Rumour of Morning

There are gashes in the hills where the

chalk shows through that

catch my eye in what should

really be night

as though they had some

inner light, some

revel within that

refuses to end, demanding my

attendance to drink and

flirt and dance and

forget that it’s just

photons following the curved Earth to

spread a rumour of morning.

HRD

If we could map all our

IM’s, emails, texts,

would we find a

bell-curve of our hearts, a

Hertzsprung-Russell Diagram of our

souls? or just random dots and a

meaningless chart on which

no parabola can be discerned?

Roadside

They peer at us, the dead, from behind their

makeshift roadside shrines, wondering why the

place of their demise is tacked with

faded photographs and plastic flowers rather than a

bedroom, say, with the row of shoes like

screaming mouths, or the empty seat in the

classroom, or the blinking cursor on a

blank screen in a busy office, or the

spare place at a table—but life soon scours new

courses for its flow and the dead are left in

backwaters, beside dusty roads where the

speeding traffic riffles the tributes and

muffles the ghosts shouting something about

profit and loss.

Hyperthyroidism

The butterfly in her throat went doolally

jamming her thermostat on maximum

boiling her body fat away so I slept next to a

sizzling skeleton with a libido like a

nuclear reactor in meltdown which

neither I nor her toys nor

all of us in unison could assuage and I

worried my heart out for her but

once she was well again I was

shamefully nostalgic for the

sharp poke of her pelvis and that

auto-da-fe on the

griddle of her loins.

Painted Sky on a Morning Walk

The pre-dawn sky belonged in Tuscany and the

Quattrocento, not mid-winter Kent; gracing a

calvary, not cross-hatched by my bare trees;

glimpsed through a grotto sheltering a

pensive Saint or an impassive Madonna, not

reflected in muddy Medway;

bursting from the tomb like

Christ Triumphant, not ignored by

bored commuters on the tired tarmac of a

station carpark.

New Year

Years end, years begin and

few choose to notice the slow

annihilation of time whilst

fireworks burst and promises are

made and broken amidst their

effervescent sparkle, and anyway

who does not prefer the

festive fervour of hope against the

steady paring of life’s nails?