The dark sun of a god

called winter, the winter of our

discontent, unrelatable: Walnut

Whip, fury like an unspoken

wave of collapse, the gunfire cry

of fear over love. Ghost faces

flit across floors of fallen gunk,

America is itchy with mouths,

a single mind- a jiffy of dread.

Voodoo death explodes like

a joke cigar, a clown’s flower.

The wall is a hand in a slap.

The elastic-band snaps back,

always. Mildred rejoices at the
pale, the blue lives. The word ape.

Who are those filthy embers

about to catch? Children with

whitewashed bellies, no picket,

nor monstrous vehicle.

Don’t tread on me. Girlie,

sit back down. Open your legs  

for the tiniest hands. And all along

we knew it was the case. Every

Injun slips by like a day. Oil & labour,

scored like a map- footfall of

terror, complex.

Waterstones frog with a golden
crown. Remember that deep
pool, the flaxen ball scattered
by a Princess? Like a tinderbox

that held all the evil in the world,
but gooder. Apple-right. Easy for it
to slip from her powdery hands
into the gravy-black pond, now

lost. That froggy in the cold murk
flipped it up with his webbed fingers
from the sticky mud, the gore, 
and swam to greet her blue

strange planets of thanks,
the lashes that cradled the trinket.
He was neither frog nor pipe
but after a kiss a shining boy

called Prince. Now in a carrier bag,
hidden, the first belonging of an
unborn sprite. I carry him careful past
the playground where chalk crackles

like a radio. I love you Mum it says,
October broadcast. I love you.
A golden thought that waits
to surface- for all this open space.

Nectarines settle in the icy 
dawn, one skin against another.
The cherries are out of fashion-
berries in general are aggressive.

Panda bowl. 
Vivid rips in the fabric of reality,
squash like the evening sun, crass
pumpkins, pink at a banquet.

Sometimes the oranges go magic,
bobbing down the market. Slice
them for a white light, the turnips
are moons, mais quel est un gourd?

Nobody knows. Traders wheel
like birds in slipstreams, biggy 
biggy big bowl they cry, breath
exiting into the crisp morning Wow.

These the stay-at-home, elders, the wise ones,
the unemployable, day-offs, the night workers.

These the freelancers, poets, the guilty, 
artists and strangers, mysterious cargo.

River of potterers, dodderers, the aimless undirect,
the Asda shoppers, gentle with avocados,

Totting it up. The disabled, unable, the radical 
and rutted- we flow through the mall, rubbernecked.

Enlightened. Beguiled by lights, the ambient puddles-
ushering in air on some unwritten mission.

Pumpkins swapped up with
the Coca-Cola saint of chimneys
who plops down into your soot-filled
reception like a fun-ripe carp.

Bones skitter across the ice,
sycamore bobby-pins strewn in wintry hair,
leaves whipping over the forecourt as
demonic confetti whirls to the right,

archaic-sploding to left-overs, crisped.
The first trees in polystyrene storms,
the crooked fingers of a skinless hand,
and all the while the outside whispers

not yet, not yet- the glistening gift!
Like Blanche Dubois in a dirty slip
mulched whole, our broken quarter,
O lady of swans- Trump aftertaste.

No one knows where the

Morris came from, some

say Africa. Or what?

Blackface see. Tradition

with its wreaths wrapped

alien tight around our

island. Don’t touch it. We

are not for you. Our children

suffer, whatsisname prizing

out the tuck from under their

Roman noses. Scarcity,

a woman scrabbling in the dust.

Brown people bleeding their

brown blood everywhere.

Muck. Time to look backwards

to a time when things were

lighter. Just don’t mention the

wars! Our Great Nation spraying

Enlightenment all over the

place- a tired child learning

how to use the Big Boy.

Nope. Your utopia is short-

sighted. Love is finite. No

space for humanity here.

Time to dial it back

to a dreamless rock,

all lonely in its sea of Mine.

Clear Channel