Three D – poems from the new millennium 

Safe sex

Welcome to step one, “Case Identification” –

date of birth, address, grandmother’s name, and so on,

health profile, fingerprints, and facial recognition,

your passwords, body type confirmed by phone and pin.

Are your forms “Informed Consent” and “Dispensation”

signed and dated; please state any reservation.

Next, to guard against all premature exposure

there’s of course a legal clause for non-disclosure,

and then you must approve proposed protective wear

while providing your own tools and aftercare

with kite-marked safety-checked certification.

Also, to optimise full synchronisation

please prepare to implement initiation

precisely thirty minutes post-medication.

Verifiable expenses are paid tax-free,

but there’s more bureaucracy if you charge a fee.

It’s always your responsibility to see

that your hormonal cycle’s regulated:

clients have no comeback once inseminated.

Now if you’re satisfied our preparation’s sound

it will soon be time to get your knickers down.

22.1.24

Capital

At the British Museum

we can still make use of what used to be true (and

if the Greeks don’t like it screw ‘em);

in sifting dust for shards of trust, so few see them.

At Westminster

the pie is instant Ginster filled with splinters;

in self-service bars the biased spiders skint us –

a pestilence of flies makes summers out of winters.

In Whitehall

flinching ministers insist that day is nightfall,

that policies are right, not slight or spiteful;

here everything is life and death, but nothing’s vital

In the City

they’ve insurance, licences, securities

and guarantees for silent slick cupidity;

no office space appreciates awaiting serendipity.

At Canary Wharf

the sado-trader scathes the banks, snorts at dwarfish

playdough paupers far below, torn as he wolfs his

slob-a-jobbing bonus, by thoughts of what enough is.

Out at Wapping

there’s news the sewage farm is double-cropping

with propitious floating turds and precious droppings:

we’re poised on words till usage lets the slop in.

Back at the Globe

the epic replicas of motives and emotions

pose for apologies in apoplectic oaths, and

grope for any hope in tropes and notions.

17.1.24

Midwife

Starvation became experimental

when hunger disrupted the virus test.

As artistic ladies drafted shopping lists,

baked cakes, tried fine wines and ordered dresses,

the midwife went weeping about her business,

dodging falling masonry and craters.

Her hands made a shield in battering rain

as they did from drunken men at home;

she waded in sewage laced with dysentery,

choked on smoke from bombsites and forests,

and tasted the acrid air of crematoria.

Some days her bare feet froze to the street

on others the sun burned the earth as she ran.

But high officials flourished hopeful graphs,

politicians gave propitious reports,

protecting her from harm behind the screens

as the midwife went by with winding sheets.

16.1.24

Magic Place

This is some kids’ magic place,

where centuries-old beeches, logs and roots

dance round a clearing in the forest

pushing raw and earthy days

into childhood memories.

Here they sit at tables of ancient rocks

in pools of broken glass splashing

diamonds on the souls of their shoes,

while round them sun-sparked ring pulls

and flattened beer cans jewel the path.

Screw-top mushrooms come in stealth;

discarded bottles everywhere

hold messages, mysteries and myths,

and squeezed-out glue tubes scheme

to fix the inner linings of their dreams.

Some time in their futures this squalid find

will transmute to treasure they left behind.

22.9.16

I wrote this jolly bit of doggerel for the family when we scattered Mum’s ashes, as she had requested, in her lifelong favourite woodland. I’m pretty sure she would have laughed with the rest of us.

Bringing Mum Back

Her dad brought her here when she was a child;

from then, for a lifetime, Mum was beguiled.

Even when big brother Reg practiced cricket

and she played bowler, fielder and wicket

nothing could equal Maidenhead Thicket.

What she did here as a teen and through the War

we aren’t – and don’t want to be – entirely sure,

but she made her regrets well understood

when woodland was felled to grow wartime food.

I loved it too: on summer walks through scrub

that glowed, with Mum and Dad – then to the pub.

In the Seventies the move to Thatchers Drive

caused controversy about exactly why:

while some blamed the needs of Chrissie’s horse,

Mum yearned to be near the Thicket of course.

Through brambles and undergrowth, mud and chalk

successive keen dogs would take her for walks.

Then when she was sixty-something she fell,

like Alice, down a rabbit hole – and suffered hell –

and though it can’t have been much fun to land,

the Thicket always was her Wonderland.

Mum felt her move to Hants was a bit off track,

that’s why we’re here today to bring her back.

Kept in a jar, it might not have mattered,

but here’s the place she has to be scattered.

