Management Speak

Tens of coffee cards each with one stamp
Vouchers for Christmas, expired in '99
Matching socks of one
To-dos undone
Notes around the pages of a newspaper, like statistics
Diary of a life kept in polished shoes
Had it been: instead, no news -

Just books and stoves
And stones from the coast
Because it's light

Fall to sleep

I went far today
To a place we walked, over hidden cachets
Of roots and crystals and tennis courts, years ago
That compound time
Now released in the air would recoil

Today there were filing cabinets hanging from creepers and half-cars
Pondering a stream of red shoes flowing against green and yellow woodland leaves
Placards melted from the rooftops of a distant city not for sale as the
Rain of an evacuation storm; falling scraps of all the desperate last summons for justice
And emergency policies clutter the ground, even out here.

These particles are
Already sourced in the soil, building tea-lights into the trees
Casting a lean yellow warning light on the
October mist-soaked valley of moss and effect

We had walked here on a clear day with mirror blue
There were cooing cows in the fields and
I was going to say
'I think you are an atom'

Beyond the reach of red tape
I seek to find a shelf
In one of the border houses
And fall to sleep

By Satellite

There is
Nothing that the time will tell
Interior windows peer into offices
For which no office is held
And no secretary files the blanket slate
Of blocked out words on paper

Years later we were in the same park and walked
Under the same trees but didn't notice each other
The records were available now
But without purpose

The pollen that flew between us simmering
And circling on amber waves
Flew without direction

Kirkstall Abbey Ruins

Litmus hoax the
Old soul's antechamber against still tall
Drip-feed yellow vines
Stands a bullet arch into the stars
Plotted with no quack's map home

A wrestler of animals
Wrought from celestial
Half-headed gods in typography
With arms over and into arms
Stony, pious
Despairingly beautiful in silhouette

I wrote first from the flat earth to everywhere
Skimming the crop-circle landing site with my fingers and toes for clues
From the nineteen-fifties

Dew
The ground is still soft from the prints of one or two
Who saw the whale as a comet
Disappearing

Twist or Twist

Self-latening
Knotted helix wander
Through a caravan brick pile
Theatre of resting strangers on green shoulders
Permanetly engrossed in their closet winter shoreline story

Lampshade sun droning on about
This time last year
Same sensation
Different circumstances it
Cools towards the channel
Sieving the air for brambles and moths
Archiving

Home
From the carpark
We walked here across military fields
In supple arches to this postcard-themed
Park of cloud hostels
Marigold
Fibre-glass clock tower
Isolate grammar in conversation

Each plot a dot of white ink
With chocks in the soil

Drive back
Because the town closes at six
Boarded up from the scouring
Trampling waves
The cold wailing cannonade
Spraying up in chords from the tiles

Between molecules and
Dancing tableware
A piece of time has departed

Beneath the storm
Cliffs of emerald water

I was a windmill

Bring me
The cold and fire
The crest of a wrong
Turn
Bring me
Coarse air
Dewy spider web in hawthorns
Bring me
November
Bulletproof

Get serious and fearlessly
In love
Get sent home
I was a windmill
I was arrested

Stay out of trouble

The movies have a lot to answer for
I think they have to answer for
Everything that has not moved

In a rainbow
Colour is thrown at me from the surface of petrol, a soap bubble
Refracted Hollywood architecture
Interference reds, blues,
Greens so pin a badge on the next time this really happens...

(But I was of no mind for a documentary)

Leave after an hour
Walk home along canal flash railway electric
Heavy rolling-eyed headlights beam up millstone violet clouds
Terrace orange on dimpled water
Crane breeze of a silent theatre from across the tracks

Forget the elbow that wasn't there
See by the filament a single drop of water
Falling from iron-bridge bones into a tarmac lake
At home open a window, a zoo, a cathedral, a pilot-light
A license to stay out of trouble