Everything we know about the M4 relief road

It was the evening of the day you left.
I’ll always remember, first gear was sticking.
I was in the Picasso, just after its MOT.

Flipping Brynglas tunnel gridlock as usual
My finger was tapping a fair old tattoo.
Stomach knotted. Acid reflux. Take a Renee.

It’s a shame the new road will wreck the levels.
They say there are cranes nesting there –
the first for four hundred years. Oh well, c’est la vie.

At eight, I inched onto the 4042.
It’s alright Newport. But the traffic ...
Perhaps if the jet pack had been invented

you wouldn’t have taken up the ukelele
and fallen in love with that lout
and then, maybe, you wouldn’t have walked out.

I would have got home earlier, see.
Rubber hits drive. Aldi chicken in micro
and a post-it: ‘Brian, it’s not you, it's me.’

My fate was sealed when he showed you 
how the diminished chord slides smoothly
up the uke's fretboard. Soon, you were wooing.

You moved in with him, set up a new life.
Flipping traffic, flipping cranes, flipping gearbox.
Congestion on the M4 cost me my wife.

Wilderness with tea cakes

With slippers for snowboots I inched my way
across that flat and desolate wilderness
I pitched my tent on the Christmas ice shelf

Day after day, I trudged wearily
through blizzards of apostrophes
and the swirls of sugared almonds.

Wind moaned through the conservatory
playing a hymn in a minor key
that was well-suited to my melancholy.

The moon howled as I trudged on
at three, it was already midnight
scowling at an invisible horizon.

What would provide a requiem
for this doomed and lonely journey?
Perhaps some words scribbled hastily

on a post-it note for my family
the metronomic tick-tock of the kitchen clock
on the table, a half-finished crossword.