07.04.12

Raratonga

Gin took hold
at sun set, the sea
rip still water out.

Gin, naked as glass.
Feral dog scavenge
in bin, growl amplified.

Ghost hang, spider silk
in air, wrapped up in
not belonging anywhere.

Coconut fall, guillotined
head, jolt me out
of pacific blackout.

Dog bark, cattle stamp,
goat, pig, cock
wake the split sun

in a circle of bug-kill
powder, counting
the dead millipede's legs.

06.04.12

A Water Cooler Moment

(After Relationship Manager)

Lee Reed closes the door to his wafer-thin-walled office,
he twizzles the nob to close the venetian blind
and walks to the corner of his room. He feel like a dunce,

feels a need to urinate, feels the lump in his throat,
the fattening tongue that has, since childhood,
signalled tears. More business accounts have closed

this month than are acceptable. His boss warned him:
first the bonus will go and then the job,
(and then the wife he is sure). Lee spends his nights

playing guitar in a rock 'n' roll band. If he plays loud enough,
for a second, the fear might go away. Tears never come.
His hands claw upwards like tight cones, his head

tips back and swells, his mouth a hat-brim circle,
his thoughts turn to liquid - heavy, cold water
that weighs down through him. Panic attack?

He tries to look down but can't. His legs refuse to move.
His skin turns transparent, like toughened plastic
and his office takes on the curve of a fish-eye lens.

He feels shrunk to the size of a child. A hand-size cave
is excavated from his belly. Help, he screams, like a bubble
escaping. A girl enters the room, acts like he isn't there,

frilling the limp leaf on his desk plant. An impulse purchase.
She walks up to Lee and takes a styrofoam cone
from where his hand used to be. Flips a nob at his belly button.

Lee feels his fear emptying, glug-glug-glug, a little.
The girl returns to the desk, waters the plant, exits. A bubble
erupts from the belly of the water cooler in the wafer-thin-walled office.

05.06.12 (a day late)

Margaret had a terrible fear
about being buried alive.

Asked if she'd rather be buried at sea
she said,
'Oh no dear, I can't swim so I'd never survive.'

04.04.10

Relationship Manager

I want to close my account, I say, and the boy-man agrees
too quickly for my liking. He squints at his VDU, examines
my financial hole - which faces him, not me.

There's eight pounds in the business account - if that helps,
he says, I'll transfer it to current. He tells me there's no money
in my savings - in case I'm interested.

His hands witter-witter away the notion that writing can be
a business - Of course you're closing - they say - stay away
from me - they insist. I read his name tag:

Lee Reed, I'm assured, would love to help - with his pipe cleaner
arms poking out of a cavernous short-sleeve shirt.
The extra half-inch round the collar makes him every inch a nodding dog.

For a second I want to order Big Mac and Fries (just to see).
His nails are nibbled down. He's married. Silver band. Shaved
this morning, but didn't have time to wash his Tintin-esque mess of quiffage.

His Buddy Holly's slip down a millimeter or two when he smiles
to make exit strategy (get out of my office) small talk. Firm hand
shake, coupelled with an almost bow of the head, inviting me

to examine the scene of what, in fifteen years, will no doubt be
a bald spot. Lee Reed closes my account, closes the door
to his wafer-thin-walled office, and isn't afraid of money.

03.02.12

Dear John Poem

All these long months and years of lying
here next to you like the lip on a shelf.

All that time. Straining to keep on the level,
or tipped up, to keep you pinned back.

God forbid you should fall off; smash-up
on our bedroom floor; leave splinters
between the click 'n' lock cracks.

There's nothing much to your cocked hip,
at rest, the hilt of a knife in half-twist.
Escaping some dream you peel away
but never quite make it as far as the edge.

I will miss, perhaps, the shared dent of our lives -
how, in cold weather, we would roll together.

02.04.12

A Lot Can Happen in a Day

He woke-up, found a tooth resting on his pillow,
an incisor. He quickly tongued his own.

They were present, but the one on the left, different,
a little more pointed.

He looked again, brushing his teeth, sneering
into the mirror. Odd.

Pulling on his trousers he felt an unfamiliar jab,
there was a house key in his pocket.

Not his. He put the key and the tooth to one side,
on the windowsill, and made his bed.

Climbing into his car he found the pedals too far
from his toes.

The rear-view was kinked. He got out. Climbed
back in. It was his.

At work, he found a new secratary waiting, who insisted
on calling him Sir.

Which wasn't his name, but he didn't mind. At coffee break
a woman squeezed his hand. Quickly.

While no-one was looking. She whispered When can we
get away? He said Soon. 

He went to the toliet, to have a word with himself
and facing the mirror

he could have sworn his eyes were brown, not blue.
By five o'clock

he was getting used to the ring that kept appearing
on his wedding finger.

At first he took it off of course, but later daydreaming,
he would be rotating it again

around and around. On arriving home a strange woman
answered his door,

telling him the kids needed collecting from Karate
class, that she had found his missing key.

01/04/12

Here goes, day one, crack fingers and . . .

Post Office Queue

Old ladies, always scribbling stuff down on torn envelopes,

have been a half-noticed fact of my life. The rationing thrift of it all.

I remember brave resistance women, at war, piercingly anxious,

listening to the time bomb of their hearts. An underground emotion

of morse code tapped in the irrational pulse of their blood, and translated

by place, time and memory into scribbles on a second hand envelope.