Hissing
buckling shields
pressing hot against my skin;
Trapped in my defence.
We continue…
Cased in limestone shells
laid down daily, year by year;
Walking on the void
~ beyond Chester
We crossed at the edge of the West
from our wider plain / towards a higher fall;
We crossed above the head of navigation
leaving fertile plains / for the western fall…
We sailed at dusk, the tide in flood,
our logic flawed, in baffled honesty;
We held a course towards the outer islands –
enticing, in their warm deceptive welcome.
“Ourselves alone” was once the bitter warning,
a harbinger of inwardness and violence,
of sixty years of poverty to come…
But now it echoes louder from behind,
brayed by the problematic poster-boys of privilege,
rotting from the head.
Dust is always with us
I
caught your image forming:
A half-seen shadow in the dust…
then outlines etched across a page,
now substance carved, creating depth;
Growing features, wrinkles, names
with movement, hints of nuance,
breaths of agency, and time;
I began to know a person.
Calving
Stacks of ice once blue:
nature pressed by its own weight;
broken free from cold
Carved in stone
Again
I learned to walk without the hope of wings;
tracking backwards from intricate devices
to carving graven shelves of slate
while still standing on those shelves,
searching for a way to cut them loose
that could leave their weight behind
Turbine
Modernity crouched, constrained,
the superheated pressure at its heart
encased against itself to further power;
Created in a symbol of the New, the turbine
hummed,
its power haunched to overcome resistance
until it whispered into life…
A mill-wheel of the giants, spinning under sight –
its screams have spawned across the world,
gorging on our hunger turned to greed
While we trust in calculation, to be
spared the whisker of vibration:
a flaw that could not fail to kill us all.
Cable
I hold onto shreds,
almost forgetting I’ve lost
my anchor cable
Clown
You shaggy haired buffoon!
You are a worm of inappropriate persuasion,
values lost in folded layers of falsity.
When they inquire into your conduct, how will you explain
that Eden was smarter than you, as was Chamberlain,
but vanity made you surpass their worst mistakes
without an ounce of their integrity?
Who chose you to be our future?
Nothing you can do is in my name.
There is a special place in hell for you…
Every thing that works for you is wrong
and you have brought your curse to dwell in us:
our futures dust, our cakes a hatchery for weevils…
If you were not a fool, you would have fallen
on your sword by now; but seriousness is out
so we must fail instead. And what of us?
We are benighted people, bewitched by fantasies,
choking on confections of a half-invented past.
No longer lions, nor audience; now mute accomplices.
Circling
Not one but three kites spiralled,
around – but not of – Easter;
prospering offshoots of an earth
sliced thin for easier consumption…
Three red kites circling overhead,
intent on every ritual of their hunt
to bring hot death to prey beneath,
oblivious, in our suburban gardens;
As they ride a rising wave of carbon 6 –
our alienated friend and profligate –
the sleeping dragon wakens, shifting,
shivering, raging at its wounds…
