Friday 30 January 2015

The rumour


There was a whisper that you were coming
a rumour, a vague undertow
You can change things with your magic
That’s why we are afraid of you
We are too scared to let you in
The delicate touch of your soft hands
can damage us. It can burn our skin
and yet we talk fondly of your visits
You slow us down, force us to look
afresh at ourselves. You are no secret
On any street, you are an open book
Like an old friend who can bless or kill
you line the brook and lie on top of the hill

Thursday 8 January 2015

Imagine


Just imagine if the rain did not stop
I would  float through life like a shadow
glide down a ribbon of light to the shops
I would enjoy going to work in my canoe.
Rye Lane Peckham would be my Amazon.
Like a modern hunter gatherer
I would paddle to Morrisons
to scan its watery aisles for treasure.
No clock but dawn would draw me from my bed.
With my lethal blow-pipe or dart gun
I would haunt the tributaries of Nunhead
Hunting for dinner – dangerous but fun.
To perfect my journeys, a new craft
her planks bent to the shape of my dreams.
She would be sleek and graceful, not like a raft
flit like a kingfisher down narrow streams.
Smoothed like glass with sandpaper and plane
she would be the turquoise queen of the rain.

Sunday 4 January 2015

Clouds


The brooding of clouds is a fallacy
but, there again, locked inside a house
in the held breath of a prolonged holiday
they can weigh us down, like an albatross.
Any yet I realise that I am not unhappy
I can fill the kitchen with the blues
with roast meat and wine-laced gravy
with red cabbage, with cinnamon and cloves.
Later, the wine glugged down
I notice my hands; something is wrong –
their slack skin like a Christmas goose
tells me, suddenly, that I have grown old.
The dark clouds are pressing in on me
they expand in my skull like a tsunami.