24.10.15

The Great Poets

to be a great poet it’s surely

better to write a little and early

so we’ll value the fact of your birth

and focus less on what your word’s worth

the tragedy’s more in mourning your loss

than reading your last forty years of dross.

7.10.14

The fabric of the universe

You lay out your creation with the artist’s care

each negligible component tracked and traced

tinctured and tinted to its ultimate place and purpose

tiny threads bind them together winding in depth

and relative space with rules, circles, spirals;

your remote will, that vague picture in your mind,

has bought this order out of nothing,

out of a trillion options of chance and design.

We stand aside and deem its imperfection “beautiful”.

In two hundredths of a second I have reduced

its tone and texture to a memory of fifteen million

identically shaped coloured rectangles;

in that mindless instant my neutral digits preserve

and destroy your work, yet I can barely say how.

We move together, tangled by threads,

tending as ever to fly apart, polarised by acrimony,

but woven and stitched by necessity.

surface tension grips us along where we touch

and we are defined by invisible forces that set

the form and perspectives of life as we know it.

25.7.14

The Bungee Jump for Truth

The media collaborate

in stupid futile stunts to fund

the charities our skinflint state

has so emphatically shunned.

Round the clock a sponsored phone-in

seems to save the world from cloning;

wearing different coloured socks is

guaranteed to spare our foxes.

Just walking backwards for the blind

buys guide dogs which are trained to find

rehabilitated vandals;

while landmines are disarmed with candles.

But mine’s the most important cause,

and, disregarding lack of youth,

I’ll out-hype animals and wars

with a giant Bungee Jump for Truth.

The Clifton Gorge is not enough –

so, attached to some companion,

I’ll make my point all taut and tough,

across some Arizona Canyon.

There’s no place for sanity or doubt,

there’s no scope to make it subtle

I’ll contrive in space to bounce about

by jumping from a NASA shuttle

So let’s give honesty a break,

and when the San Andreas Fault

next splits the earth and starts to shake,

I’ll reach the core by catapult.

In a world so full of lying,

someone has to slay the monster …

and yet, what is the point in trying

to find a rich and honest sponsor?

2002

The Fall

Trees gave up early. August scorched the air

at first, stretching dead skin across surface things.

New growth cringed. Grass paused unseasonably.

Leaves curled, crisped, kept falling through September,

falling through still air dry as snakeskin slough,

through scarred branches, through the hesitating green,

through deadened dogrose hedge, through the morning,

through the afternoon. Leaves kept falling through

as though there was something bad we had done,

through rosebay roasted by the blitzkrieg sun,

through burdock blurred to grey, losing its grip,

through burned husked bracken and an end of sedge.

Leaves fell across a million miniscule

corollas, shrinking yellow pimpernel

and cinquefoil to deceive a billion seeds.

Leaves fell like lies from politicians’ mouths,

like compromises written by the wise,

like news; they fell through thin October air,

as though the earth had winced and they poured through,

condemned to fall on the far side of the year.

But then, we found a tiny hard fern frond:

a green scintilla’s proof we’d done no wrong.

2003

Turnaround at Honolulu

The ceiling fan is fumbling with the furled up air:

it heaves around the hotel smells, but hardly shifts a hair,

While it aspires, too lightly and too long, to loosen clothes

and suck the surface heat from dampened glowing skin,

our bodies brake and stall; above us tireless blades still beat.

The waves awake on coral reefs, and reach their wandering end

just short of shrinking shores more than a thousand miles from home.

Now they outrace, overwhelm their core, and wrap their outsides in

with coiled and towering crests erect, poised for collapse;

they’ll chase and boil and churn, till water changes back to air.

Progress and pleasure are pouring in, plane after plane;

arid, anonymous, the airport aches at every flight,

as passengers moved to passivity press and pulse and spurt;

the ragged baggage caterpillars clunk and judder

case by case by case, each after and before the other .

Faces here can’t fake the past or flatter failed mythologies:

they come from California, China, Africa, Japan,

and plainly Polynesia, since nothing’s less parochial

than Man en masse in flight, more mixed, more up more down:

though no one’s taught or trained us, we just turned the Earth around.

2004

Room

Loneliness soils the hotel sheets;

you’ve a headful of shirts; your pen

makes you think your mind’s all creased:

you’ve meetings soon – but who? when?

There’s a cockroach where the time should be

the bookcase stamps like a child:

the drawers store mediocrity,

mirrors won’t be reconciled.

The phonebook and the Bible bawl

how the headboard’s grown unjust.

A sign that’s turned to face a wall

claims “In rats and dogs we trust”.

The wardrobes secretly converse

on your choice of shirt and tie.

