City nest

Birds line nests with cigarette butts to repel pests

The Telegraph, 5 December 2012

There’s a bird in the Aussie bush

builds bowers out of bottle tops.

At my crash-pad in London I employ

scented candles to mask the stench

of fresh emulsion, halogen magic

to enshadow the whitened walls, and prise

the crown from an ice-cold Foster's

to flush away the tastes of the city.

A blackbird hops along my window ledge

toting a bloodied syringe in its bill

drawn I suppose to its glinting steel

or the ripe red berry sealed in the vial.

I watch my blackbird spirit away

its prize into the foliate reaches

of the plane tree opposite my balcony

when suddenly the penny drops

that the twisted butts of spliffs

and burnt foils scattered under the tree

aren’t after all the aftermath of kids

but fall-out from construction overhead.

From my window I can’t see

through the canopy of palmate leaves

what jamboree of bric-a-brac

the blackbird has found its project needs

so my thirst for the story’s reveal

impels me to the littered foot of the tree

where on the cracked and swollen flags

lie several empty condom packs

the fruits of whose deflowered seeds

aren’t hung nearby, so I construe

those sheaths weren’t hatched in situ

and my bird is building a thatch

up there of a most unnatural nature.

Still those infernal vernal leaves

conceal from me the blackbird’s folly,

the lure to my itching curiosity

stubbornly still beyond my reach.

And a London plane is not a tree

that’s easily scaled, so I run to retrieve

my three-in-one extendable ladder

and rest its staves on the lowest bough.

I clamber up into the plane

whose wooden heart hammers a metre

too slow and subtle for us to hear

and sap-like I’m drawn by capillary action

into the void of its cavernous sphere

where daylight, shattered, lies scattered

in coruscating geometries that come

and vanish again before they’re seen,

a universe cloaked in constellations

blinking in and then out of being.

And from the still axis of this turmoil sings

the blackbird, its nest like a mirrorball

laced with tinsel and shreds of sequined

smalls, held together with earrings

and paper clips, ring pulls and nappy pins,

lined with tampons and cigarette ends.

Adapting to the spectrum shift

my eyes are drawn to a gap in the leaves

through which can be glimpsed now and again

a flickering tableau like a TV screen.

How otherworldly from here it seems

with its halogen lights and candle flames

casting shadows on the lonely walls

and forming stars in the amber bottles

collecting on the windowsill.

(c) 2012 Slush Poet