Drift

There is a body lying
on Waterloo Bridge, tucked in tight
to the wall as though blown like the dead

leaves tossed into drifts
by a wind as unfeeling as unfelt,
covered only by a dog-stained sheet.

I would stop if it weren’t too late,
lift the sheet if it weren’t so dark,
touch his cheek if it weren't so cold;

but it’s late, it’s dark, it’s cold,
I pay my taxes,
my conscience should be clear.

(c) 2013 Slush Poet

Owed to a discarded urn

One cruel night a white urn stood outside

the Wellington in the Strand, that boot on the foot

of Theatreland whose tide of patrony

goes out nightly on its raft of yearning

returning with punctured hopes, deflated,

to sink into bitter beside a cordial fire.

The tide goes out and there the urn stood

stoppered with sand with ashes on top

and below that, surely no one we’ve heard of,

remains of none whose name ever burned

in pearl-strung lights or neon, or even

played a full season, for the very next evening

it was gone, appearing for one night only.

(c) 2013 Slush Poet

Mass evacuation

Homeless families expelled from London by councils

The Guardian, 5 November 2012

We had been at war so long
we often forgot we were at war,
looking to TiVo to keep us safe
by serving up only palatable news.
Our world was an agreeable place
to raise children, browse the stores,
catch the vital episodes
of our favourite TV soaps.
We welcomed the blacks, the Irish,
the Poles, but then came oligarchs
fleeing their own revolutions
exporting our soil. War children
once again left London by rail
this time labelled ‘do not return’.

(c) 2012 Slush Poet

A church of cards

No faith, hope or charity: church status in jeopardy

The Sunday Times, 4 November 2012

The church’s season fast approaches,

doves ascending into the night sky

up above the buses betoken the start

of this year’s festive sales, electric stars

light pilgrims’ ways from west to east—

the long trough of Oxford Street.

To the greater glory of lesser Gods

incense and gold are traded for souls,

or for the want thereof. Hark! angels

sing from doorways to the ringing of tills.

(c) 2012 Slush Poet

Leaving through the looking glass

Mankind prepares to voyage across the final frontier

The Telegraph, 9 September 2012

Nothing expands a young man’s horizons

like travel. My parents left me standing

on a market square in Cambridgeshire

with a sky that sat on an earth so flat

it looked upturned, convex, and my mother’s

vexed smile speeding towards the receding

horizon, though smaller hour by hour,

even now refuses to fade fully away.

And today, arriving in London is something

the best kept village in Cheshire could never

prepare my daughter for. Everything lies

in reach, not like her teachers taught her.

Looking back, she’s someone now

who, when the lights change, disappears.

(c) 2012 Slush Poet

Flat Earth Society

Cameron in new assault on green belt

The Daily Telegraph, 2 September 2012

Wirral was once the hundred of Willaston,
Willaston, now marooned in the Wirral
hemmed in by the Mersey and Dee
lapped at its shores by paddock and roost
the M53 seeming to moan through the cedars
modernity caring only to break
for tea and a cake as it hustles on through,
nostalgic for the twenty-first century.

In 1850 Battersea Fields, a wilderness
where gentlemen with more adventurous
ladies strolled the Thames’s reach,
couldn’t foresee the city’s westward creep,
the fences went up, but to keep the city
at bay or the wilderness, who can say?

(c) 2102 Slush Poet

Homebird (No 6 of ¡Las Canciones Bravas!)

Thousands head for home as London 2012 signs off in spectacular fashion,

METRO, 13 August 2012

London survived the Games
the only casualty the cynic pained
to find no flaw to aggravate
into an ugly sore.

For the first time in my lifetime
of Spanish holidays I have yearned
to return to dour English streets,
a Londoner by choice.

(c) 2012 Slush Poet

Dustbowl snake

Crisis looms as extreme weather hits crops

The Guardian, 23 July 2012

The viper winds down Victoria Street

its colours fluorescing in the sudden sun.

One man waits it out on a roadside wall;

ice cream trickles over his fist and drips

onto his flip-flops, he stares beyond the day.

Curses fly as immigrants rise up wielding

squeegees like machetes, and there but for

two-for-ones in Tesco’s... It’s only waiting

keeps us anchored. At the serpent’s head,

biodiesel drips like rain onto cracked soil.

(c) 2012 Slush Poet

The greatest spectacle on earth

Lack of exercise is as bad for you as smoking

Mail Online, 18 July 2012

A circus is coming, and over London
hangs a feature bereft tarpaulin,
grey as the skin of a child fleeing
the rubble of her flattened home.
Tears run down my window pane.
It is six weeks since the last full moon.

Confined, we are obliged to live
under the weather, and while we wait
for a forecast of more of the same to come
the evening TV news lambasts us
for sitting and watching what they put on.
The dog wants its blanket back.

It’s tempting to exercise just to get warm.
Nothing extreme, mind, possibly running
a bath. Or taking a hike to the fridge.
The wife says the lawn needs mowing.
I tell her I’d need a submarine. She says
fetch the damn mower, I’ll plug it in.


