
They’re wrong
Those buds
Your bod
It’s bad
It’s not a gift from God
The blood,
the curse unchecked will burgeon
I’ll buy you time to think
-Your surgeon
They’re wrong
Those buds
Your bod
It’s bad
It’s not a gift from God
The blood,
the curse unchecked will burgeon
I’ll buy you time to think
-Your surgeon
At dawn, a gosling stands upon the lake
He doesn’t fly or swim
He’s fake
He’s driftwood?
Grains, or bars upon his wings?
There’s things suspiciously like other things
Five times a day the trains
From London mostly, Edinburgh and Wick
Disgorge their loads of promises and pains
The visitors come fast
And thick
They chafe at their disguise
They groan
Forlorn, they stumble over stones
And underneath the surface cables hum
The cameras are tucked from view
The Starlink dish is new
A winch to drag the carcasses
A gun
THIS
is an anagram of SHIT
Pithy observation, isn’t it?
Observing doesn’t help one bit
When WAR is RAW words fail.
Let EVIL LIVE and rip the VEIL
To crucify
To kill
To nail
Two letters keeping LAMBS from BOMBS
The lambs are in our prayers
EXPLOSIVES
CRATER
BURSTING LUNGS
O shattered bones
O burning hair
Guide, please explain the scene.
It is tangled colours, jumbled like a dream.
A petrol-slick of possibilities
Not unlike the sun through screwed-up eyes.
Graffiti leaps out from the walls
There’s light and shadow, shape and form
The architecture’s come alive
Touch the concrete here, it’s warm
It’s evening now, the golden hour
Oh quick, you’ve got to shoot!
You’ve hardly any eyesight left.
The composition’s up to you.
Soon you’ll be falling by starlight,
My ill-starred friend,
Who was with me till the day the signal went.
Too soon, our moon goes blind
Our tent becomes impossible to find.
Too soon, our sun goes down
Eastward draining valleys fill with cloud
The compass spins, the GPS is out
Wind snatched away the map
The darkness bearing down on you
Until your ribs are snapped.
Each year the leaves fall a little more,
The thickened tree-arms spark
With frost in the park,
where other middle-aged men
Kiss dogs that don’t belong to them.
These men consume their friends like food.
But underneath pond-scum and weeds
A man retains his hair, his needs.
Why won’t you stay for good?
I wandered lonely as a sock
Discarded on the floor
To consummate our passion
Till I couldn’t handle more
Although you made my skin crawl
I wish you all the best
I’d love to pop it in the post
But don’t have your address
While I was distracted
The grey hairs appeared
First in the temples
And then in the beard
Meanwhile on the Cuillin ridge
In flats with empty beds inside
A slim fin of rock waited and waited to be sat astride
The so-called “peak of the young men”
Who got stuck at the planning stage
Hoping they would somehow gain attractiveness with age
Still with none of the instruments studied
Something wells up and up
The window was open
You wanted to jump
Several times, but something else always came up
one day while he was typing
e.e. cummings got a shock
where once had stood a SHIFT key
was a little pointy stalk
he cut his finger on it
and was so irate (it’s said)
that he never touched another
till the day he fell down dead