3 avenue road south
the second embodiment
after the womb: first of
six addresses in a terrace
off a street of plane trees
slighted by the bourgeois
Mock Tudor gables oppo
-site and picking its nose
behind palings not worth
the melt-down for bullets:
whiskered antimacassars,
great-aunt Naphthalene
hiding in oak drawers
packet rooms lit dark and
the parlour smelling of hare
stew and temple polish.
I remember wrestling
sleep against the grain of
warplanes, and the old
crones of the homeless,
their reconstituted faces
tapping at my dreams.
Fifty years on and the dust
of its red brick still clings
like unrequited love.
fresh out of Eden
Thick skins to make it work, you said,
high tensile strength, low breaking strain
the colour of bruising; or horn of hair,
yours in free fall off your shoulders
inviting me to suck through a flat straw
and you forever preying in long grass:
that subtle ambuscade of smile and tiffany
while oxpeckers hoe my running wounds.
I didn’t know you’d leafed through my genome
looking for damp spots and loose mortar,
didn’t see
failed to duck your words hot-tongued from coals
but not so much them, more the anvil jaw.
Then back behind your Masai shield and me
laughing up a skin of armour plating too
except mine made a fine pair of brogues.
Underground Descant
Eastbound platform
fat boy
lordly on a mobile
wires dripping
cuts a slalom
through commuters,
clang of riposte
ricochets off pique
Lusty
Westbound platform
salesman
sag suited on a mobile
shouldered laptop dancing
effects a chicane
of precast manniquins,
Italian sales-speak
unzips the station
Fortissimo
Phonebound showbiz
duettists
sense of rubato, motile
corporate syncopators
banking, swerving
past cryogenic faces,
the telepathy of progress
enters the tunnel
Di-min-u-end-o-o-o-o-o
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