Doodled oil: frame, drape, and garden.
Lavender green, anaemic blue, grey,
redbrick, bush green, tree green,
jumbled muck brown metal,
shocked gasping yellow bursts.
Yeats and Keats. The chickens!
Missed the Sussex white dabs.
In the coop, having a lie in.
weekend after all. Sun still life.
Cock-a-doodle-do. Get the picture?
Look out!
An ill wind
Coughs: spits out
Lilac phlegm.
Now smell
sweet almond waft
angry onions:
this garden is
full of livid
sad mad
bramble.
Ghoulish dead potato
crazed leek
rise up to
taste
doomed decay
reeking havoc
hear
the cluck as
amok chickens
weep behind trembling
toffee wrappers
See
Behind that mauve shed
a terrible lettuce
is born.
The Rev Nice-Grub paused life struck
shopping list of savoury dainties before her
incomplete: savoury quails eggs, spiced cheeses…
Holy music meandered ox-bowed
midlife muddy water curved solidly,
strong, steady laps undercut the bank
vile, grass clod bays and inlets for voles
cans and ducks. Captives get marooned
on a cut off clump, excised by wake and wind,
and wave forlornly: we wave back, hollow eyed.
Our off white hull stirs large laps as it hums past,
scary aftermath loosens more sods that collapse
under the webfoot gait of ducks and swans
and wellyboots of anglers and toddlers
leaving small gashed inlets for thin quick snakes.
…crudites, nice dips, potato chips, nuts.
Waiting on pork sausage
We were forced to skelt
willy-nilly
for mute sanctuary from
tampons confounded take on fern hill.
Tea was derationed today in fifty two.
Five eggs variously
boiled Mohr’s scale by Nanny Charperson.
Is it safe?
Can we come out?
Chai or Cha, your High Chairness?
We emerge and return
Waiting for pork sausage
Green and dying in our chains
Ding-a-Ling.
Coming up for Noon:
Chicken & fish purchased by Poll.
No knobby-curse, no hobby-horse…
ham & eggs ate listening as…
big con speaks: poor as piss, full of shit.
After this, fearful prospects – complex phantom
horrors hidden behind the gun-ho noises
of the head boy’s gobhead, a quake
of vile thoughts sent me, suddenly weary,
back to the warmth of my duvet.
For better, Heaney’s Beowulf bolstered my warm bed and stark head
until half three: silent, dozing, sleeping,
perhaps dreaming,
phone calls were ignored. Then up to find the house empty and open,
closed and locked the cold back door.
DO.
wee
bark
DI
trash bin day dark
old metal pan sky,
scoured by grey blue sick traffic
air, hanging like a cowl or shroud.
Sky waits wind
to blow another shoulder
of squalor.
Dream: got up and walked away from
the dingy flint wall office;
going quicker,
just missing walls on corners.
I realize
I
am on a bicycle.
At the main road,
tourists wave from cars and campers.
I watch a couple getting horny
in the sitting room of the guest house,
I cycle in disturbing seated groups.
A small woman with tight knit jet black hair staggers backwards and falls
back
on a carpet upholstered settee laughing excitedly.
Roaming about,
people read papers.
We speak of what they are studying.
They drift off and out.
A
group are gardening for their board & lodging, pulling up shrubs and bushes.
So, the crazies
Got scared after total wipe-out and their fears,
Which had got plain drunk on hubristic puff,
Regained their force and jumped ship sharpish, but
The past caught them up (like a shot
In the dark or Pinkerton’s chasing down Butch and Sundance in a shotgun shack) and made
These shysters clean latrines
Midday
Starving. Neck
aches bad despite analgesics, just Poll this morning.
Did crap.
In a heavy head. Read a chunk
of nodule, looked things up.
Caecuban triumph plonk!
Salian piss up.
Forked tongued
double Dutch caps Cleo’s aspic act. Horace Norris changes trains of thought.
After eggs and passing clouds drowsy.
Struck dumb by JH Plumb
Social history, steeped in mystery:
Simon Schama, Dalai Lama…
‘Where’s my Karma, Dharma?’
Pyjamas!
Piranhas!
Scratch
Owls howled
weird haunting
arias,
touching
arcane
libidos,
opening violet eggs
louche like your
wings aping ruth
Grimbeau 