Tag Archives: poetry

REVERSE GEAR TO THINK

REVERSE GEAR TO THINK

road is tar
and economy

hole and
ideology

Someones everywhere
trying to follow
their roads
to their very end

and everything might be
cul-de-sac ultimately
(straat
    loop dood in a
slightly more germanic taal)

hopefully you have the grace
not to mind my language

even as rubber
and aphsalt
chew
    up each other

pedal to the metal and
concrete to the petal

me stuck in traffic can
safely presume I am
measurably not alone
in not
   loving it

not noticing that the lights
had changed

anxious, Slavoj,
for the lights to change
someone
    sitting with a sitar
at the back
of my head

reverse gear to think
this is a raga that will
colour the clouds
thus
colour
     the
       rain

ASHTON

ASHTON

the track
curves like a scimitar

I remember
being in a park in
Ashton on the red
steel roundabout

overreacher
    and fell

that roundabout went
on revolvng, spinning forever

that red roundabout
or maybe it was green

and talking of green
I waa distracted thereafter
by what
had happened to
the countryside

wondering where
it had gotten to
and so
forgot my poem
on the train

that train winding its way
forwards to the millennium
ot
  backwards in time

through toytown stations
where they loaded
real soldiers

some soon
       stacked to be buried
piled up in ossuaries

others, as is the nature
of war, simply evaporated,
officially disappeared

and my poem out there
with other poems lost
or forgotten
     poems out there too,
be it
recalled recounting
the horrors of war

but train
is at the terminus, no
more huff-puffing, or
smooth
      electric or
even diesel

the countryside chaning,
the poems
    No longer speaking the truth
they could not escape doing

this picture fading
all
   those lines
yet unwritten, all those tracks
going somewhere
          having nowhere left to br
   





JOHN

JOHN

Ah, John,
the smoke got you

did what German steel
and flame
could not do

I saw you with
my big little eyes
down in your cellar worship
a year or
so
before you died

those same little big eyes
fastened on a Vickers
belt-fed machine gun
fastened high up
to that tall wall

what tale of fear and bravery
life or death it might
have been
able to tell me

if it could speak
    but you did not tell
me anything at all

whilst you found
wheels and plank and
purple paint for my push cart

coughing worryingly
as you worked:
such a together, purposive,
engineering man
       given his
mission requirements by
his youngest
daughter’s eldest son

my single real
abidng memory