Insulation

In a cosy pub, away from your mother

With your mates, light ale, or the new mixture

Of lager and ice cold Irish cider; you say

You won't stay long, before you get on home

To the television and the chatter

Yes, the natter of what you did with your day

Not that it matters, unless of course

You've confounded everyone and got a job

Or once again picked up the calendar

With artwork by Vermeer, or passed the scent

Of lilies in bloom, or explained how to develop

The recipe of sauce for Beef Wellington

And if you do hear us say, without thought… if only

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Estranged

If you had a caravan

Would that make you

A particular kind of person

If then in November

You camped on the top

Of this most desolate of moors

Would that say something

About how you fit into society

In an hour, or less

It will be total darkness

Later the whisper of silence will arrive

I wonder to knock on your door

But ask myself, are you alone?

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Before I go to my brothers

A smidgin of pink in a vast grey

A slip of silver white fading to blue

Creases of browns, half full blacks

Dull oranges turning to red

On the other side of the tarmacadam

On the other side of the interrupted

White lines; in both and all directions

Car headlights leave a twinkled glow

Even without the rain, which surely visits

Or has visited already, settled itself down

Into the squidgy peat bogs or drained itself

Off into catchments to by passed escarpments

Bracken-water, for coagulation and chlorination

To become crystal clear and drinkable once more

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Wessenden Head

Yesterday you talked of place

Of the writers three month trip

to the Antarctic; you spoke of the congress

Also of nothingness in everlasting light

On the grey windswept moor

A stones throw from the graves declared

By Brady to torment Longford or to make capital

Out of the somewhat badly affected Myra Hindley

Reed grass angled at a quarter past the hour

Guards over the roughed up rippled water

There are no houses, neither on the horizon

Nor to right or left, human habitats are unseen

Among an unfortunate landscape of tainted beauty

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The eye is distracted

The latest exhibition is of twilight

Photographs composed as paintings

They easily suited utopia or dystopia

To cast doubt in that environment

Being entirely natural now, in this hour

Between day and night, here or wherever

In the world certainty is our hoped for companion

As we open the loose hinged doors

Or catch the last bus from the school yard

Or walk through the half lights of the old town

Into a stranger’s bedroom

Into a house of uneasy corridors

Of our own discouraged misunderstandings

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