Put Upon Another

Thursday lunch

Crayfish & Rocket

Watching the guy who cleans up clean up

I sit with my own frustrations

But soon I begin wondering

What are his rack-able doubts

Does he talk to himself about a past love

Is the swift sidestep

A sign of more flamboyant times

He reminds me of my own poem

The Fedora from Buena Vista

Already I hear the samba & the rhumba

Maybe he was once a galactico

On the sands of Rio de Janeiro

His sensual slipstream movements

Reminiscent...

A feel of the breeze

With the sun on your back

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Timetabled

Geometric shapes
Forged
Language
Pummelled & beaten
Silences
Whispered over the heads of corn

Take me there again
To where the light of time is lifted
Away from the lonely
Where what is maybe mine is gifted

Local
Somehow global
Revolving doors
Revolve
Noises
Shout across the crowded room

Let me escape
For certain as a polygon would
Eventually as only
A once regular theorem could

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Irksome I: A Review

Breakfast was cold

It suited the cold stories

I came for poetry

My mistake

This was more like

A chilled

Thriller writers exposé

Dan and Ruth led off

Pouring scorn

On our lack of knowing -

The pictures all hung square

Most people had been last year

I won’t be back; the breakfast was old

& it suited their over told stories

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Den

Harvest time; first we piled the bales high

On the trailer, carted them from field to barn

Sons of farmers and village urchins we became architects

Future participants perhaps for Kevin’s Grand Designs

The main space was deep inside the piled bales

The entrances, and exits, had twists and turns

Part to keep people from knowing of our secret den

Part, as Jenny says ‘to secretly discover our sexual selves’

As the winter wore on, and the cattle needed feeding

Our den was dismantled; bale by bale, day by day

First the entrance, then the exit, then the small

Cavern, which had been immense, with boys laughter

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Power Station

There was hardly any differentiation, between the mist of nature, and the mist created by the warm droplets of the cooling towers

We had left the wharf in Lincoln, good and early, to glide along the canal with the sunrise at our back

I had longed to belong to the water, and here I was on a long boat, a narrow boat, crawling through edge-lands countryside, moving freely, yet seemingly always in a straight line

You can still taste the coal; not so much as in the old days, not since the power stations cleaned up their environmental act, but, with a big gulp of breath you can taste the damp black, the sulphur is still there to be chewed upon

Any good mathematician would be able to tell you that the cooling tower walls are parabolas, or another fancy word that I haven’t used since geometry classes at PGS

Any poet would be able to tell you that they are metaphors, for beauty & isolation; and that love always dies, and one day they too will die

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