“Float”
Tommy, who was selling them the boat,
Pointed to the horizon,
Where the Clyde, beyond the Erskine Bridge, atlantic, where
That yacht, he said, that’s Franz,
He’s sailed around the world and hates.
What struck me:
Not the semibreve,
The Trappist artist sky, but
Cholesterol, his caulking,
Pitching stars and stripes in shit, his,
Like a Lodestar in succession;
Read disorder –
Read swollen mid-life odium;
(The children! The children!);
Arterial buoys.
"Snow"
Russian snow blows in across the Astroturf:
A beautiful rolling numerical panorama,
With prime numbers as goalposts,
Cuts us to size;
Bequeaths,
Limp vulpine tread –
Scalene fox-holes
And a slither
Between the flats.
"Harehills"
I’d rather it be something,
Janet ran it, or a nod.
But the toast.
Unswerving when it does come.
Lazy-eye Rapunzel,
Scarborough phenotype,
Putative earth-ma;
In her concrete postcode,
Face-dripping windows,
Solitary bombast,
Hex imagined bitch-slaps
And sending the cats for jewellery.
Which?
Every thought-bubble has agency
(lurching, like fifty-sixes from the park);
And would that I had swap
This qua qua bower -
Two parts of a church (Oxford, Lit.) -
For the Queen Veronica:
Furbished,
A volcanic postage gable.
The only boozer around,
And I large in it, and present.
The magic bullet I could have become.
This quirk, opprobrium. The feline spoils.
