Life: a manual

I woke up. Pretended to be a bloke
Conducted an argument with myself
Walked to the bus: a swaying goldfish bowl

One must navigate between earth and sky
Find one's way through a forest of symbols
Like a knight in a dark, silent wood

Though life is finite, a one-way ticket
The eternal endures, light and dark
The candles of horse chestnuts standing proud

The shaded graves are as cool as water
On a hot, prickly day. I walk past them
Imagining I am not going to die

Why is Liz Hurley so rich?

You with your radical innocence Did not ask for this daily display Of wickedness and stupidity The imbeciles with their megaphones Proclaiming their prejudice, with pride In this world of ours, wrong begets wrong The soft-voiced disseminate their lies As their badness becomes ossified In a slew of religions, cultures And competing ideologies We remain ignorant of our drones That bring terror to a foreign land And reward the merely beautiful Why is Liz Hurley so rich, and why Did Lineker play away from home?

England versus Slovenia, 23 June, 2010

A preternatural stillness

hangs eerily in the air

like a question that goes unsaid.

On burning summer pavements

and in chilled supermarket aisles

England is unified, in one shout.

We are united in our desire –

beer gutted and taut of belly

dowager and lager lout.

Flags stream from scorched balconies,

smoke climbs from barbecues

into the clear, listless sky.

Blistered by summer heat

the honking vans announce

that which they normally hide –

the national colours, our hope

bright emerald, white and red

the small weaving figures, our pride.

(NB. The disappointing game ended in an unconvincing, one nil victory for England. The winning goal, the only bright point, was scored by Jermain Defoe – a header from a cross by James Milner.)

Life is love

What value does life have?
The discourse of men in suits
The sound of footsteps as they pass
The chirping of sparrows
The busker in the underpass

All have a transient lease
Of what relevance are they?
A few moments of beauty and strife
The echoing footsteps fall
Is life merely life?

We are microbes on a ball
Or, to put it another way
We are united as one
Our path is universal
We are light, love, the sun

The beach at Deia

It is a house inhabited by ghosts
Your totems, your carefully folded shirts
Shaped terraces of lavender and thyme
Tall carobs and orange and lemon trees.

There must have been enough of England in Deia
In the grey cliffs that walled your domain
In the sycamores by the rushing brook
And the white hawthorns frothing by the road

There is a different poetry here
Where stepped mountains climb to the sky
Of tumbling orchards of olive and fig
Of jigsaw boulders and the super-charged stream

Slicing though tortured cliffs like an ogre's house
Today, there is a world you never knew
The parked hatchbacks are like silverfish
There is a barrier across the sacred grove


We walked down the road to your beach
To your crystal pool, somehow defiled
By a driftwood bar, the colours of Europe laid out
Flakes of plastic, like shells, on the grey stones.

Water does not change – the sigh of the spinning brook
The glowing of flesh opened to the sun
I sat on the beach with a black goddess
Your lemon in our wine. Thank you Mr Graves

The world does not have hospitals

With reference to William Wordsworth

The world does not have hospitals, or schools,
Or museums, except those built by us.
It is a place of ignorance and sloth.
Its beauties are over-rated, by fools.
The world, in fact, is esteemed far too much
For its ants, pipits, tigers and flowers,
Killing and eating each other for hours.
Nature's a hostile universe; it sucks.
Great God, I would rather be in London
With its escalators and shopping malls
Wrapped in the city’s vast, murmuring hum
Than looking at heaths or waterfalls.
London’s glories are far more startling ones
The smeared orange sky, the dome of St. Pauls

Overload - to my father

Removed, in a vague amniotic dream
I forgot who I was, who I could be

I could not stand it, the divine comedy
The beauty and pathos of life itself

A sagging settee was my continent
I dissolved into a gentle haze

The world is too much with us, far too much
I drank every day so as not to see

II

Years passed. The pain of living was dulled
The quotidian ache of light and dark

Into a vague blur, far beyond all strife
Where the daily terror could not reach me

I suspended myself, because I could
In a bubble. Who can tolerate life?

It is too beautiful and too strange
It is much better when seen drunkenly