Poetry

Rest stop

We go deliberate tidal slow,Each second monumentalAnd totally alone

Stag weekend

Gravity: tugging our luggage, bidding us settle downAs a new crowd, as doctors and developersConverging on the Clyde, reminiscing about pills,Both taken and prescribed. And No one sighs, ‘Mine’s a small world.’ But I could.Because I know/know of/once knew these men,Though never knew them quite like this,Beaming brightly. What radiance! What display! What’s gilded these …

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Tell the bees

The nurses told your children first,Passed on the news, passed on the taskOf calling, corralling the massOf scraps you left behind. By no means Complete Collected Works,But hardly either a meagre sum: a hive,Four degrees, a swarm of type,Assorted memories and sons. Your greying boys will tell the beesHow, well after harvest, you still stirredSweetness …

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17:00 from Apolonia

The city unspools,Loosing strange trackside shanties: Hunched-over hills and buckling sheep,Oily green and dusty ochre, Blank country that repeats itselfLike rhythmically shuffled postcards. All that, Until the tunnel gulps,Pressing us in peristalsis. Then, red-ringed jelliesReplace the whole world.

Before the shower

You smell like garden,She says, meaning soil,Wood and water. True, I have been at play,Breaking planters whichCould not withstand rain. She flowers; I bend to tend.You smell like garden,She says, again.

Dying light

Our touring, our junketing stalled at Orkney.We shed waterproofs,fogged the windscreen, nodded along with McCartney,waiting for the sun.Our guide described horizons flecked with haloes,sea hissing through harr,fires that stuttered on jutting tallow-smeared stonesplanted in peat and,alongside bones (or charred fragmented clay),a brown skull gathering rain. Its brow lay low like the island, cropped by cords,lengthened …

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Electrosurgery

Later you explained the tug in your left sideusing diagrams of divided womanhood, unpacking pamphlets of pink chaliceswith lowered fallopian horns. The flesh, it transpired,didn’t resemble an apple core. Nor did white flecks flarelike malign constellations. But when he touched the loopto your mutable field, it set you aflame.State the fact: your body was fixedby …

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Message recovered from a satellite

If you are reading this,by some miracle, find our home.Find the glassy marble,fractured, but somehow stillrolling around a red-faced giant –a star we called the sun. Your fall will be brokenby mortuary houses,tumuli, blasted cairns,dusty relics, ruinedmonuments to fatal moments –grim faces set in stone.  Understand, we did morethan erect walls, divide Berlinand fortify China,but …

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