Sack Lifting Hook

In my favourite cafe
In the chosen corner

Looking out
On the lady with the porkpie hat
Listening in
On the garden refurbishment small-talk

Everyone so it seems
Is going away somewhere
Everyone, more so it seems
Have memories to treasure

Earlier
The funeral cortège drove through town
Led
By the solitary stick-tapping walker

Perhaps it was for the very man
Or the very woman
Who inspired the conversion
Of this bonded storage warehouse

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Feast And Fast

I was at a daytime social gathering, somewhere in the countryside, there were lots of people there, families with children, although I didn't recognise anyone in particular.

There were two big old sports cars, the sort that used to race at Le Mans or Goodwood; a Lotus perhaps and an AC Cobra like on my Scalextric set.

They decided to go for a drive, each with a fair number of passengers, even some standing on the footboards. We walked behind them, soon they came to a junction in the road, they went separate ways.

We kept on walking until we reached a five lanes end place, with tall shops to all sides, garden machinery and the like; a large display trolley, crammed full with cakes and buns got knocked over; "an accident waiting to happen" someone said.

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Construction Workings

I built up a new life after the old one fell apart
This is how it went, the rebuilding that is
For you know well enough already

How things fall apart
I ran away
I've done it once or twice before

I took a flat
It was vacant because it hadn't worked out
For the owners son and girlfriend

My son joined me, it didn't last long
We were running away for different reasons
We were running in opposite directions

I gave up my job, explained the heartbreak to my boss
He was sympathetic and understanding
He it seems has also been to this place of desperation

I left the flat; where I feel I have to tell you
I had ritual burnings of love letters
I also put my entire CD collection on to computer

I went to university
To study creative writing
I took a residential room in the students dormitories

I wrote, I wrote, I wrote
I was present and involved at each and every lecture
I read, I read, I read; all manner of words infused me

I drank, I smoked, I went to music concerts
I saw a play about Sassoon and Owen
It was performed  in the Imperial War Museum, Salford

I visited art galleries, I laid out on the frozen grass
I joined The Guardian's Soulmates programme
An internet dating site, where I met the lovely Kate

One day I received a letter, slid under my door
It had inside a home-made CD
A collection of Kate's favourite music

It was a wonderful surprise
We started talking on the telephone
And made a date, to see The Roches in Sheffield

Kate joined me for our passing out poetry performance
Afterwards we sat by a stream, under a stone-arched bridge
Kate washed blueberries in the crystal clear water

This was in the afternoon
Before going to a fairly inebriated party
At Michael and Angela's house in the country

All of that was ten years ago; a new life begun in earnest

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Unnaturally Light And Dark

Sheep graze on the sweet grass
Sunlight shafts strike the pastures
Leaves flutter from the taller trees

What sense
To escape the madness
That lives in the dimmed imagination

All, outside the window, wobbles
In time with late October's slow movements
Yet the evergreen darkness of life lives on

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Memorial Park

Up into the high morning
Through the mists of pink champagne
Along the ridgeway of expectations
Beauty is as beauty reigns

Would we have danced
If I too had been younger
Would we have ransacked our minds
To find money for the rides at Kelso

And as she walks
From side to side
Does she remember
The railway sliding by

Up above the early sunrise
Through the rift of wronged exchange
Along the rooftops of pointed presentations
Thoughtful is as thoughtless motive gains

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