The View From the Tourists Garrisoned on Tower Bridge

Tower Bridge, 01/04/2024

1.)

I know the reason you turn heads so
the confident stride, the glowing grin
striding down Tower Bridge, apprising the soldiers, their mouths agape 
on the overcast day, with a lingering chill on the breeze
and I wonder what they’re going for
their goals, plans, their lords and honour?
I wander but still I’m here
am I someone’s type?
If I walk beside someone would they have the surety 
of their gaze that we have arrived? 

2.)

Marylebone, receding from coat tails 
A couple, one with suitcase to hand 
Lips pressed to the other, time dilated 
just enough for them to enjoy the moment before the train

Would I ever be loved so much that I would be 
missed if I went on my way? 

Have I ever loved someone like that? 

Never loved, never will! 
Never known, never healed! 

My eyes fixed fast to the horizon, legs hunting and knowing
The only time I’ll fall is down 
And if I fall … Might as well do a flip! 
Promises, portent 
laughter, scorn
toying with the sharp edge of my thoughts
pricking myself into melancholy 
on the long journey home 
back to a place that is no place 

As the miles pile on gravel past the shoulders
As the fatigue gallops along 
As the night quickens just ahead of your heartbeat 
And the sun breaks your back. 

2023

Where has the year gone?
I have no record of it
autumn has already sloughed off
the sweat of your shirt

It’s dark as your mood
where no light can reach
trees buckle from some unknown weight, soundless
rain lashes cheeks bloody

Time is the outlier
formless or faint
like your face these days
ineffable

Next Time

After Laura Marling

Remember the days when I
said I could fit all of England inside a can?
It was a blessing even with your whispered no.
Oh! And you remember how a hug could stretch it longer
without losing quality, something to hold close?
I’m startled by my
self recognition; it must explain the wildness in my eyes,
at the grains jammed in lines on my cheeks while
seasons pass in seconds and the
decades seem to have slipped off the world
as the air metastasizes all around.
Everything hides from me.
Time dies.

Untitled

The sky must be covered in nodules to weep so much.
If it has eczema it must understand
that to have skin is to suffer
“Do you hate the rain falling onto overflowing gutters,
unfilled potholes?
You said the only thing you learnt in school was to hate.”

“You can’t blame the rain for itself,
it’s doing what it’s supposed to,”
is not helpful.
I’m trying emollients like new clothes
I don’t want people to see.
This itch should not be necessary.

“Try not to cover your impression of the rain.
A memory glares at me as I pull back the curtain,
a housemate gawking at the infection
cordyceps, he gasps
with real fear.
Others shrink back at the redness.
This skin grins at the reactions but I don’t want it
to rule me—
I remember when I scratched so much it bled.

This skin, this skin
this
fucking
rain
won’t let up.
“The river’s banks must be burst because of it.”

In the Valley of Lost Kings

When the hammer met the sandstone,
and ice made the mountains kneel
you shifted plate and spoon
to break your fast on small excesses.

I sat on the hill to rest my thoughts against the paints of the
valleys hollowed by your feet, reflected on the
unthreaded tributaries and
billowed red clay, heavy as a burden.

Back then, time was sawn, planed, dove-tailed around your eyes,
back then, rain and rills smoothed and bevelled
the horizon’s shoulders, now levelled
to look at and despair.

We were the kings holding up punished masses of broken earth,
panels of rock dusted and dated and
held together by a curled fist
around your cup.

And I didn’t know whether I was mortar or tern
and still, the current of the page had
yellowed and grinned, flooded with silt
from the riverbed, raked with rusted anchors,
below indifferent waves.

Despite our efforts, to lay and smooth and soften
from all that we had done,
hurt will show when it is time,
I say, I see, I dream;
sometimes I think telling is the right thing to do.

The dawn is deeper than we know but
we haven’t walked the valleys in years
now the land tilts like a javelin:
A fine, dry red north-eastern point
towards the sun now sloped into night.

Birmingham Poetry Project

So if you want to know what this project is, you should read this first.

