We sit playing in his room,

this is how it always goes,

he shakes stars out of a tune  

I just puff along

He is a saturnine fellow

like Pan on bad a day or like the devil,

he doesn’t give that much away

while I pour secrets from a severed vessel.

All the songs are sad romances

suffering so much in deliverance

that I think I’d like to be that dame

who goes blind on the bridge and topples in.

Into the river, into the flood,

umbrellas of Cherbourg splattered in mud.

Too much singing in the rain

you’ll never be fit for the sun again.

October 2006

Hotel Room                                              

The sky cast its five o clock shadow of rain through the hotel blinds as Margaret floated to the surface of her doze. The man was sitting on the bed, half dressed, clinking keys from dressing table to pocket. Its OK love, he said, the room’s paid for all till morning, enjoy it, I can’t, and he was off, seventy quid on the side table.

It was a posh hotel. When they’d come in at lunchtime the woman at the desk had looked right through her. She could tell her type, she supposed, just from the thin weather- inappropriate white cross over dress she was wearing, quick enough to get in and out of, now damp and clinging, and the plastic rain hat bought hastily from Boots. She was polite enough to the man. She’d seen it all before.

The room had a kettle, tea, nice biscuits, a minibar but that was extra. Margaret flicked through the hotel information folder, menu, notes in case of a fire, facilities, a picture of the swimming pool in the basement.  In the wardrobe Margaret found a navy blue one- sized ladies swimming costume in a sealed bag, a pair of terry towelling dressing gowns for Him and Her, and slippers.

She cleaned off all her make-up, put on the swimming costume, the dressing gown, the slippers, took a towel and walked down to reception. The receptionist ignored her. Where’s the pool? Margaret asked.

It’s not really for you. Said the receptionist.

Room’s paid for, said Margaret, and she began to cry.

Aren’t I like everyone else in my swimsuit and naked face?

The woman called the manager, but he nodded, had words with the receptionist, whispered, urgent, instructive.

There was no one else in the silent basement pool. Margaret floated on her back, like everyone else in her swimsuit and her naked face, like she’d been before.

She closed her eyes, sank beneath the surface and came up gasping. She was lying on the bed in the darkening hotel room. The man had gone. There was thirty quid on the bedside table.

A knock on the door and the manager entered. Time to clear out, he said, if you want to stay a bit longer maybe there’s something you can do for me. 

Oct 2015

Here is the furious woman.

Her spite the sharp berry on a sweet tree,

her rage the looming spire of a witch’s hat.

She is wringing me out, she is holding me under.

She is furious with the man who spat me

and furious with the woman who spun me.

She is the furious woman.

She is all the black skeletal trees on the bare windy hill

cartoon as shadow puppets, dead as wood.

She is the spinning dame with the poison thread

flat as evil in its single dimension.

Her fury is a sharp high shriek up in the branches,

the flap of a bat, tarred feather of crows.

I am a mouse flit over forest floor.

She is blind with her fury as she sharpens it.

I am the brown leaf rolling over brown leaves,

a crackle of dried out green on the grave of leaves

and then the wind rises, her voice high on the wind.

I float before it like a discordant bridesmaid.

8/10/2010

Her name was Susan, I read on her stone,

a wife and a mother of three,

all orphaned in nineteen sixty six

when she stepped onto the A303.

My brother’s soft-top too fast, too sleek,

the Give Way sign veiled in leaves, 

so his grave lies next to Susan’s.

He shot over the A303.

the highway through the barrows,         

by Stonehenge, on to Glastonbury,

becomes something else, but everyone knows

it is still the A303.

It’s the old straight road down to the west

and it glides past the cemetery

where side by side its children rest

who died for the A303.

I wrote this poem earlier this century about something that happened half way through the last century, ( the same subject matter as ‘The Hardest Day’ written and posted yesterday)  but posting it today, 27th January 2016.

50 years ago today, when i was 9, my brother Hamish died in a car crash aged 23. Where does the time go? I remember the morning so clearly and the effects on my mother, the journey to Salisbury Plain, time off school and the end of being bullied when i went back again, as my status was elevated to The Girl With The Dead Brother. But of him only i have one clear memory: a couple of years before, my parents still married and me attending Avondale, a school for army children on bleak Salisbury Plain, i missed the school bus (again) and Hamish drove me to school in his open topped MG wearing just his pyjamas. So he saved me twice. I gave my son Hamish his name. RIP glamorous brother. I know a lot of people will be thinking of you today

Getting ready for school:

Beware harsh green hall carpet concealing large spiders

The phone on its throne by its telephone chair

A confessional box for wind-ups and hopes

And occasional penny-watching long distances

In the labyrinth basement

in a dark lake of  green carpet.

It’s January- mild or cold-

My school uniform on for school

My battledress for dread and bafflement,

Each day a new strategy flies and fails.

The phone rings, my mother talks in screams

We hang on the stairs listening.

Deidre (the lodger) and me

Re-order her strangled words into sense,

Think something must have happened to the dog,

Whose great yellow ears would flow behind him like comical banners

Whenever my brother drove his open top sports car too fast,

Like a yellow flicker over a disappearing stripe of racing green.

26th January 2016

The night Elvis died,

flat on my back

looking at this chap

(beautiful and cold)

light his French fag,

(the one he didn’t want)

take a superfluous drag,

I didn’t know then

while the radio played

This Time, This Time,

Elvis was cooler than he’d ever been.

When I’d got up-

thinking, Boy that was clean,

sweat-free and guiltless

like baby-love, frighteningly simple,

as a novel when you’ve finished it,

nothing in it, nothing to it-

I walked home through the rain

while the world wept

‘Sing it again, El.’

27th April 1978

First they came for the people in the café

Laughing and drinking wine

But they did not laugh or drink wine

And so they shot them

Then they came for the young people at the rock concert

The girls in jeans and t-shirts

But though they were young, they did not listen to rock music

Their girls did not wear jeans and t-shirts

So they shot them

And one replied to the other

Remember Syria!

But what was the question

Breaking from its frown of hesitation

In a lost second of human recognition?

16th November 2015

In Nunhead cemetery

saplings smoke out of the organic dead

in trances, webs of spider branches

creep out crackling, dripping into sunshine,

bulletins in stone tell you everything succinctly.

This Victorian woman outlived her seven children

by sixty years. The little space of life between

each birth and death suggests her growing hope

that this dear child, surviving longer than the last,

might make it, but year by year they died,

the oldest six- they must have thought

she’d cleared the post, she hadn’t.

Imagine all that time alone

side by side with the empty space

where your babies should have grown.

The dog flourishes in between the stones

chasing the pungent odours of life,

rabbits, foxes, badgers, voles.

Crashing through the branches we startle

visitors who’d heard our whistle.

Next time we should dress up in long white nighties

and jump out-

and here are the Weightmans!

Harold twenty four, Marjorie twenty three,

Olive three, David seven months,

killed by enemy action in 1944.

A little family bombed out

in a South East London terrace just like mine.

I like to visit the Weightmans.

Their grave’s only recently been uncovered

by the cemetery restoration works, hidden all these years

under a reign of thorns like Sleeping Beauty.

No one to come and remember them.

Every possible descendent evaporated by that bomb,

So I read their stone and make them mine.

Harold, sleeves rolled up, mending his bike.

Marjorie making pastry in the scullery.

Olive tottering by her brother’s cot.

Sirens, thunder, darkness, black horse carriage,

then this place,

the creeping blackberries and birdsong,

sun between the smoke, me walking.