Bath, One Too Many & Opalescence/Liquidity

Bath

Victoria Park of sunshined days
Is a place in vast and beauteous array;
And in streets so gay come
Tourists from every fray, peering and
Pointing at Jane Austen and King Bladud’s
Swine, herded round bathing spas for the
Rich Romans and crossing Pulteney Bridge.

To The Old Green Tree for a pint of Abbey,
And Sally Lunn’s for a bun in the old alley;
That great house of God stands staring over
The drunks and buskers in Abbey Church Yard,
Asleep on benches, whilst the Japanese take pictures.
And the Avon, eternal river, flows in tumult
And tranquillity by Garfunkel’s and Pulteney.

Into holes in the walls scuttle Bath’s inhabitants,
And out of them, fed, into Milsom Street, visitors.
Great Pulteney Street looks as magnificent
As a Parisian rue often and off it, down the
Stairwell a walk along the river edge; in the
Evening the lighted limestone glistens over
The soft waters below. Flowing and coalescing.

The Royal Crescent represents the architectural
Magnitude resultant of an aristocratic plenitude;
And so Bath in days of yore is imaginable unlike any
Other city in the world, as if Georgian ghosts haunt
The heritage still, stalking the cobblestones by
The Little Theatre and The Theatre Royal;
An impression of pasts trampled into its paths.

The ghosts of houses stare from hills at the quiet
Suburbs of Bath’s ancestry; like a bowl in which
Water was over-spilled the valley stretches up its edges,
And Oldfield Park is humming with night-time folks
Going for fish & chips and curries and evening drinks;
The lights of the shop fronts illuming roads and pavements
As Bath and its people settles down into moonlight.


One Too Many

Face the humidity and dance
In perfidy polkas across a floor
Of upturned drawing pins lain
Like confetti on a wedding-day;
The wedded bliss of evil and death,
A wedded hit and miss conflagration
Swallowing in its wake all the
Sentiments we used to hold dear,
Under a new collective title: lies.

An egalitarian simply couldn’t withstand
The heat and was born again misogynist;
Whether he really was or not was purely
Academic, but he felt it easier to wear the
Badge; to walk like a leper so as to avoid
Baseless words, meaninglessness, simple
Untruths wrought to ends, ultimately base
In themselves: a dancing martyr;
But it was selfish the cause.

Salvation was the cause. Salvation is
Lying to oneself, slightly easier
Than being lied to by another,
If only because our lies to self
Are less believable, because the veil
Separating our lies and the quiet truth
Is slightly less opaque; the filmy
Truth beneath the cataract, unseen;
The bred nothing of vision deceased.


Opalescence/Liquidity

Shimmering, glimmering reflections of light,
On rivulet spindles of water and night.
Rivering warships of whispered poof!
Vanishing markers of innate proofs,
In ravelling and inter-ravelling pools
And currents of trends and fashionable schools,
The inside in inside-out a caboose
Looses the drinkers in carousing abuse
Of liquid insipid in puddles and Oceania;
A skin on the liquids is opalescent and thin.
Thinning the liquid with Warfarin and skinning
In haemorrhage tones muscle from bone bleeding,
Into cups of tears and urine, an opalescent museum
Of man’s liquidation .