deaths marked by furniture.

Of feathers beneath the moon

When I'm not a poet, I'm an ecologist, and can be found surveying and/or writing about wildlife - usually insects, but sometimes larger creatures. This poem is about working on the Arne Penninsula in Dorset.

Mapping nightjars

Daytime apes
out of time and place,
we walk the dark heather
beyond terse ‘No public access’ signs
on every gate and fifty feet of fence,
skirting regimented blocks of pines,
shuffling through sand and lichen
to listen for the chirr of males,
triangulating with ears and eyes and GPS.
Between calls, we pencil
rough boundaries by torchlight,
scrambling colonialists
interpreting territorial extent
from snapshots and soundbites
of reproductive intent.
A few make flapping silhouettes
against the last glimmer
or perch to survey us in turn
while silent females drop to the ground,
invisible, rising strident when we pass
too near a hidden nest,
wing-flashes circling low overhead
drawing us away from precious eggs.
Our allocated square kilometre complete,
we depart and night reclaims the space.

Trees and guns both shoot

This year is the centenary of the outbreak of the First World war. Much will be written about it. Some of it will be idiotic and self-serving like the comments made by Michael Gove recently. Hopefully such stupidity will be in a tiny minority. Here's my tree-themed take.

Baumkrieg/Peacetime

I

Ash-keys unlock oaken doors,
sycamores rescue drowning acorns
by sending helicopter-seeds
and lifefloats –
catkins yowl to be let in,
dogwood barks to be let out.

Both shed leaves upon the floor.

II

Willows weep for fallen deadwood comrades,
elders send saplings to the Front –
they’re only following orders.
It seems just yesteryear that they were buds and blossoms,
blooming on the may,
flying warning flags from beech-masts –
now thorns are set, fixed as bayonets,
sound the advance,
march across the Nullarbor.

Some come home
missing twigs and branches,
bearing lop-sided crowns and leaf-scars –
at first tended like heirloom bonsai,
but later, still unsightly and now seeming foreign,
they are planted in the corner
of some forgotten arboretum.

Rooms from my oeuvre

Something I wrote based on one of my mixed media pieces.

Hotel

Taking the penthouse, a three-room suite,
homage to that pickled shark,
once YBA enfant influent,
now can’t-paint-for-shit shock-conceptuality,
all dead butterflies and money.

Over in one wing,
crumpled biro sketch for a green man
wrought in silver fretwork,
now etched and hammered, chained
and put up for sale.

Brushed to one side,
an empty blister-pack of brain-pills,
each 20 milligrams
a bitter bite of sweet chemistry,
I'm such a neuromantic.

Tiger balm and beaded lizard
whisper nothings through wood-thin walls,
varnished with intent –
grinning, a brass-balled imp
sits sly on his stack of timber.

Paper-cut bamboo forest,
trees hold onto chainsaw blades,
while triplet queens lie supine
under a celestial arch,
contemplating their paradox.

Faded letters speak of old contests
and hints of science,
print-block songbird
calls the ink down from her serinette.

Fragments of ammonites,
pebbles once shiny and gleaming-wet,
but still interesting in the dry,
unlike childhood holiday gleanings.

Bar-room in miniature
touts ‘beer’ above its rug of ribbons –
next door, ransom-note wallpaper
proclaims the anguish and ego
of the artist.

Of course,
there is a lacuna,
always one empty
among a hundred others,
ghosts of occupants unknown.

This hotel will stay my own.

Well, it is Halloween

Things that are 'meant' to be scary aren't...

Unexpected creeps

Not fox-screams,
horror films,
graveyards or fog,
not even when accompanied by theremins,

but:

lime-tree branches stridulate
against bus-shelter perspex,
pigeons echo-howl through chimney cowls,
taxi brakes cry out in the night,
anguished X-Factor faces captured as stills,
Atlas of Parasitology,
CGI babies-in-adverts gyrate,
landlady half hidden by an architrave,
light-bulb reflection (bathroom mirror),
space behind,
next door’s stone garden menagerie –
they stare so benignly,
some fish at certain angles
(Lovecraft knew about angles),
collections of old dolls
tiny porcelain teeth,
pretty much all dolls,
including Resusci Anne;
empty corridors,
abandoned doors,
trash-to-treasure TV presenters,
hydrangea petals so like peeled skin,
monochrome wind-sway of tall grasses,
dark cumulus in summer –
press ‘pause’ to shudder.

Benefits of autumn

It's that time of year again - yes, it might get cold and wet, but there are...

Benefits of autumn

Light the stove
with last year’s gathered logs –

watching it flicker,
lovers huddle under duvets
as trees turn to flame,
wych hazel red-margined
and camouflaged against
our rusted iron fire-bowl –

kicking through drifts of
lime-tree seeds, we collect
baskets of apples and quince
for pressing-day.

Perspectives

Scenes from a double-decker

Old lady with a black-dyed bouffant bald patch.
Roadside moorhen nest (punky chicks).
Ragwort growing from an upstairs window frame,
halfway to the sparrows living in the eaves.

Other top-floor travellers at eye-level
(if not eye-contact).
The little aerial atop a bus-stop
collecting estimated times of arrival.
The ubiquity of single shoes.

Some ummm… interesting views of cleavages.
The onrushing slap of twigs and leaves,
the approach of the next biro-jarring bump.
How the supermarket’s wall of greenery lies.
Men (only men) collecting train numbers,
shuffling like the walrus lumbers,
choo-choo-g’joob.

The texture of slate tiles and leadwork.
How people sometimes seem to know I’m looking
but not that, or what, I’m writing.
Teenagers smoking behind a hedge –
private privet.

The contents of that bin,
that drain,
that pram,
that garden.

Railway ballast, Hippo-bagged, Buddleia-hidden.
Scars on the head of a swaggering fool,
walks the monkey-walk,
talks the monkey-talk?

Sprigs of a green mohican
sprout like grass through cycle-helmet slits.
Cracked grave-slabs by a cricket pitch
next to where the ponies mooch
and crane-necked tradesmen
muse upon the old church roof.