The bathroom beats for you in verse:

“Poetry,” it bleeds, “can’t lie.”

The railway here is overgrown,

stations where you stopped are closed;

the site of this hotel’s unknown,

the traveller’s name supposed.

2004

Swan

Awake at dawn, I walked

a lake’s looped shore and stalked

a white mistaken bird

unseen and hardly heard,

afloat like downy seeds

among the swishing reeds,

aware that here no one

knew me except the swan

that slipped across the brass-

lit lake like oil on glass;

it scratched like scorn, and ached

like porn to be so slaked

in unsound moss and ooze

while this free queen could choose.

So it started: something stark

and sparking, knife and shark-

like arched my back, strained

my neck, wrists, shoulders, feigned

the weightless power of wings

and made my taut legs spring

against the water’s purchase;

the air bursts, boils, urges

what’s left of me to rise

as truth above Earth’s lies.

Surely no one believes

I’m free to fly like leaves

now I’ve become the swan,

detached, becalmed, and gone;

2005

Town haul

I come from a town where we all live like guests

in streets full of cuckoos and emptied-out nests.

The teachers play truant, the students are vexed,

the youth clubs train teens to forget that they’re sexed,

and interns request wealth and fame in texts

to economists whose numbers they’ve guessed,

while banks bet on slots what their savers invest.

Old people grow lucid, the nurses perplexed,

the hospital’s closed due to patient defects –

it’s sugar and water that the doctor injects,

though he’s not sure how far the cure has progressed.

The church is full since the priest was possessed,

a queue formed to hear what it was he confessed:

they’re mainly young women he’d like to molest.

No one wants office, and no one elects:

the MP’s a mistake which no one corrects

(says he never inhales and prefers to ingest),

and the Mayoress is picked by the size of her chest

now the Town Hall is run by Special Effects.

The rats are all leaving ­– they refuse to infest.

This town is the target Al Qaeda rejects.

A journalist earthworm writes blogs and dissects

statistics on dog shit, in which he’s obsessed.

The police Chief Inspector grows horribly stressed:

since he solved all the crimes by ending arrest,

he can’t quite remember what it is he inspects,

but a leading evangelist says he detects

we can’t all be guiltless, and God still suspects.

A drunk army colonel wants Brussels annexed

to stop the invasion of EU insects.

When a Frenchman moved in we vowed to protest:

we hear that his furniture’s all been distressed

so we need to find out what else he neglects,

and report to the Council the things he erects

(though it may be enough to hint at incest).

Poverty’s ended, we thought – joy was expressed –

the day we each won a million from Readers Digest;

even the postman was mildly impressed

but he sent the post back marked “wrongly addressed”.

The motor mechanic’s been losing his zest;

if it wasn’t for drinking he might have regressed

when a series of breakdowns left him depressed.

All our plans are just schemes that have no pretext,

we each live in hope though no one expects,

we’re extras on set where no one directs,

we’d be action heroes if we wore dirty vests.

Some townsfolk are damned, none thinks themself blessed,

though everyone’s dying, it’s too soon for respects.

There’s a post office queue and no one is next.

2008

What the Woods Say about Us

Margins

Out on the ragged edges of our towns

and villages are the wasted spaces,

where brambles and scrub scramble

like wild children who won’t tie laces,

where floods find rutted tracks

and a padlocked gate takes us nowhere.

we could fence this willful wilderness

to isolate its prodigal spread and pitch.

but its lure and influence lingers:

why not grub out the hedges, level lanes and ditches,

cleanse the land, make it geometric?

And there are always endless acres more

beyond our profit makers’ studdied grasp.

Neglect rots away our global status,

and corrodes the vision that could extend

the magic and margins of our plenty:

we must quarry nature’s selfish mess like stone

and, for the common good, make its growth our own.

Out

Every walk we take,

parabola or straight,

has necessarily

had circularity;

departures and returns

define their own terms –

it’s a different route

coming home, going out.

So we know each step of the way,

the truth of it won’t go away:

we can’t take a linear track

so long as we plan to come back.

First

The hill is a clutter

of forests and fields

conglomerate outcrops

castellate rocks

sheer sheepedges

wrecked cottage stones

where rooms are bones

and trees repeat

cliff after cliff

wall on wall,

and streams stream

falls fall.

Though woods at first

lack definition.

Earlier

Here once wide-eyed Red Riding Hood passed by –

she was lost where the wind had snatched the trees

and dashed them together and to the ground;

she trod where floods had scorned the water course

and scored and scummed the brush to mulch and crud.

