The Road

The road buckles
like an outstretched arm
at the point of pain,
hauling the horizon closer.
Your path is written
on the bulging surface,
a ripe, golden vein.
Above, in the aurora,
the constellations tighten.
You slow your pace,
drinking in the air.
Something bubbles upwards
from your heart,
the leaves of your brain
and your strands of hair
shiver up and start,
your hands clench,
your eyes whiten.

The light drains out
of everything around
and pours silently
between your white knuckles.
From your fists
it drips onto the ground
making silver puddles.
The landscape falls gently
away from your eyes,
but the road still twists
from the edge of reach
into the back of your mind.
It tells you things,
terrifying things
that glisten even in the dark,
in a voice so beautiful
that you laugh as you go blind.

The Drunks

Winos crowd the city bars,
usually the cheaper places.
Their mouths unclench, storm drains
ready to glug and gag
a deluge into their faces.
They carry leaking minds in cups
balanced on sagged shoulders.
At the slightest slosh
ache drips from the brim
and trails their blinking dishes
leaving them black as oil.

Later they'll have to piss,
shuffle past the bathroom mirror,
peering at themselves, hands
lightly moving over and over
the most eroded places
where their hides are slack,
blood vessels blooming like roses,
where the bottle once bit
a hair line crack
and sent them with a stroke
into a pile of bleeding noses.

The Blue Room

The blind is down
but strands of the sky
fall into the room,
going softly through the slats.
The cold outside is soft,
the kind that turns
as slowly as the world,
coming in at the walls,
rising with the sound of planes.

The room could have fallen
off its axis into the street,
left leaning like a bucket
in the corner of a shed,
lopsided and grey,
but you wouldn't know
because today
the air is a bed,
television has spilled out
in a puddle before the screen,
whiteness drips from the walls,
the colour and weight of everything
becomes absolutely clean
and falls.

The arc of light and motion
judders into life when you wake.
When you fall asleep
the last reel of the show shuts off
and a world of noise and colour
becomes silent and opaque.
This blue room is deep.
It breathes in from the window
and blows the light
into every solid shape
until the edges roll like sleeping eyes,
and break into darkness.

Giftshop

Bothered dads with bum bags,
plastic straws in rucksacks,
boxes of smeared sandwiches,
some with babies bouncing full nappies
in their marsupial holsters,
some with fingers red from airfix,
all with the nervous eyebrows
of Charlton Heston in that movie
Planet of the Children,
stand with handfuls of pencils,
grimacing at the checkout girls.
Mothers float like squids,
toddlers plucking at their tendrils,
past giant stuffed geckos and apes,
deformed orcas with impossible smiles,
tubs of rubber dinosaurs.
The assistants grin like auctioneers,
throwing paper pterodactyls like lures
into crowds of clammy hands.
Vacant little girls gaze
into cases of glistening stones.
One father strikes a tragic pose,
a novelty pencil sharpener in one hand,
the other working at his scalp,
then darting to his wallet only to flip
like a helpless fin into the air
with the choice despair of parents
forced to cough for nibs of plastic
and baubles of rubber put in paper bags.
In the entrance way a girl in frills
swells like a bullfrog, screams,
and tears apart a doll.

Taxidermy

The moodlit corridors
of the stuffed fish and reptile wing
are full of leathery gulpers
gazing snaggletoothed through glass,
bulbous eyed, slack jawed,
cameras slung around their necks
like purses of shark eggs.

A bald man stares at a tortoise.
A fey father at a seahorse.
A meathead in a vest
scratches at his groin,
nodding respectfully at a swordfish.
A cast-iron grandma with leashed kids
at her ropey heels eyeballs
the glassy eyeballs of a crocodile.

In the distance, Spanish tourists
skitter past cases of hummingbirds.
The guard by the bears scowls.
The lights of the corridor flicker
as a one man mountain
lumbers from the hall of whales.

Feed Me With Love

The doors of the factory
snap open like a mouth,
chewed up cardboard boxes
crumbling out into a drain,
curling like a soothsayer's guts
into wet brown shapes.
The wind brings down walls
with the crack of a studded belt.
The wrecks have voices
and lift into the looming clouds
as bubbles of brick.

