Charlotte

Though named for a rose she had

no desire to be one, watching the

girls at school primp and tweet,

display and slut, be

budded, bloomed and blown

before adulthood, so she

prayed she’d one day find a man who

knew more of a garden than just

dead-heading roses.

Time Whistles

Time whistles its discordant tune through

branches and bushes and

blades of grass, the

slab sides of buildings, holes in

walls, cracks in

concrete, the detritus in the

next-door garden, TV aerials,

telephone wires, washing-lines, the

clothes of your loved one,

their hair.

Dagger

Winter is the dagger hidden behind

Summer’s back, ready to be deployed in some

improbable Fifth Act carnage that leaves a

stage littered in corpses and some

ingenue in charge of whom there will be

great hope but

little expectation.

Dagger

Winter is the dagger hidden behind

Summer’s back, ready to be deployed in some

improbable Fifth Act carnage that leaves a

stage littered in corpses and some

ingenue in charge of whom there will be

great hope but

little expectation.

Formal

A formal garden, bleak, with

coyly nude statues beneath a

sealed-in sky, your

off-white dress skittering between

bare but budding trees as I

pursued you across

frost-crickled grass and

caught you,

pinned you against the

plinth of an empty urn

which swayed and

grated worryingly like my

skull against my spine as your

hot mouth clamped mine with a

kiss like the

ghost of sunshine.

Field Day

Leo harbours Saturn, a

lubricious flea clinging to the

matted belly of the beast

hoping its host will catch the

trailing gaseous skirts of

skittish Virgo when they will both

have a field day.

Grasp

 

Smoke Signals

Email in a Bottle

It’s instant isn’t it? Unlike

telegrams or snail-mail or

smoke-signals or carrier-pigeons or

a runner’s feet slapping

bare baked earth?

There are no horse-relays involved

are there? or landslips to

frustrate, or feathered tribes to

shoot, a messenger?

Our frontiers are pervious,

aren’t they, to all our

ethereal mutterings? The

air is so full of them it is

opaque with their mist of

assignations and the

sweet musk of infidelity. They

must mingle with the drizzle I inhale

as I sit and wait and

wait for the instant reply to my

instant message.