Spirals & Staircases

I left few marks
None that you'd notice
I saw that white green grass
On the sunlit Sunday evening

The bark of dog, and song of bird
Muffled words overheard
I have watched that leaf
Throughout the season

Only with reason and mastery unplanned
Do I misunderstand the photographs
The bric-a-brac on white windowsills
Chilled still wine with plain Roman blinds

See the signs of middle class
The traps of middle-aged nostalgia
We are now acquiring vases
At quite a rate of knots

Inkblots are found to be fake psychology
Or so it seems, as some mean spirited
Writer tries to crush my dreams
With few marks left

Least none that you'd notice

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Songs - Times

I didn't check the date
I didn't pay attention to the detail

• Pablo Picasso
• Edward Burra
• Wyndham Lewis
• RB Kitaj
• Frank Brangwyn
• JoanMiro

These are the names that brought me here
Most especially: Wyndham Lewis and Joan Miro

I have missed Conscience & Conflict
Just as I missed the Spanish Civil War
Though that was by three generations
Rather than by just: For those three days

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Floorspace

One lamp bulb is not lit
One painting is in darkness
The blood trundles
Around my calves and my thighs
As if to say it is time to rest

I need not meditate
To feel the twinge in my left knee
Or the dissatisfaction, shown
By the soles of my feet
With the morning's extreme walking

Only the scents, the perfumes
The eau-de-colognes
Only the aroma's
Heavy with wanting, heavy in expectation
Of lifting the weight from my wasteland

It is quiet now, I am alone in the gallery
There is a parquet floor; the exhibition:
So Last Century
Says a lot about misdirected energy

There are more staff than visitors
There are more galleries closed than open
Two days ago the doors closed
On the future, or the past
Of the Spanish Civil War, it seems
The modernists have moved on

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Occupation

The gusting wind tears through the small but flexible tree. The small but flexible tree that has made its life between the yards slabs of reinforced concrete.

Behind the interwoven wire and railing security fence, in front of the stacks of remaindered wooden pallets, to the side, in the foreground so to speak.

There is a brick-wall building, attached to which is a cast iron drainpipe; whose once blue paint now peels to allow the rust.

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Chemistry

We were on a factory visit, a place also with a university. I was with colleagues from an old employer. The bus, yes we were a bus-full, the bus dropped off the first tranche of visitors by the glass domed building, the one with underground laboratories.

I also got off there but quickly left the group, isolated myself, and headed for the old, quintessential, stone-built university.

I climbed the wide stairs, sat on a bench and took off my shoes. I put the shoes down on the floor by the door to a long long passageway.

I was quickly and forcibly told by a sour old lady on the reception desk that I couldn't leave my shoes there.

I moved them to the other side of the door, then a uniformed security guard said I couldn't leave them there either. I left them there anyway.

When I got back the shoes had gone; I looked all over for them, but I didn't ask the grumpy old lady on the desk, or the smug security guard.

It seemed I would have had to get on the bus in my stocking feet, except for the fact, that the bus had also gone.

Available on Kindle