Monday, October 31, 2016

The Bifurcation

Near to the Hampshire border and beyond the bifurcation
Are narratives of given names with virtue's connotation
Or championing the status to which parents might aspire;
Charity and Christian, oddly wistful for the empire,
Call their daughter India, India of revanche.
And as Pankridge Street in Hampshire links to heedless roads that branch
Off to Surrey, they will straddle obligations to their names
And self-interest.

Saturday, October 15, 2016

Addressing Abstracts on National Poetry Day

Day dreamt up to rub it in,

Poets worth their curing salt—
Unprecedented wars thin
Your relevance. Stoppered vault—

Are these present wars too foul,
That McGough's wordplays displace
A seer's lines on the boy's bowel,
Ruined as the bombs efface
Aleppo? Tending to use
Pomegranates when she weaned,
With a sweetness to infuse
Till munitions supervened,
His mother had held him nearest her,
Her heart’s continuity
Assuring his viscera,
And then turned, that his ear be
Less orbital of her breast,
And yet equable virtues convened
As if it remained there, pressed,
Till munitions supervened.

Wednesday, October 05, 2016

Mediating the Human Flesh Engine

Approaching the stationary tractor I can see through the back window and windscreen someone walking away from it:
The subaltern, Helen, whose tact is mortified to countervail chagrin in the artist who was turned a tell tale tit
When he made her message public. Amanuensis of the charity she works for, and thus, like me, a conduit,
Helen had declined the offer of a limited edition print for auction, but stated, whilst they could not commit,
That an original would be considered. Helen, I write my poems under the authority of a spirit,
I am dissociated, as you are, and the vigilantes who chasten you echo those people who discomfit
Me. I watch you through the aligned windows of a tractor, heading away, through the heliotrope and hydropic grit;
And I too have been denigrated, Helen, having asked for too much on behalf of a spirit for whom I transmit.