I hear the heel-clicks from my window
as she rushes past to work,
grabbing bites of buttered toast,
drawing hard on a cigarette
trying to catch up with herself
in time to start another day.
Wrestling with a tangle of wire,
she’s desperate for a music fix
to insulate her from the morning.
The headphones refuse to co-operate –
unwilling to find an accommodation
with her hair’s Medusa writhings –
stragglers from a frenzied night.
And so, she stops to don her daytime mantle,
taming the image for office-hours –
hair swept backwards from her forehead
bunched together at the nape
pinning down those strands of passion
keeping them firmly in their place.
The only tiny giveaway
an impish scarlet love tattoo
that peeks above her polo-neck
with every bouncing stride she takes.
Birthday Boy
Each day,
as one-by-one we came on shift,
he would be standing, back-to-the-wall,
framed by the outline he had worn
into the dull Victorian varnish.
Pointing at us -
to say he was looking
would be to overstate his involvement -
expressionless, and with a certain
rigor mortis.
There was a diagnosis hidden somewhere,
gathering dust in a filing-rack,
that deemed the level of his functioning
to be - merely superficial.
But you knew if one day he was looser -
more nearly focused, arching forward,
that this was somehow something different.
He had been waiting - keeping a hold
upon our names and dates of birth -
the answer to the only questions
he ever asked of anyone -
rehearsing for the chance to show us
just how much he could contain.
Slowly, he would voice the words:
day and month and sign of the Zodiac
delivered with a knowing smile.
It was one of his very few
connections with the world
of people.
He wished you Many Happy Returns,
and you and he knew
that another year would pass
before this precious interaction
would come round again,
to bring him back,
however briefly,
to a place in life.
Sea Nymph
As we explored the low-tide pools
collecting bait of crab and mussel,
there she was upon the rock -
a schoolmate, but so very different
standing at the furthest point -
the most detached that she could get
from the influence of land.
The slightest of figures - skin so pale -
a tumble of dark brown salt-teased hair
that she hugged close like a shawl,
billows of blue gypsy skirt
trailing on the slippery wrack.
Her voice would come and go like mist
as she pleaded for the waves
to take her.
We were still at that awkward age
where pointing and giggling
covered embarrassment.
When next we saw her in the classroom,
sat so still - and just as distant
a tousled tress defying comb -
that same expression in her eyes
said all she had to say to us:
’This is not where I belong.’
Wasted On The Girl
She wondered - had I ever thought
of setting the poem to music?
So sweetly put, and yet without
the slightest hint of irony.
What would that add - or take away?
I wondered in return.
Did it come on a bit too strong -
perhaps it needed a dash of song
to dilute the essences -
maybe a few bent notes in there -
a push or a slap to the strings to give it
a little more pace, or variety?
Was she deaf to its resonances -
or was it just that she found it hard
to listen to their echoes
un-distracted
without a reassuring scarf of sound
to wrap snugly round her feelings -
something to keep them
muffled in?
Watching The Fish
I am standing,
elbows propped upon the sea-wall,
scanning with binoculars
for pauses in the emptiness
of a grey
The little girl shouts to her Mum:
'Look! - Look at the man
watching the fish!'
Suddenly I’m yearning
for more open ways of logic -
ones that would encompass
such possibilities.
I wonder, is she young enough
to have retained the vision
of a wider world?
Can she really see them there?
Is her imaginary friend
an Atlantic Salmon,
perhaps,
a giant conger-eel, a dolphin
sliding on through?
Creatures of a deep
we haven’t yet filled in for her
with rubbish
about common sense,
and the way things really are.
