Hayes Street Farm

Is it nostalgia or memory
that guides me to the stables and sheds
rusting machines, the mountains of baled straw?

At the city’s edge is an economy
where chickens can wander freely.
Once, everywhere was like here.

Maybe it’s the stories of my father
that I remember. But I often feel
that I have been here before

fixing up an old tractor
bailing hay with a pitchfork
or picking up windfalls for cider.

I follow a sign to the car boot sale.
These days, one field is a car park
another's harvest are terrible MPs

broken clocks and old crockery.
What pleasures linger in this detritus.
picked over by crows and magpies.

Perhaps I can find the perfect way
to learn Spanish, a flower pot
or a useful tool for pennies.

Fringed by hawthorn and elder 
a rutted track is drawing me
to the farm pond; its hidden treasure

strangers brought from some wilderness
bright fish, like fragments of sky
lending the dusk their icy brilliance.

Clown and doll

Once there lived an orange clown
in a white house on a hill.
The puppet man who ruled the world
spied his foe, the china doll.

‘They’re going after Jefferson

one day they will get me too.’

He shouted at at the hapless toy

‘And so you Goddam freak: fuck you!’

The doll’s skin was like porcelain

his pursed lips like a cupid’s bow.

He liked to taunt the harlequin

on who would rule the puppet show

‘Your words don’t mean shit to me

or your fucking rodeo.

Fuck your white supremacy

I’m gonna fucking kill you bro.’

The angry clown snarled back in pain.

‘Now I’m getting mad,’ said he.

‘Your word are very threatening.

It’s me who who runs this nursery!

‘I’m gonna make it bad for you

hotter than Kardashian

meaner than a rattlesnake

with fire like you’ve never seen!’

The harlequin laughed maniacally.

‘Whose the fucking loser now?

Come on boys, let’s lock and load.

Seriously, we’re good to go.’

The china doll was calm and still

despite the wailing sirens' sound

heaping morsels on his plate

hidden safely underground.

He did not fear the puppet man

or his weird orange glow.

He listened as a city burned

in a bunker far below.

Gravity

Please do not blame me for being old.
My life just happened, like gravity.

The apple that falls from the tree

slowly loses its brilliance.

Each moment should be savoured and yet

it is good for us to remember

that the past is actually still there.
and that the mind chooses what to forget.

How we feel now is how we felt –

wet fur, the scent of lavender

the leather and dust of an old car

are offered on time’s conveyor belt.

unburdening us from mere chronology.

The present lives in our memory.

Please do not blame me for being old

Please do not blame me for being old.
The apple falls from the tree.
It just happened. It was like gravity.

Once, spinning in euphoria
I rode on everything.
The horizon did not interest me.

My years are like your seconds.
Decades passed. It was not meant.

You rise, slowly, to the top
of the Big Dipper. And then ... the descent.

While I was not looking
my life seemed to fall away.

The sounds and colours that are strange to you
once were a novelty

Please do not blame me for being old.
It just happened. It was like gravity.

The cheaper sort

At the moment things are hot

They’ve made me lose my job: what rot

Oh the rank indignity

Sajid Javid who is he?

How dare he dish the dirt on me

I said to him just wait and see

The plebs’ attention span is short

All they want is fags and sport

Give it a week, or maybe two

And they’ll have over things to do

But no, he wouldn’t wait a bit

He’s stitched me up that little git

I said to him, what’s all this for?

We’ve heard this bolshie talk before

All that ghastly tenant power

We tarted up their sodding tower

Sprinklers and a fire test!

They’ll be wanting gold bars next!

Designer labels, super cars

Fine cuisine and cocktail bars

They are plebs, why should they be

Living in royal K and C?

Lazy beggars on the lam

Send them up to Birmingham!

I was at the Treasury

And Cambridge University

You don’t get to the PM’s door

By wasting money on the poor

So why all the sodding fuss?

More for them means less for us

I need my rural liberty

And life in Surrey don’t come free

Ski-ing is my favourite sport

The shares this year are falling short

That’s why I did it with no thought

The cladding? Use the cheaper sort

Accountants

They must have an interior life. 
It is one of the mysteries of the office.

Church on Sunday, a new car, a pet dog?

They reveal less than a goldfish.

They are strangers to emotions.
These people don't do words.

They prefer columns of numbers.
Their seeing eye merely records.

They are like Easter Island statues.
Don’t ask them about East Enders

Who put them here, and for what purpose?

We know why. It's to torment us.

Primly superior to those who
blurt out words, or who cry after a skinfiul
they are frozen in some Biblical hell –
a year zero, where feelings are sinful.

A clay pipe

For Chris

As news of the invading Dutch fleet 

travelled slowly across the city 

the pipe was snapped by one who is long dead 

and forgotten. A remnant of history.

Sluiced from a storm drain into the river 

bowl and stem were touched by eels

layered in an invisible jeopardy

a shifting pavement of slime and ships' nails. 

Years passed. New outrages were observed.

The man who blew out lungfuls of air 

died and was buried somewhere.

At night, the sky thundered with war.

His tiny act went unrecorded.

Each tide brought new whispers and rumours

until one bright London morning 

I found his clay pipe stem, on the foreshore.