REFUGEES

Escaping gunfire from the sea,
fear and blind panic drove them on
like any other refugees.
Without the loadstar of their lives –
away from the familiar –
they travelled unseen through the night
from far beyond the ocean’s swell.

Singing, they kept their spirits high,
they passed Black Rock and Castle Point
to swing into the broad Porthcuel…
Beyond moored boats with jangling sheets,
the sleeping Manor House at Place,
they lost their way and chose Porth Creek.

Into this elemental place
of mudflats, long abandoned boats,
they moved in on a changing tide.
Beneath the overhanging oaks
where brown stream narrows, up near Froe,
the tidal waters ebbed away.

Caught up in flotsam, debris, weed,
the party floundered in the creek
as channel water turned to shoals.
Poor gardeners raised the alarm –
as sun rose on the carnage there,
of those who travelled from the sea,

Interactions in (un)controlled conditions

Here is the boy who once caused Chernobyl
to be known as terror-not-town.
It was singlehanded and he was just fifteen
years of slow meltdown, design-flaws, all
his wrong secret buttons pushed in sly dark – a child,
who first heard the word delusion as an echo
down a hot tunnel of dissolving ground

The concrete sarcophagus for his containment was ugly, poured
in the frightened 1970
to conceal runaway reactions from the general populace
until they safely (oh privately, quietly please) exhausted themselves

Inside, he found several alien suns still glowing, right
where the lino in the back corridor was scorched, a blast-map
orbited by squeakshoe nurses (15 minute check!), and in that universe
each 2am LadyJesus flamed hard with belief,
post-slot breast flapped up, on Sundays she wept Latin and milk, baptised
him in the night-bulb glow
of her earnest sacred heart

He thanked…

Gossip Magazines, Dog-Eared Children’s Books and Two National Geographics

In the waiting room none of us are sick
we are without diagnosis
without prognosis
we live in the world of the well, the un-sick
until our name is called
and we shuffle into the examination room
listen to our test results
nod as if we understand
feel the heavy cloak of time
drape across our shoulders

we fondly remember five minutes earlier
being healthy enough to be disappointed
that there were only
gossip magazines, dog-eared children’s books and two National Geographic’s
healthy enough to be annoyed by the woman having a full-blown conversation
on speakerphone
so healthy as to wish for an off switch on that baby

we did not realise
until it was too late
that the waiting room
was paradise

Seagulls and Silence

I wipe sea spray from your fringe
you point to the horizon excitedly
there is…

An excerpt from

In place of memory {in lieu of memory

The places of memory {les lieux de memoire

Fragmentary doting — love
will disillusionwhat we are made of
rejoice in the allure of unease miscreation, rageful apothecaries
and seek the phantom gesturesnail clipping, euphoric extractions
translate collapse into folly

*
*

Otherwheresosmosis — Polaroids — the smell of douce France

I still try to sweep moonlight,
think in parables

*

Throats

It was a large kitchen, formica and vinyl, the height of style in 1975. That was
where I first became aware of it. Or perhaps in Woolworth’s? Gulps of Tab, no

straw, can the color of tonsils. The power in carbonation: how it eased the tight-

ness of everything caught there // voice, tears, rage, fear, secrets, “no” // trapped

where the towel was forced in, to smother what would not find its way out…