provost 88

as if through some forgotten fault
a rugged asbestos spire purports
unappointedly above its urban parapet:

this is the inauspicious bishopric
that deconsecrated your wing
and disarmed your prayer

internally, your landing gear regressed
and your wing-tips dimmed as gently
as the sundown of a pilot’s eye:

dreaming elevators being lately unexercised
with inevitable time the creeping ivy awakens
and the lichen clamours for quiescence

look – the provost 88

snow

we prodded amongst sudden ruins
carefully dismantled accidents
with safety-belt sentries that returned
without protest to their positions

these denying moments made silken webs
of spilled reveries and unmade windscreens
whose cold fragments crackled beneath our soles

red flags

and
all this emerald airbrushing,
popping
sunken little sandcastles.
here – and there…
these eighteen minor sieges, the
middling
sorts on manoeuvres.
ancient trees mustering
there,
sporting
seasonal tweed

and,

cordially,

standing aside.

technicolor oldies

look | read

look | read

look | read

telescopic

passengers seen and unseeing:
we count the passing mill towns

their spheres of ambered brick
in damp abacus streets

then darkness itself replies
multiplying our emptiness

but for the lonely cab-glow
of the southbound trucks

searching for the next
pale imitation of stars

leaving lancaster

the bay lies west
amniotic, adoptive

her contours rise, lining
mossy basket walls in the east

and we are cradled
with our backs facing forward

elevated and headlong
like fleeting parents

in the shredded muslin
of our own imaginations

beckoning
from the frosted fells

weeds

becoming the stubble
upon your dead face
and we evacuate the city
like redundant teardrops

to work

forming
the fields read
tacitly
– like a prose poem
typeset in corduroy
and serge

morning
the sunrise-writer
– warmly
stuck for illumination
yet casting softly
upon buds

centenary

rendered in frames per annum
that lingering hit-and-run
whose moment of impact
flickers on
for
years
in capitalism
that still-buckling
corpus at the moment of damage

shreds

every newly
machine-unreadable
number cross-unreferenced
and crossly unexplained
remains

my unique id
to someone
‘s intents and purposes
and how easily the “i”
can be picked from
a card index,

or exported
/ re-entered
as a creature,
of journeys,
multibuys,

discounted,
ripped, wrung, overdrawn
and direct-debit-per-quartered
save for that digital death mask