Saturday, 1 December 2018

Little Venice

By Sil (7th of July 2017)

Little Venice 
Belongs to cyclists 
And city boys 
Who ping-pong their freedom away
Fake status satiety
Seek temporary safety 
In money and uniform.
In the glass theatre
A vertical, potted 
Gauche summer 
Directs a play without words;
It moves its actors in reverse 
Nature, reduced to a trimmed-back 
Farce mustache
Has no scent.
We're braving the edge 
Eyes, adrift 
On the frogskin face
Of the water 
(A prince
Left unguarded,
Unkissed even by death)
Carefully unpicking 
The stories 
We tell 
From the ones 
We don't.
Desire makes
Halfway station 
Between promise and 
Caution 
Conspicuous barge
Painted in lurid letters 
Its owners 

Are water haters. 

Monday, 12 November 2018

Silver Spoon

I linger in your spaces
Walk and walk,
Possessed by beauty
Admiring your painted ceilings
The sandstone arches;
When you build
You build beautiful walls.
Once I thought us, siblings
Born under the same moon
But Oxford reminds me that
You’re the one 
Born with a silver spoon
They’re playing the first chords of
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Within Plato's lackluster cave
My heart  -
A cat writhing 
Under truck tires -
Spits as
Young orchestra players sway with grace
Sheldonian angels
In the name of the Father, blessed.
Your tribe wear privilege ever-so-lightly
As if it were an expensive coat
You wouldn’t mind leaving behind
In the Bodleian Library

Tuesday, 30 October 2018

Shredder

(Silvia, London)
There is no you in you,
Just miss-target, lassoed desires
I envy your skill 
at fighting fires
This is your city
I take to the streets
In a pink scarf and red lipstick
Modern girl with a match-stick
Lingers on New Bond Street
At Sotheby’s the flower arcade
Never fades
That’s the best money can buy – perpetuity
This isn’t about finding you because,
Your sort shun opulence
I bet you smirked when Banksy did his shredder trick
Intellectual “Fuck-You, Your Majesty”
Hey, Mr Status-by-Stealth
I wish you died
They’d bury you wearing your usual grey
Next day – I’d keep those damned gates locked
At Friary Court
It’s late autumn, evening without afterglow
Did I tell you I have a child at war with himself
Together we paint a face on the moon
I’m 38 - my path loops back home
The lights are on

Saturday, 1 September 2018

Homecoming


(Silvia, August, Exeter)

I watched you look for fragments
of your world
there’s a Romanian story
about a prince
who goes off chasing
eternal youth and
everlasting life
He returns home
to find
valleys and cities
where forests used to be
in the palace the lights are out.
At the Double Locks
Instagram poets
carry picnic blankets under one arm,
articulate girls
abandon their bikes
in the parking lot
We eat scotch eggs
in ritual remembrance
of student penury
and later, on the way home
I lock on Venus
to scale down the human distances
we’ve travelled
to something insignificant
like a chicken coop
Give me one fixed point
and I’ll be brave enough  
to let the sky bleed
again tonight
 every night
for the next
38 years