Wood ants have abandoned their nest; nearby

rooks in riot wolf down the rising worms.

badgers have torn a branch from sleeving bark,

bleeding it of beetle grubs, leaving shards

flushed and pulped and mashed to soil, storm to storm.

Earth resolves to water, water to air,

so nothing’s left to be substantial here.

But don’t we know better than to be deceived

by the howling wild wood and its shift of leaves?

Aren’t we too old and wise to be destroyed

by the hit and myth of seductive choice?

The straying stream runs both ways to find

its level: now it tells both truth and lies.

Now

The earth wears saxifrage like a shirt,

its contours ripple beneath their silk –

a place where orchids race to be like weeds,

and weeds contest to know they’re Best In Show:

the only end that they’ve pursued is now.

Forest brakes

We’ve searched the woods for an afternoon,

never finding even the odd ten minutes.

We curse fallen branches: the brushwood snaps back.

Nettles break out in more than a rash,

early purple orchids break up for the summer

rosebay and decay take off, leaf litter breaks down.

Some trees are marked for saw or salvation:

even here we are all on someone else’s files.

Everything is a reminder of everything else.

A faint grey scrape in matted wood sorrel

is the last trace of some creature.

In the wildest parts we’re hunted down by mountain bikes,

snared by zip wires and families enjoying forest breaks.

Canadian Shield

Up on the rocks elsewhere it’s dry and clear –

specific as the day the month the year

but ground and rounded a long time past.

Dwarfed elders manage fruit to feed bluejays,

but bunchberries hunch in any buried shade

and bilberries only bronze before they fry.

Unlike themselves, mosses persevere,

thin, crisp, olive, erect; while lichens lie low.

Death-grey peeling larches bleach and break 

in the heat, bark and branches braced for Fall

and the pick of ice that prises cell from cell:

all but the stone is poised to leach away.

Sometimes there’s a route to lead us in or out,

a choice of retreat or reaching for Nowhere,

but normally not – just rocks that are all the same

in ways they change. In ten mistaken minutes

we might be lost for the rest of our lives.

Below on the oilslick swamp dragonflies

mix and match up genes in their quick two weeks;

it took the ooze of four thousand human years,

for each slimed dragon-nymph to learn to fly;

now there’s just time to set the lake alight.

Down there everyone is kin, tree frogs, newts

snakes that listen with their skin, the terrapins

that slog to warm their blood on half-sunk logs,

the flies and bees; everything that swarms or swims

or seeds will never have a need to leave.

Up here on rocks half as old as the earth

each stands his ground, clings to its foundations

lucky just not to be blown away or back.

Next

Summer’s done with those rites of spring.

Bluebells yellow; a rump of ramsons morphs

dull and malodorous. So let them rot.

Make room for something new and brute that won’t

consume the floor and flora like the short

scheduled trooping of colours before,

only to let it slide away to slime.

Do it next in darkness, eclipsed and dusked

by beech, hung over with holly and yew.

Now’s the time bramble and bracken arrive

bruising and belligerent, set to rise

and ready as rain to take back the earth.

Like my leaders they conceive nothing wrong

In acting when they like and when they’re strong.

Then

There’ll be a time when even familiar forests

defeat us with their mumbling impermeability

and their random architectural rain.

Rock faces crumble away unwilling to see us pass;

paths lead nowhere because there are no paths.

while marshvalley carpets absorbs us

with their soluble distractions, and cloudbursts

spread darkness, chaos, confusion, love.

Beyond

Some landscapes pull you in, drag you down to their level –

the smell of sheep’s urine under trees,

the weight and well of cliffs dropping from the sky,

limestone that drivels a thin seven soil.

Plants sieve nourishment, carve a niche.

Their succession is written, fixed and specific,

a rare mix grips the hills where everything fits.

We come in fun or plunder and the difference is nil.

Late afternoon

desperate oaks twist and grasp the falling land

sunset ignites them with the southwest sky

and catches occasional leaves as they drop,

though November’s chill stills all other life.

Later

Bare bark stumps and sticks

are spattered, carved and clawed

by craving things with empty maws.

Late

This tree wears death with every fungus going:

it wouldn’t want to carry on if it shared our knowing.

Last

It doesn’t matter whose reality

we’re in, or which dimensions, whether up

is straight or fast or flat or green, we see

what the trees see, and if we had a top

we’d spin it like a moon and still be lost.

Life’s this borrowed thing: and what we do last

is give it back to the chemistry of cost.

What’s strange is most of us stay sane, or lie,

although we know we have to learn to die –

unless this is the madness from which we shy.

2014