Why there are no British Road Movies

We have no highways
ripped across the desert to take for metaphor,
no giant arrows pointed at infinity,
roads long enough for rock anthems,
or huge signs saying starkly WEST.

There is nothing bold in our motoring.
While you hitch across inner space,
dust clouds giving shape to your longings,
we tow caravans to the same known spots,
where lights of the amenities out-twinkle the heavens.

Incendiary

I was just setting the mechanism,
positioning the sprung levers,
delicate as humming bird bones,
when the merest shiver in concentration
became my undoing.

The word just
went off in my hands.

I, who knows so well the ordinance of vocabulary,
the whiff of saltpetre
which lingers on each syllable,
blackens the lustre of each verb.

I have no tools for remaking
what has been lost, only words:
dumb footsoldiers
in my own internal conflict.

In the Temple of Onan

To find myself abruptly private
amidst the postures of the shop-window workday,
to be suddenly, headily alone,
the door locked in my favour
while the world’s eye pries elsewhere,
what else is there to do
but contemplate my penis,
the best part of me,
giver of life to my children, pleasure to my woman,
ground zero to hedonism and history,
as ephemeral as orgasm, timeless as a family tree,
what else is there to do
but worship at this totem,
until my prayer crescendos
into the porcelained cathedral,
and I must return, breathless,
triumphant, to live among the damned
with my blessed secret?

For I have conversed with pearlescent angels behind the temple veil.
I have touched eternity for an instant.

Last Rites

I’m on the sterile table,
on the street beneath a car,
in bed, convulsed,
or otherwise broken.
My flailing heart stutters, stops.

The stuff your brain does when it’s dying happens.

I see light: I see the things of light
fall like sparse snow towards me
from the lighted dome above.

They curl around me and whisper:
‘Don’t worry – there is no God, no heaven.
It’s over.
You can rest now.’

Secret g

I love you
the way danger and anger do not rhyme,
like the secret g in paradigm,
like the scar that marks loss with a cross.

I love you
like the spilled insides of a dead wren,
like a phantom pain in my lost pen,
like the now that always happened then.

I love you
like an ovum always loves the one
that burrows inside when the sex is done
to divide, divide, divide, become.

Gulls

The air is thick with rain.
Sea gulls squabble in earth coloured pools
on a land made blank by bulldozers.

“When you spy a gull you must pray
for the men at sea” my mother used to say.

These white marauders were heralds of the distant storms
which had driven them inland
to regroup on playing fields and village greens.
And so I would say a prayer,
and feel that I was ministering to
distant sailors abroad in the slingshot rain,
pitched into the valleys between house-high waves.

Later, I found that feral gulls had abandoned the coast
for the easy pickings on our rubbish dumps,
the ready-made bluffs on the highrise roofs.

I watch the dull birds scuttle
among the mud and rubble,
remembering a time when I believed in prayer.

Equilibrium

Buddhist initiates
are taught their holy calmness
by hurling fists of lotus blossom
at the thick monastery wall,
until they finally drop, weeping and exhausted,
a waft of orange muslin.

I fill the air between us with a crush of petals,
raging against your stonefaced coldness,
until pollen falls like snow
about your shoulders

and I collapse
onto a bed of broken sepals,
breaking my heart for all those shaven-headed boys.

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