Pitching a plan to the dark
It is swallowed noise word
Plan and all
A bird condenses out
Of the darkness and I say
Sparrow
The word wraps
Around the small body, the sound
Rustles under the feathers
Shucked from night
The naming
Paints the thing
If not before
This soft corpus
Is now sparrow
The beak chirrups
It has its own call
The dark takes it
Like my plans, the yoking
Of All That Is Now
Vainly passes by
The earth diver
Returns empty mouthed
With a song in the beak
We had been asleep
On hot stones
Lulled away from
This world by the chirp
Of the horny cricket
Or our bellies were
Hot stones
Jutting out of the lake
Shiri spluttered surfacing
Said she could hear our
Hollow bellow
We lay like flies
In her majesty’s royal jelly
Basking in time and sun
Preparing for our departure
Our goodbye to the colony
Night at last
A good silence
Brandy light on
Fossilised cars
The only movement
On the empty street
Out past the lamps’
Faithful burn:
Patches of burnt
Pockets of dark
That the dead
Come through
The scorch marks on
A branded brain
Shadows of memory
Pleasant to the touch
On the gloom boundary
Wisps in deathmasks
Of some, still living
And others –
The street quivers
With a passing car
The dead dissolve
In the arc light
They shift behind the red
And push the beams onward
Like bodies and relics moving
Beneath the disturbed earth
This is no boreas
No king east No
This the bitter breath
This the lung of lout
Harbinger of a world sneeze
Hear it kick cans and spit
In the grey faces
Of early morningers
Black bags like the fruit of flies
Torn open rolling metal and board
And bonesshards into ear drums
Of unconscious
Women behind windows
This is no spring zephyr, no spritely ghost
It moans as a child then pile drives the door
Street cleaning dung beetles
Scuttle to restore balance
By one, A Good Day is wished
And the words
Are torn
From his teeth
Hermits pass in their shiny shells
In condensed warm air
And the stink of leatherette
Their softness rocked by radios
But Have No Fear, they will.
They will crawl out soon
Joining us in the din
All awake and not
Shall hear the roar
There is no spirit other than the wind
Coaxing the pine cone that opens
In the dry sweat of the afternoon
Spent with the endless drip drip
Of the coffee pot and the drip drip
As the measures of various clear
And brown liquids complete each cup
And to look up after a rose chafter
Swaggers along the blue veined hand
And watch the emerald conifers nod and
The hair of the willow in the garden
Strokes the fronds of grass beneath them
And a glimpse is caught perhaps
Of a house behind where no house is known
Or the bare belly of a woman darting
Where no woman should be, could be known
And to follow down that wet green road
Well you might never return
But that maybe just the gin talking
Then again this is just the gin seeing
Genies in everything
A far flung globule of spittle looking neptune green stings the pavement on the threshold between his morning door and the outer morning and he is otherworldly today; working on the buttons of his coat with fingers like oak roots taking small forevers to thread the whorled catches through the stitched slits 'good morning' a passerby on this thin stretch of grey raised street grunts as their shoulders touch and he flubs an answer to his state with the same though it is not true. The scum of streetlight froths on his shiny black shoe and his mouth warps an expressive moan. He becomes less than oak more papery thin the tissue undefinable pulp on the cold wetness of the paving slabs. They seem to quake beneath him, loose as dream teeth, and proceed to slide open like recumbent crypt doors as if, were he less prepared he might slide beneath them interred in some permanent personal sewer or forgotten mausoleum.
Both eyes glint at the weak winter sun and he almost trips over the blue cocooned legs of a street dweller, they look upon each other and the automaton of the gritty left hand rises towards him. He checks his mental clock for his hour of lateness, he is already out of time. His imagination whirring wildly for a worthy excuse to explain his protraction for another Monday, so much so he cannot consider a worthy excuse for his lack of alms. He sits. They stare. Placing eye on eye, watcher on watcher. It is a cold day says the streetman as his eyes dribble down our Worker Bee's collar. His head nods. 'I've been on this street for as long as the cement in these roads and it has never been this cold' His head nods. 'But then again I believe I've said that every year, hotter summers and bitter winters. I suppose this one seems colder as I've got no music.' Worker Bee asks what he means by this. The man holds up the wood and wire of what once was a guitar. The brown neck is intact and the rest is far from. In a crash between cyclist and juggernaut and the rider is taken beneath the wheel; this would be the leftover; the indecipherable abject body known only as human by the scruff of the vertebrae.
Care to tell what happened?
The streetsleeper's eyes glaze over, sure; was hanging out here playing a funny number about a one legged syphilitic dwarf and had the tone and rhythm broken over my head by a cloud of angry young birds. What they were so angry about I could not tell. Maybe my caustic troubadouring was too close to home. Worker Bee nodded, our itinerant went on, 'we are in a strange time, not that we haven't been before. I've never seen the city so worked up and I'd be one of the ones to have seen it. I have always seen our country, our speck of dirt in the blue as this clever apiary, more particularly a concrete hive when I'm concerned with London. Lately it's as if the bellows from the bee smokers have stopped pumping and the bees, shaking their furry little heads have begun to wake up to the coldness and in their new awareness, they are to swarm. Now, I know every man likes to think he is living in the End Times or that juncture of history where there may be no following and maybe I am not saying that; but there is a togetherness coming and it is a rotten one; a... - Mobile Vulgus? Worker Bee chimes, yes the nomad says, the cult of the mob.
A droplet explodes at his foot and ripples out in the reflected sky, he wonders if this is the first to fall, vanguard of new cloud joining its kin and the un-kin of grit and sewer water summoned from the bowels of the city. Who could tell of its significance and its cardinal position upon exodus? Would it take a ranger of old or something more absolute? A god in its fat omnipresence perhaps? The sheer absurdity of such questioning makes Worker Bee map his own being onto this fallen bead, where is the I in the dirty flood of a thousand, speeding through space at velocities unknown? He shakes his head. Better to concentrate on his feet, placing one in front of the other, avoiding the cracks as he was habit to do as a child. After these many years of growth, he still realises the little pleasures in his circumventions.
He studies his timetable, the cyclic routine of week on week that he has warped on this odd-morning, his office would not want him now. And maybe not tomorrow he hopes in his secret parts.
He takes the short route back home, down the alley where he is sandwiched by high wooden fences and on the other sides of these ramparts stalk two mad dogs baying and barking at his unseen presence. He pushes on a knot in the wood and it falls through, he looks through and spies a giant Newfoundland panting on the other side, Boatswain against the boards. He continues on with no other thought but his feet till home.
He closes his front door, shutting out the sound of the pushchair babies and mothers on their mobiles singing hymns and screaming at their other halves, he takes off all his clothes and climbs beneath his duvet. The world outside the window shuts itself down, he enters oblivion.