After the devastation came recuperation.
New shoots had sprung with alacrity
enough to establish a presence
in that walled garden,
contained to a strip
barely big enough for date and citrus
to thrive.

The neighbour waited twenty one seasons,
and with each season saw
young shoots
replacing the old.
Imaging a future
where grass might escape the confines
of concrete and sea

neighbour chose to start the mower,
move beyond boundaries,
and mow and mow and mow.
It's been twenty three days now
and still blades whirr
day and night
each hour inducing fresh rubble

to deter shoots, new seeds, hope.
The neighbour will retreat soon,
beyond the wall,
being temporarily satiated
with reek and wreckage,
knowing a day shall arise to return
for the fruits of the land.

Folded into this numb-husk of unknowing,
undeveloped eyes, wrapped by distressed skin,
continue to peer, unseeing, accustomed
as they now are, to a feed of distant

Telegenically Dead. These short lives have been
socially shared and mocked,
as morgues overflow to floor;
impromptu fans recirculating mournings hot air.

There is little chance for grief on Day 13;
rage has to be spent like a brass cartridge
or slung stone, or drowned in red pools
mixed with the water of collective driblets.

Meanwhile a politician says something else.

Sky hallucinates
a momentary purple;
silhouetting crowns
of the Sycamores hitherto
melded in tenebrous night.

Low-slung sun of October
caught and embraced those gathered,
on steps, hemmed by fountain,
and Victorian revived Roman.

There are statues amongst the passers-by,
rooted by makeshift placards
fashioned from discarded cardboard
with chalk marked ironies.

Tank girl, hair part shaven and
dyed flame red, is slender and strong
holds, 'This is a sign' on the reverse,
in bold print, it read FRAGILE.

Having skipped through fresh bloomings of
Lesser Celandine, feet numb to their shiny hearts;

one-foot-spanned the wild River Beal,
the other missed, trailed, became sodden.

Green eyes scanned, surveyed the horizon, with its path
to Gallows hill, so with one foot cold he ascended;

Tarmac pounded his heart, as words,
from god-knows-where, flushed synapses.

Perhaps it was the discord of former chains
ratting in the bleakness, crimes of dependencies

crying for release that swept his attention on the wind,
or a lapse into timeless genetics, coursing naturally.

He died up there, left a ghost on a former gibbet,
then descended to the Beal's banks of Yellow Flag Iris.

June 2014

Rake-thin Humble hoes subsistence soil
Planting green-topped onion bulbs,
Camino divides the field forcing Humble's Husband

To till distantly, he works slower, and is of bulbous girth,
A red Reebok shirt adorns his back whilst she
Wears the hand-me-downs her grandmother had worn.

Their house is built of stone like bone,
Ground-sewn and dug fresh centuries before,
No siestas punctuate their endeavors.

Passing pilgrims groan under weight of sack -
Whilst Humble counts the years before her bones
Are interned in preparation to shelter future generations.

Looking out of the window;
a ribbon of duck-egg-blue sky,
fringed by the sun's late light,
is sandwiched by grey cumulus.

It frames Sycamore tree tops,
red tiled pyramids with their expectant aerials
pointing West, littering clean lines.

It is a mute view;
serried bins wait for the mornings collection,
cars sit dumb, curbed,
their daily commute completed.

Two starlings flit, silent,
and in the far distance a high contrail is picked out
in gold as a thread in blue silk.

For five years this view remains changeably the same;
unspoilt by the entropy of new perspectives.
This is the summer of un-broadcast malcontents,
pacified in Brazilian spectacle. Days simmer here and there.

Soap operas filter through,
made to massage the message
of consume and discard, of holidays and pistons.

And in the mornings, that never come,
we abandon the cars that cannot diverge
from work-honed routes,
taking to the air from Sycamores as Starlings.

June 2014