Contents

Part 1: The City of a Thousand Trades

Prologue: Home Is In A Hall of Memory

1.) Forward! To The City of a Thousand Trades, and, A City of Colour

2.) The Brotherhood’s Teachings in Four Parts

3.) 16

4.) Big City Plan

5.) William Caxton Fan Club

6.) Meditations on a Modern Person, or, the Many Masks of a Mortal

7.) Yet Another Derivation of Ozymandias (1st sonnet)

Interlude: Hollow City

Part 2: The Imperial Dream

8.) Grand Central

9.) Old Joe

10.) No Title

11.) Lignum Vitae

12.) B43

13.) In The Shadow of the Colossus

14.) A Weary Wave, Live From the Central Throne (2nd sonnet)

Interlude 2: The View When Waking

Part 3: Two Kings

15.) The Magpie & The Condor

16.) The Condor

Final Interlude: Strange Fruit

17.) The Magpie (A Eulogy)

18. ) Two Kings (A Reflection)

19.) Kings of the Deep (Final sonnet)

Epilogue: Your Smile Is Like A Sunset: Beautiful But Different Every Time, So Let Go Of Feelings Of Ugliness and Inadequacy and Feel The Freedom to Move Forward, or, Look at the Sunset With Me!

Your Smile Is Like A Sunset: Beautiful But Different Every Time, So Let Go Of Feelings Of Ugliness and Inadequacy and Feel The Freedom to Move Forward, or, Look at the Sunset With Me!

Previous

Kings of the Deep – A Sonnet

Previous poem

The sky was bruised because of winter’s kiss,
hid lives fitted for the depths of the sea:
A place where I am alone and in bliss
(it is only in death when I am freed.)

The wheel has turned from lessons of the sun
to face the summer in the throat of storms.
But there’s no chance against the winds now spun;
the tides claim what they will without reform.

Time was sawn, planed, dove-tailed around your eyes,
wing and feather dreamt of their final flight
above fields of the saltwater’s reprise.
(Living is to be eroded by spite):

“To steal treasure from the kings of the deep

all must linger in their gaze and then sleep.”

---

And that will do it! That’s the last poem of this project. Thanks for joining me and this weird thing.

Two Kings (A Reflection)

“Curzon”

Previous

8.)

The seabed is dappled with that celestial fang,
spat in the bowl for us to keep in
the land of quiet and curls, in league with its mirror above:
bottlenoses and orcas and basking sharks
soar and glide with the current.

My brother of the seas lies across from me, waiting
the reef and shelf are his cloak and hood,
the stony smile at last affixes his lips,
that subtle self-satisfaction of things to come.
The waters are the axe,
but he is the handle.

The birds don’t know yet of sailing in the sunken sky.
It is the spine, the atlas.
We dare not question it lest it strain, as
stress builds on faults that have followed us here,
refracted through the waves.
But now all is at peace here. All know our name.
Look. See.

9.)
Focus. Deep within the earth.
I always remember that I forget.
A wheel rusted over by seabed
ripples in the world and our song betray
our tiny whims begin to break.
Eyes dart for a master, settle on the aqualung,
for succour.

Even fevered it darkens,
grace and forgiveness still within the broken holds
all anchors for the tolls
for even the needle that pierces the voids
laments their fallen charms and barks.
The storm of courage soon calms.
Its throat widens above
plunging us into blessed, blotted oblivion.

10.)
“Look, ye mighty,
and despair!”

Next poem

The Magpie

Previous poem

5.)

And we’ll go into the arms of Nu
bend the branches of the day.

Past the cemetery and the songs that decayed:
take on twisted shapes.

Star-bitten cape.
Westward rise above slung rocks.

Dawn deepening among the feathers of the flock.
Puffed up chicks, collecting every word

Elysium, emerald plain, how absurd.
What’s the sky without you?

6.)

Star-bitten cape.
Dawn deepening among the emerald plain, how absurd.

Elysium, rise above slung rocks.
Westward into the arms of Nu.

Past the cemetery the feathers of the flock
Take on twisted shapes.

The branches of the day,
Puffed up chicks and the songs that decayed:

bend, collecting every word.
And we’ll go, “What’s the sky without you?”

7.)

What’s the sky without you?
Elysium, emerald plain, how absurd.

Puffed up chicks, collecting every word
dawn deepening among the feathers of the flock.

Westward rise above slung rocks.
Star-bitten cape

take on twisted shapes.
Past the cemetery and the songs that decayed:

bend the branches of the day.
And we’ll go into the arms of Nu.

Next poem