Clown contortions

There is a strange ceiling collection
Of clowning acrobats
Hanging from the corners of your room.

They are clever contortionists
Silent, suspended figures
You say your predecessor left for you.

They do not swing or sway
Keeping Mum,
As you mouth and moan in gaelic tones.

They play their part better than you
A gleeful tableaux
Mocking, as you act the bedroom fool.

Strawberry liquorice

(I've put this one up at the request of a boy I met at the Scribe magazine launch this very night. It gestated on my phone's notepad for a while, before surfacing in front of the mic.)

That woman smells

of strawberry liquorice.

I wonder if she has strands of it

tucked up in her neat hair,

covertly tugging out one at a time

for a tasty treat in a boring meeting.

Bury me in the Dales

(Writing comes most easily to me on trains. Mostly. Here's one from a rail journey through Yorkshire last Summer.)

Bury me in the dales.
That is all I long for.
Tucked away on a sun burst day
With crisp white cut-out clouds
(from your own kindergarten classes’ lessons)
and green folds enveloping
my senses.
Tired on time and drowsy,
I feel the trembling of the train’s engine
shudder up through my feet
up through my seat,
I am greedy for the dales.
Glugging down its errant
Knavely stance,
Drunk, and drugged
Huddersfield’s golden stone
glows rich and gleaming
and I imagine how it must have been
One afternoon in long-distant days
To find oneself steaming -

Oh to be
immersed
in the moors -

Steaming along

Old Age Titans

When the titans were forced from grace,
From skylight to skirting board,
Thrust to the depths of the earth
And beyond by Zeus’ almighty arm,
Even the tallest of Titans shrank in stature
Shrivelled and stale, smelly as an old man
Sitting like dried up fruit in a bowl of mouldering apples,
Past wizened and instead aged off the tree – not rotting,
Not exactly, no – sinking and sinking into the back of an ever-reclined armchair,
Sinking into folds of skin that suck onto cheeks once strong and full,
a face now slack in meaning.

When the titans were forced from the sky,
Did Zeus spend time testing various hells-on earth?
No, he merely looked to earth itself, where the elderly hover
on the edge of life,
The edge of the earth, imprisoned
in bodies slumping into husks
in fusty, dinge-laden lairs of unconsciousness
and glancing insanity, shrieks of envy, and angry, misplaced sociability,
Attended by the hawkish, the dumpy and the dour.
The false cheer scrawled on whiteboards
Distressingly loveless to their blank gaze.

No, there was no need to ensure the malaise of his forefathers
When the threads of time are destined to fray
and fritter away, the fundamental evaporation of lucidity and lustre

Shining silks are tossed out in their turn
And so are we all.

The Maypole

I grew,
Whilst you cultivated inches
And we
twisted our thoughts together
ribbons on a maypole,
spinning around one point
circling weaving wending
- thoughts little beads upon a
thread –until the base becomes
as tight and unified as a tree’s stump,
the bark as finely carved and grained
in its gnarled and new growth
as the most established of oak
heralds. Laced up, our love looks
festive, streamers of primary brightness
pixelated with baser, earthy tones
an elemental, invisible hold
that binds the core together.