(Photo by Joel Hughes)
Heavy cloud at shoulder height,
Dirt-dense rain riddles dry earth,
And indeterminate insects
Are thrown up in frazzled swarms;
Light is finger-fouled perspex
Refracted thinly through dark milk.
House of Heat
(Photo by Joel Hughes)
Set’s off though TV still bristles,
An afterglow of talkshow shapes
Stalk about the rubbed-out room;
Heat-nailed to synthetic textures,
Things like fleas and ants stop sleep,
Scratch, sweat, itch, and marinate;
A ventilator hums unseen,
The ring-road’s faint, repressed roar,
Lion-tamed by concrete collars,
Closer cars send telescopic sound,
Along subdued, cat-combed streets;
Above us unheard tubes of talk,
Criss-crossing conversations,
Curving through satellite signals;
A small child coughs, a dog yelps
Then this failing silence resumes.
Pissing over sandcastles
(Photo by Joel Hughes)
Pissing over sandcastles,
Frangible turrets tumble,
Grain-framed battlements dissolve,
A toddler-pitched flag topples,
The chateau slides into sludge.
Sea’d have done it anyway,
Liquid-levelled the edifice,
But pre-empting eternity
Is oven-ready recompense.
Grip
(Photo by Joel Hughes)
The worm rotating in the skull,
Always angling for an opening,
Sometimes subdued, yet alive still;
It can grip the brain claspingly,
Squeeze out extraneous ideas,
And anaconda along the nerves,
Tightened like straining strings;
Finger-fangled orders enacted,
And then back to deadened feeling
Spengler’s bootboys
(Photo by Joel Hughes)
We can’t be thicker than we used to be,
We’ve developed robots that walk like dogs,
Magicked foodstuffs out of chemistry,
Internet’s made a mind bigger than God’s,
And yet why do I sigh and feel rotten
At that dickless piece of shit in trainers,
Hands rammed down front of tracksuit bottoms,
Swearing at any passing stranger?
Milky spit jets out of his cheerless chops,
Sticks to the window of the Oxfam shop.
Clone town
(Photo by Joel Hughes)
The old-time hardware shop with its mynrh bird,
Who skulked mutely in a cage out the back,
Razed to make way for an under-used carpark;
The mahogany shelves chucked in a skip,
Along with all the other intricate things
That were needed to keep the store going.
The family butcher’s boarded up ,
The counter’s marbled slab dust-darkened,
Those hanging hooks mourn lost lengths of meat.
The barber’s shop let out to “Sue Ryder”,
Forgotten that happy hive of Woolworth’s
With its uniformed battalion of staff;
There’s a Wetherspoon’s someplace down there
Where silent drinkers avoid each other’s looks,
And flick forlornly through kitchen brochures.
They’ve opened up an out-of-town Tesco’s,
No point now strolling these out-of-date streets
In which boredom stands like thickening heat.
Revenue streams
(Photo by Joel Hughes)
Everything untangled into money;
Bracken-veiled locksides as prinked piazzas
Poured out of business-plan jelly moulds;
Broken-down factories as luxury flats
Where shareholders dream of a third swimming pool;
Time-mangled millhouses as office blocks
With furlongs of glass and manicured lawns;
Corroded cinemas into art centres
For some self-fellating connoisseurs;
Overgrown meadow-land as golf courses
On which fat-arsed entrepreneurs pose.
Everything untangled into money.
A plastic sickness
(Photo by Joel Hughes)
A plastic sickness seeps into all things,
Through every window the same logos,
Primary-coloured, evil-eyed totems.
Shops selling identical items,
In Calcutta, Cairo, or Coventry;
Big Macs, hi-tech junk, and throwaway clothes.
And all the old inns have been tinkered with;
The Pheasant’s now a corporate gastropub,
Decked out with props from a central warehouse,
Serving defrosted, mass-made lasagne,
And nitro-keg lagers from distant countries;
Others are listed in portfolios,
High-yield, ideal urban property.
Identities have been ironed out,
The local details bleached to blandness.
Yet everybody craves community,
And they build links in cyberspace,
But still we need an idea of place.
Gush
(Photo by Joel Hughes)
And out it gushes greedily,
Protean, the water bursts forth;
Angular eel, buckling boa,
An uncontrollable reptile
Uncoils itself out of the hose;
It hits my hand and splits spangling,
Clusters of sun-sharpened jewels
Strewn along the parched concrete;
Fingers fleetingly frame it:
The liquid is uncageable.
Only a brief dampness abides,
The skin resumes aridity.
Days are this streaking, fluid snake
Wrestling out of our dry reach.
Flat-packed
(Photo by Joel Hughes)
As smooth as spilt milk on a tiled floor,
Spreads all the sameness of succeeding days,
Planed down to a knot-free uniformity,
A spirit-level established expanse;
Layers merged into a single surface
That reflects exactly the blank-eyed skies.
And yet a desire for depth persists,
An itch to attain perspective,
Disordering all this silk wilderness;
A hammer tap at head-high glass,
That then cracks in angled anarchy,
Jagged arachnids attack the flatness.
