Perspective
Ignoring Laurie, he’s doing
his best to provoke, in that way
that only bantams can.
And he’s thorough. Starting on
the surface, contempt highlighting
the undulations of her
rind, the tight black curls under her
skin, the silver specks
gossiping about where her
viridity is injected. She
knows these ballistics are truths.
.
And now the maternal silhouette
of her, he holds up the mirror
to magnify every pinprick
of hatred sprayed about her face
and length by her daughters,
her sons. They freeze and expand
in the cracks, fracking along her
form. And she
knows these specula are truths.
.
Finally he aims white hot straight
into her heart, exposing her
base lack of desirability,
the way in which she lies,
not stands, so still, not heaving,
not writhing, she has expired, dry
pallette – no lid – a derelict
parlour with no roof and
no walls and
no floors.
Barely a vessel, it’s true,
.
she knows. Laurie has pins in
his leg: a souvenir of the
accident, he likes to
joke, whilst retaining
gratitude: he was luckier
than Stu. He stands, listing
slightly, allowing the frantic
whirl to expire.
.
No word, no glance of rebuttal
is thrown in her direction, but
he nods, taciturn. I won’t deny,
.
he finally concedes, that
there are frustrations, but
(here he pauses,
recalling his stage
direction) I have seen
my dearest friend buried, and it
puts things in perspective.
Her mouth gapes as – literally –
he strokes his beard and
shakes his head
paternally. Sculptor exhausted,
he’s sloping back,
allowing the space for the boy
.
to comply. He complies. Satisfied,
Laurie walks back to his chair.
She knows he is right, but she’s changed.
The Prince
Silent smiles.
Slicing hot
ricocheting wildly
Spurting banter
.
Her wings are clipped, and it is found deplorable that she cannot fly. *
.
Where is your albumen, your chalaza, your yolk?
.
Fifty to one
The gamecock
.
It’s all I can do, the audience hears, to keep smiling after the way she’s treated me, and of course the law always favours the mother.
.
Poachers’ pockets
Fabergé glaze
Smiling silence.
____________________________________________________* Simone de Beauvoir
the Cuckoo
Thursday night book club
Mary speaks like the visiting host
of a sex-toy party. She
over-seasons her talk with
“ladies”
(even though Paul’s always there)
pronouncing it: lay
– dizz
reversed capital ‘L’s like
little fence posts holding
up the bunting and steel
wire of her pitch
as she conspiratorially
appeals to our shared
experience of stolen baths, league tables, cat hair
.
This enables Deb to
look down on her – slightly –
only Deb’s not conscious
of it, of course. She’s paddling
furiously, coolly
trying to look as if
she’s doing anything
but. All these appraisals
she makes are thrown over
board immediately
after she’s tasted their
nectared allure – instead
of sucking the crude flesh
from the bones, Deb nods
empathetically, before
trumpeting considered
remedies, delivering
sagacity, head at
forty-five degrees like
a cantilever parasol.
.
Poppy would like to be like Deb. She
doesn’t care about living out
of boxes because she’s never done
it
– well, maybe in her twenties –
and she’ll never have to. Poppy is
fractured, though – shattered in places – and
she’s given up on pretending she
isn’t.
She’s like a used sheet of baking
parchment that’s been smoothed out but then
balled and thrown at the blackest corner.
Light falls onto Poppy sometimes, but
it’s so brief and it spotlights all the
dust between the stage and her. It
never shows the blueprint she wrote all
over her self.
Force
https://www.nottinghampost.com/news/local-news/robin-hood-declares-sacrilege-world-4348677
Is it still called scaffolding
when it’s raw wooden
struts on the outside of
the building, holding
up the parts where gravity
is swinging
too hard? Like
the frame I was sure they
placed round the Major
Oak, alongside the
fencing to keep fingers
and feet from
touching its ancient
bark and grain? The irony
of felling tree
upon tree! donor timber,
a genetically-modified factory
farm of disposable
chips, preserving the
hollow husk of a
long-expired fable. Nature
herself has torn it
down, but we know
better. We know
better. We know
better, and our needs are more
pressing.
.
Elsewhere,
the bones and extinguished
ghosts of our worthless
predecessors brace the
Victorian bay-front of my
building of
historical interest. A guy
stretching the roof
to stop it falling
into its own embrace, telling
it: wait.
Wait.
Wait? You may be
tired, but we know
better, and our needs
are more pressing. Or
the invisible conditions
of a contract with progress,
personified in the splintered
down of unfinished
lumber, pushing back
against history’s
hands?
.
And what about those
same foundations
forcing my skull against
its nature: strutted from
the concealed content
of my crypted
heart? Are they
scaffolding my bull-
neck, countering its
reluctance to hold up my
neanderthal skull? Whispering:
you must.
You must.
You must? We know
better. And your needs
are less
pressing.
Saint Valliant
Saint Valliant
And that was the winter when we decided
to start worshipping the boiler. It was so
cold at that time. We felt as if it had
never been cold before. We needed to
wash, and clean our windows, and launder our
clothes, and we had never chosen to
notice those needs before then.
So we brought in the most prestigious
party planners to prepare a festival
for our boiler, because we knew it had
needs – it had had needs for years with the
effort of trying to provide heat in
spite of the blows it had borne. It was
nowhere near new and not entirely fit
for purpose. We weren’t sure what exactly
it needed but we knew that we liked to
eat. We made stickers and garlands to prove
that we knew where all the holes in
the lagging were. We exchanged the knowledge
of the missing radiators we had
sold, before that winter, to pay for our
pinks, and how we had dismissed the plumber,
forgoing our brave boiler’s annual checks. There
were cobwebs behind its opaque door.
.
We worshipped it, our heroic boiler,
so persistently, peppering it with
our love and our charity until that
cold, cold winter thawed a little and we
realised we need much, much more of
our housekeeping spends for Easter eggs,
defence against next door’s extension, and
fabric softener.
Rubik
I have stayed up
all night
trying to solve the
Rubik’s cube
.
because its solution
will prove my predicted future
.
but my failure will
portend certain doom’s continuation.
.
I cannot trust my own thoughts
to think my way through it
.
because I’ve had years to
do that already, and : failed.
.
Take advice.
Follow advice.
Practise.
.
It took
all night.
It did take
all night.
I was up
all night.
July 13th 1985
July 13th 1985
We are still in sight of the Greatest Year Known to Music but
however strong the power of love
you can’t hold on
when the race towards space rips you away from the shore and
blasts you downwards.
It’s quite the event; nothing like this has ever been seen
or heard
before. Are you watching?
Did you know we have this power? The power to reach around the globe?
The power to circumvent God’s mischief?
The power to reprieve
one life; three lives; two million lives:
for the day
and simultaneously swig synthetic lager
and gurn on your muckers’ shoulders
and forever search for your likeness on the indistinct blurred footage of
this day.
But we were in the blistering
car, all day
in the race to reach the hospital
within the space of his remaining breath
and we were too late
Low-lier
You were just standing there, taking a
leak. What could you do? You needed
to go. You had pulled up: discreet. It
was a natural and innocent urge.
.
Why was she prowling around, anyway? At
that time of day. Alone. A vixen sniffing at
a dog. Of course you had offered her a lift.
It was an act of chivalry. The school run.
.
Why shouldn’t she be
travelling, though? A young woman old enough to
know what she was doing. Calling you
‘Sir’, leading you into her theatre and
.
throwing herself open wide to the
audience. Scriptwriter and director.
Innocent 