Shabby Shabby, Niamh & Cycling from Lacock to Chippenham

Shabby Shabby

Shabby bed freezer
Shabby scalp diseased, peels,
Shabby floor turtles, kicked tufts of dirt.
Looky looky, wife or husband, thinkst thou dost not
Live shabbily?

On shabby paycheques, with monsters in closets,
Shabby pornography in pockets, late teens
Degrading shabby lust Kafka cakes
Plonked on the table, shabby table.
Shabby shabby liveth we in shabby hospitality.

O, ode to shabby, for shabby are we
Shabby, shabby
Shabby, shabbily.


Niamh

Niamh she was, and grand she was,
A little locked she was, but she rocked
On the tin whistle and waffled on she did.
Not naïve she was, a great girl she is,
I miss Niamh, even if the others din’t.



Cycling from Lacock to Chippenham

Alone I bike back whence I came accompanied
And see sights sorrowed slightly by shadows’ gall.
From slimming sun-sprawls on quiet, uneven green
Across the fields buttercupped with Spring mien.

And people did not pass me, nor I them, as I
Was lost in heavy reverie perceptively,
Amidst hillocks and memories of Lucy, riding,
Close behind from the weir to the Red Lion.

The Bell was closed, The George was closed
And we did not venture to The Rising Sun;
We did not venture far beyond,
We did not venture far beyond.

Night Scene, Dhún na nGall & Scenes from Window; 23 Lorne Road, Bath

Night Scene

I can’t pay this debt to my head,
Or my place of birth.
A thousand bus stops originate
Independent of my negligence.
The seeping, sweeping trees
Betray certain lifeless aromas,
Concerned, yet unaffected.
In heather thousands of miles away
Lie pieces of a fictitious Bildungsroman.
Gates, electrified, yet wooden,
Seem unusual. Placards depend on
Superstitions and red telephone boxes.
A roundabout, like a U.F.O, stares, blankly,
At no traffic.


Dhún na nGall

We lived fast in a slow place on
Borrowed time; Donegal, on
Teelin bay, across is Sligo; in
Mountainous tranquillity we sat.

Death Rock punishes a night’s
Debauchery, my friends and I,
In the middle of nowhere, rich
Scenery envelops the foreign.

W.B. Yeats-country, old men’s
Retirement, from two nights in
The youthful capital and one in
Belfast’s quick-eyes furore.

David is Friedrich’s wanderer
With wellies and the fog beneath
His stance, and Dan a clamberer,
Joyful in its sublime romance.

Adam, first man, propels the trip
With music at his fingertips; and
Ulster fries and fajitas in the
Dining room, as night comes in
Across the sea.


Scenes from Window; 23 Lorne Road, Bath

Short telegraph pole tops peeping over red-tiled rooftops,
Misty Mondays, from my window, glass pane besmirched
With drips of brown paint and one lonely tear from heaven.
Things in perspective appear odd sizes from my window, a
Lighter on a barbeque down below, next door, next to bikes
With carrier bags over the saddles. And clothes pegs, water-
Butts and a greenhouse in a concrete garden, grey-rimmed.
An infertile cosmology; chimneys like periscopes before the
Backdrop of a forested hill with one antenna receiving and
Giving, silently, under cloud. Steam puffs slowly in the
Beginnings of rainfall, from an old heating system, as a spire
With its weathervane cross is solemn behind a leafless tree;
Seagulls soaring as scavengers offer white flashes like paper
Dropped from an origami balcony. There are colours, but
They die in the misted greyscale of the sad English overcast;
The only hope of explosions in the sky are rebel fireworks
Launched by miscreant friends to disturb the peace, but not
Today. The mortar between limestone bricks leaks battery-
Acid and stains old walls. A wooden gate creaks and bashes
Shut, and a door handle lays redundant atop a wall, probably
Never to be reattached. Terrace ennui, a still dead place. But
Now a cloud moves and reveals a hint of pale blue sky smiling
In on the mossy slate of a yonder roof and the rungs of the
Steel ladder left up against an old shed wall. The sun shines on
The white cotton of clouds, reflecting an eternity into eternity.
In the crevice of right-angle that frames my window at top is
Ingrained dirt an archaeologist’s brush could easily remove
And a small patch of chipped-off paintwork reveals the
Almost-cyan blue of undercoat or the previous scheme. Nimbus
Now the cloud again before the bright cyan that pierced it not
Four moments ago. Triangles and polygons in the architecture,
Everywhere a geometry of gradients, about to drop, a hanged
World. Dialectic between inner constitution and perceptival
Realm; meditated physiognomy; the façade of consensus.
Ever-present in the audible holism is the amour-propre of
The band saw in the garage and the amour-de-soi of the stereo;
Both music unframed. The quick succession of glints in the eye;
A skylight seemed to smash briefly, or even bend, a trick of the
Mind that Descartes and Locke held so common. Corners. Each
Tree on the hill now definable after cumulus cover dissimulates
The old order. An hour or two has passed. The seagulls still swirl.