(c) 2012 Slush Poet

Tumbleweed

Olympic travel chaos as M4 reopening delayed

The Telegraph, 11 July 2012

I was drawn to a stillness

like Christmas in the snow at dawn

and held in thrall by the sight

of wild daisies sprouting

from a crack in the elevated stretch

of the M4 from Heathrow.

Spectators crowded round

to gawp like the dead reborn

in a spontaneous communion

of awed disbelief.

We expected bedlam.

We expected to be over-run.

We expected to be crowded

off our own streets

and out of our homes.

We have conscripted an army.

We have posted lookouts

and placed machine gun pods

on the rooftops of schools

and old people’s homes.

We demanded gas masks,

the council gave us phrase books.

We look up and find no words

for what we see, for henge,

for relic, for tumbleweed.

(c) Slush Poet

The Mystery of Mortuary Mews

Woman jailed for using six-year-old girl to burgle

The Independent, 24 January 2012

The tidal Thames breathed a bitter mist

hiding all but the gas-light glow of mock

Victorian street lamps along Mortuary Mews

that January watch.  

A disassembled scream oozed through the fog;

denied by sealed sash-box windows, fended

off by Chubb-locked doors, its prying fingers,

ice-cold to the touch,

left breathy prints on glass and lightly gouged

the windowsills of every floor, and was gone.

No one saw these signs nor read their gravely

coded message till

the night outside began to throb with a blue

light the curtains let right in, and being

wary, occupants edged back curtains, the bleak

street scene to reveal.

Now TV and radio sets were muted, CD

players put on hold, and from every slit

of light at every darkened Georgian sash

prying eyes gawped.

Even then the icy scratches went

unnoticed, only to baffle the residents when

Inspector Carter pointed out the way

the very glass had warped.

(c) 2012 Slush Poet

Olympian rents

Hotel prices soar by 300% for Games

The Sunday Times, 15 January 2012

Dust off Vaughn Williams,

Handel, Elgar and Holst;

what need for a German

Ode to Joy, we grow our own;

it’s the Dunkirk spirit,

don’t you know?

Over meadowed hilltop

sways the circus caravan;

gypsies spill from tenements

like pig tripe from a bucket

lured to a pied piping melody:

easy money! easy money!

Mrs Dodd has let her

beechwood garden chalet

to the Samoan relay squad;

the Council says it’s a shed,

but with the tools removed

who are they to say?

Liam and Amy set

a wedding date

several years ago.

They’d have hoped by now

to save and squander the price

of a wedding breakfast,

but there is no room

at any inn. They’ll keep their cash

and marry in Vegas:

a Parisian paid in advance

a white wedding sum for a week

in their Council flat.

Doctor Downs put in

for thirty thousand pounds

of prime Olympiad.

How galling must it be

for his family to receive

but one tenth their need?

The prayers of Reverend Meek

must have raised a smile

up there. Tickets drip-dripped

through the leaky church roof

for the opening, the closing

and all in between.

He could rightly sit

beside the Parisian, watch

Samoa steel to victory

in the crucible of truth.

Or sell the tickets on e-bay

for black market lead.

(c) 2012 Slush Poet

Gloriana

Gilded Barge to be Given to The Queen for Her Diamond Jubilee

London Evening Standard, 12 January 2012

Lord Sterling, who knows how to float

(so rare a knowledge, both bold and

quintessentially cut of an olden

courtly jib) his monarch's boat,

contrives to consort the Jubilant Diamond,

upon a rowbarge hewn from wealden

chestnut greenwood graced with golden

leaf, in Tudor flourish to Richmond.

Lord Redgrave, viz Olympian Sir Steve

to erstwhile peer and liege, shall weild an

oar of forty-four and row the dhow down-

stream this June the third, the river

pinking at the passage of Old Bess

on so sycophantic a pageant of excess.


(c) 2012 Slush Poet

Scraping not the sky, but by

Worst areas for child poverty are in London

The Independent, 10 January 2012

Your eldest brother, whom you'll know

by the dried scent of my tears, awaits

you on the distant bank, my fleeting child;

beyond the towers of Barclay blue

and Citi red, a kindlier place

than those you've known, where floors and walls aren't cold

and damp, where supper costs a smile;

so sweetly sleep and in your dreams

around you fold my lullaby, and warm

fresh tears I'll shed upon that veil

that he who waits beyond the Thames

shall know you for his kin as you shall him.

The rain has stopped, I've heard that frost

is coming to this shadow land;

where no sun lights the grassy cracks no March

could come too soon; we'll feel full force

this Winter's spleen before respite's at hand.

Remember us, oh fleeting child, the wretched

who must hourly bear your loss;

there’s nothing spare to keep the fire

alight, nor sate the bailiff’s avarice;

he’ll have the bed from under us

and repossess these rags we wear;

for bread and wine we’ll take the Eucharist.


(c) 2012 Slush Poet