Now crunching wheels grind the concrete
Metal bones groan
The blasting surge of the Thames
Heard in silence.
And he, pausing,
an old man now
(by the standards of these things),
Stops and breathes.
He holds, not proudly,
The board he once rode.
One of many; a few shattered
And spilled him aslant on the slopes.
He is a phrase-book
Brought through time
To translate the thoughts of those
He knew here.
What, this came out as poetry? Clearly some sort of mistake.
First poetry in over a year. For the weekly Whimword challenge…
January first, cold and hard. January is a killer, his sin is neglect; set to face the new year, pining for the old, he never looks down at those he freezes.
It’s National Poetry Day, for once it’s the actual day for this country so I’m not just using another nation’s day as an excuse. I wasn’t intending to write a poem, but this almost came out spontaneously as a response to an email, so I thought I’d better scrub it, put it here and reply more sensibly. I’m not saying this is the definitive guide to child-rearing, incidentally. Just a facet of how I see it.
Drown me in this awful boredom
Stretch my skin across my desk
Let it dry to leather
Over rubbed-blank keyboard sweat
London breathes in
Brackish pools
Yellowed-straw grass
Swathed and rippling
In flattened heat.
Snarling, savage
Scream and leap on your desk
Thrash blindly at the cord
To the mouse that keeps you
Tethered,
Bought, brought close,
A wild thing
Dolled in toil.
Continue reading Light work
I miss
the pine smell
on the edge of sense
in the dark mornings, stumbling
to catch the plug stuffed behind the bulk
of a tree
whose fate it was to stand
mute in gaiety
in our living room.
Of this fate
it did not know.
It is a tree, and it knows little
but the endless grip of roots in the soil
and the catch
of endless winds through evergreen,
whistling
knife-cut needles.
