Collected

That moment of joy

Over the sand dunes

Past the restaurant

Down the worn out steps

On to the sun-drenched beach

Skip freely on the sands

To the sea - all full

Of splendid waves

& the foam

As they turn and crash

Unrestrained, unbeaten

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In place of DIY

Less of a search for memory, we leave the pictures

Of distressed doors and windows behind

More in a hope for future self-expression

The thought is to create rather than buy

Although right now the plan is to navigate

Past Portimao, to the sands of Praia da Rocha

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Cortes Real, Paderne

Incessant chatter

Out among the dry trees

In the acres

Of interminable scrub

A life’s work: of space

Colours, hues; backdrops

Of washed-white walls

For giclée prints and

Idiosyncratic objet d’art

Above me, as a shade

A triangular canvas

Suggestive of the voyages

Of more adventurous

Portuguese artists

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Divide

The blood blister is expanded

As though the pool of ozone treated water

Had infiltrated the final layer of skin, passed

Through the membrane to dilute the purple puss

& thereby facilitate its further hold around the finger

There are five shades of green; from lime

To grass, to fir, to laburnum, to mimosa

There is only one pink, that of the solitary rose

Planted, one presumes, with a certain purpose

Perhaps to the memory of a prematurely lost love

And so the flies land on the skin; drawn by the sense

Of victory, or drawn by the same death as witnessed

By the fallen and dried leaves of the bougainvillaea

An old climber, that trails haphazard over the pergola

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Long Player

Might I name this breeze ‘The scratch’

Like the sound of needle on vinyl before

The singer or orchestra make their entrance

The sound of the formula one racing cars

As they take that long corner at the far end

Of the two hundred miles per hour circuit

The sound of the sea washing the shore

Though we know the shore to be too far away

For the wind to carry the rush of the sea

It is the sandpaper in my own mind that generates

The internal sense of ‘scratch’; sandpaper which 

I would willingly rub over those f’ing mosquitoes bites

This poem is from the collection