From Hereford library, two biographies –
Genet’s and Lawrence’s Women. Today
we shall live tremendously through others.
I smoke while reading on the river-bank,

mixing my adulterants, alertly
indolent as the wind brushes the leaves.
Some pages skim by, some detain with charm
or horror. Penalties and escapades

both quite beyond my capabilities.
I am a leaf unshaken from its bough.
Genet and Foucault; Frieda in her power:
I entertain such thoughts within my bower.

…

In better timeline, picture her in age
advancing, tootling through countryside out of
the fast lane for good, no object of mass
fixation, the manageable bounds of her consent
upheld intact. Tributes all ready to go
some sad day still forthcoming: global
herald of causes carried always with
humble aplomb; so much comes down to her.

…

Something within me learns with shocking ease
how to distract my therapist; I hadn’t
thought myself that keen a people-reader.
You see what you (or it) will do when roused.

And that is all the cure I self-allow:
I get to watch her watching me pull verbal
wheelies up and down the street, go skidding
into parked cars, winning no awards.

Perhaps her boredom will at last unhitch
me from the authorised version of myself;
or if not hers then mine, or stranger yet
an ennui that is nobody’s, that swells

…

Booze-distorted, goggled-at, rain-refracted,
commonplace world-furniture turns auratic,
oozing at the boundary sightly nectar,
gauzy effulgence;

auditory too are hallucinations –
overtones fuzz out into amp-singed umber
over soft-fringed strummers still at their footwear
fixedly gazing.

Even so there’s place for precise distinction,
parts of wholes laid out by decomposition:
this and that inventoried to the nearest
practical unit.

(Mainframe hyper-abacus keeping tally
loses count to once-in-a-lifetime cosmic
upset, bit-reversal by stray neutrino –
who woulda thunk it?)

…

Someone’s retirement home is named Thalassa.
I keep a tight grip on the buggy: here
the road arcs steeply down towards the beachfront.
The sea is down there, doing its thing as always,
a doing that is closest of all to being,
a being that undulates into undoing.
I don’t go in the sea. It’s cold and wet
and I am warm and dry and wish to stay so.
I sit next to the buggy on a mat.
The children run full pelt towards the sea
as if they had come from it, were reverting
to it as from orbit, speeding hotly
across the sand into their element.
Splashdown! I used to dream of outer space;
of going there and never coming back,
the night’s great ocean swallowing me up.
But now I think I couldn’t be apart
indefinitely from the blue-green sea,
its give-and-take, its alien marine life
that hardly cares to be like us at all.
Offshore a wind farm twirls, a distant tanker
clings to the horizon. I am hot
and bothered. I rise sighing from my mat.
The children hoot. I amble my reluctant
earthbound feet towards the cheering sea.

…

Of course in the dream the stopcock’s jammed with rust:
nothing turns back the restless onwards push
of household pressure doing as it must
from warning dribble through jesting spray to gush;

the pipework weakened, creaking at every join
and spoilable things nearby, and ruin lapping
about one’s ankles; insufficient coin
for plumber’s call-out, and your useless flapping

hardly helping much; no tools to hand
except the kind that somehow make things worse;
the ceiling bulging now, a reprimand
from Triton for the seemingly perverse

…

Summer is not quite through with us. Somewhere
far off a patch of parched stubble ignites;
torrents rise suddenly, a fusillade
of lightning-strikes crazes the coastal sky.

The South East London suburbs keep their peace,
good-humoured although humid. Unconditioned
air accumulates in bedroom offices.
Even my darting brain grows slovenly –

not spacing-out but folding in, a migraine
signalling its onset. (And the children -
what are they up to now? One has just taken
seven teetering first-steps and a tumble;

…

Grateful for this autumn rain, suffusing
dampness, the season’s gathering itself
lately in; wet grass unmowed, tufting around
a plastic children’s slide, a garish rocker.
I put the bins out last thing before bed.

Nature gets on with things, its secret ministries
as Coleridge said a slow work of repair
sometimes felt inwardly, even as ageing
scrabbles at the façade, chips pieces off.
Perhaps – no, surely – both these things are one,

…

Make it a snow-globe, shakeable from stasis
into a gelid flurry settling
on alpine starkness, moulded plastic firs
deep-set in dandruff, pert within their sphere.
Wobble detection trips a jingle, one
of those old-time tunes you’re just supposed to know –
The Cuckoo Waltz, for sake of argument.
Shelve in antique emporium, last chance
saloon for gewgaws, books no-one has read
in forty years, unplayable guitars.
The books have titles like “The Mushroom Cult:
an English Priest Reviews the Evidence”;
“New Waves in Knitwear”; “Davro’s On The Prowl”.
The culture of your childhood is washed up,
flotsam and jetsam, on these final shores.
The globe, though, indestructible, a capsule
winking among the ruins, its jingle looping:

…

I have now reached the stage of slackening,
deteriorating eyesight
where I am constantly put out and surprised
to find that I need, but do not have, the glasses
I still do not always wear –

affronted by small-print instructions
in white text on pastel peach
or blue which tell me
how much of the thing to take
or how long to microwave it for –

illegible now in even the strongest light
until lensed into discernibility

…