from Enfield lock

The abandoned arts and crafts hut

The empty estate expansive 

Blown out by the showers

Unquestionably the day time trippy eeriness

Aura of emptiness and anti-depressants

Hangs in the air like a fat burg

A rainbow plays across a river

Funeral lights glow from inside stained-glass windows 

In the church at high beech

Cars line the woody verge

Everything flows through the arts café hut

It is an endowment of Pan and the sublime wood

Magpies and fungi guard the threshold

What secrets do the woodland dwellings conceal

What massive deviance requires so much room

Guarded behind twenty-four-hour surveillance

Buzzard cry buzzard fly wing span casts a shadow

Over slaughterhouse bungalows

Tread carefully up Avey Lane

To begin the return to the heart of the beech

Warm damp autumn conditions 

Are ideal for fungi

The arts café sublime decay

Decoy and magisterial entry point into

Underground networks beneath the forest floor

Spores soak upwards

The tea hut 

Maintains its trippy essence

As dog walkers haunt the periphery.

Questions this morning 

The lid flicks open

An eye of crystallised emerald 

With bright orange pupil

Pin black dot in the morning middle 

Reflects a face

Is it you 

Is it me

Somewhere outside is it sanctuary 

Is it glowing green 

Does it frame that distant memory 

Of orange flames licking the jungle’s

Morning mist

So long ago now

That you could be dreams 

Ah grief against the bones 

To be such at a loss

These days is a bat dance

A cat creeps across the back garden wall

Blue tits shimmer inside the tree canopy 

Rats scuttle into the bushes

The air rings with sirens and machinery 

Ah. 

a modern crevasse

Pain in the air

unevenly at desk

Swallow unskilled,

Behaviour has aspects 

of hurried hell 

surge 

At the top of the stairs in Manor House.

gums reveal decay

to find a truth inside

the words. 

to rot

over a matt of newspapers

unfolding today

And on the way to school 

the moon 

Still visible 

“Dig for victory” it says

On page

Of 

A P O P H T E G M S

“Fish and chips” is our covert greasy kingdom 

underneath sweaty bedspreads our heritage

Like a net,

Cast over terrace houses

rich then poor now the rich

Deception leaks 

its roots unhinge foundations

Small talk.

“everything oozes” (Sam Beckett again)

the silent tv

throw yourself over the side

be done with it

just now a withered husk of protoplasm 

dissolving memory.

Thought burgers

That’s more like it 

the hollow small village running society 

scorching up and down the fields 

                                                            Where, 

where can I find it ?

the truth is so many bubbles

So many bubbles only time will tell

the keys melt 

you and I, both  stowaways

Hitch hike at the turnpike 

ditch the autumn 

down frozen lanes 

Enter,  face to face at last.

"The most arid stench is often richest' - Frank O'Hara

Be vociferous it is your nature

Shout the odds commune with your fellow animals

Load the tumble dryer

It was designed to make life simpler

Today is a quiz show

It’s called “Who Fucking Cares?”

The most misanthropic contestant wins a prize

A life time supply of nothing

And a free voucher to nowhere

Now inject some humour into that

Writing the end of the world and eating about poetry

all about

Outside the wilderness of

of today’s descent.

trying to define

Children cry themselves into being

shuffle

ready to spill

what is meant

upon the floor

Of your descendants

consecrate the ground

by living in a time of deep regret 

weep

For the futures

It knows

humans and non-humans

Untangled now clambering out from under 

need to 

a deep slumber

Where people are unknown 

Speak no sound comes

it does no longer correspond to language
when thinking about the past

You are paralysed at last 

the heart motions of your breath hold on 

the reflection back is the animal you

as the moment you know as now

unfolds once more into 

the past.