Glass bulbs of streetlights, shaking,
fall like bright cocoons
and let their electric ghosts go
screaming into the afterlight.
Behind black shut eyes,
shapes still march brightly
with a creeping song,
popping in ears,
and spilling on the tongue.
Writing appears in fire at the curb.

Suddenly, WB Yeats appears
in the body of a bird.
The moon prangs at a weathervane
losing height,
spins into a whirlwind of light
and rockets down his throat.
He retches a calendar of signs
which spread like music
across the night.

An angel smokes beneath a fountain,
ears pricking
at artists screaming like candles,
writers gnawing their shins,
rats dancing in piss,
the lawns of countries
blossoming into the ground,
the insane rising up with bile
and burning tongues
to massacre the court.

The corpse of love,
collapsed across a bench
and soaked in beer,
coughs and splutters
and is born again.

Betsey Trotwood

Betsey Trotwood on Farringdon Road
with its dark green walls and wood
like an out of use Masonic lodge.
There are chandeliers blooming
like bromeliads hung with pearls,
a stag's head with an eyepatch,
a fifties standard lamp, setting sun,
bronze bust of Edith Cavell maybe,
and a painting of Elizabeth Hurley.
The brown ale pumps bulge, tall
and shining like chess pieces.
On the counter, tin buckets of bottles
of ketchup, vinegar, Lea and Perrins,
behind bottles of pale ales and gin
glint like grapes. The board is scribed
over with French Reds badly spelt
in white chalk. The tables are pale,
grey like dust jackets of old books.
In here there's an orange haze,
like the air is blushing from a shot,
the walls lean making a bower
and all around chairs curl up,
creaking like choir children
shuffling hushed into a pew.

The pictures in the windows
of ambulances, traffic lights,
space to let, cones and brick,
alarms and engine roars
stretched into the falling afternoon
seem thin, and sad, and blue.

The Checkout

The mothers pass packets
and bags like shed skin,
boxes and foil, wraps
of roll, toilet, domestic
tools and chews and toys.
Babies hang from them
like big blue fruit.
The tills beep up and down
with a soft computer song,
when the rustle and whirr
falls to a lull, yawns
mouth out of the cashiers.
Among the mother bundles,
big men in big coats
buy beef and beer, thumbs
push roughly in and out
of leather wallets, hands
inside of leather jackets.
Hairlines and firm expressions
like giant felt puppets.
More women now, older
singles with beehives
and grey houndstooth bonnets,
cartons of milk and olives
they love with their eyes
like promises. At the rear,
the grizzled fen potato
with a beard like a lizard
and soily, rutted skin,
chewing on a parsnip.
One cashier knocks off
and leaves the scene,
shuts the register
with a slam.

There Are No Demons

As the farmer comes in
the sun burns into the copse,
yolk broken over trees
dribbling light on the soil.
A bruised bunch of poppies
blush inside his fist,
he keeps them to his chest
like a dead love or a child.
In the darkening yard
the stink of hay and shit.
From the pasture
he hears the shaking
of his skin and bone horse.
In the house he wanders
for hours and hours,
looking at the walls, or into
the garden that lies dreaming
or down into the town.
He finds himself in the pantry
staring at an egg
cupped inside his hands.
Later, he wakes in bed,
covered in sweat, laughing.
The moon bulges badly
into his bedroom,
the throbbing is there again,
behind the eyes.
He hears moans rising
from the yard, rushes down
the stairs naked with poppies
flying from his fingers,
to the cattleshed.
The cows are black with blood,
reek of metal and screaming
in their eyes. He reaches out
until his hand and hide,
trembling, meet.
The dogs, he says, the dogs.

The Entombment

Christ hangs dead and limp
between the silken arms
of Babylon's best whores,
toneless like a dusty olive.
He's green, a ghost of oils,
no ochre in his pores,
among the dancing silk,
the bursted gates of beards,
he swings silently on worlds.
At his feet a girl has fallen
with an arm of canvas
Michaelangelo forgot to paint.
The ground is brown and rises
in a tide, grey and nothing.
Golgotha falls in patches
from the blue punched through
heaven, to there below
his broken, floating toes.