Three Poems

Who Bayoneted The Brigadier?

Peep behind the curtain –
he nips a peeve of dandruff
weathering the storm
on his Controller’s bowler
shrinking from the corpse
fizzling in acid.

The burden of his song
is an uncracked nut;
he games to stop the mouths
of Sabotage Section denials.

The Tate

Let us transform ourselves again.
Pine planks have stopped sawing,
the grime survives. Gallery doors cling.

Listen in with me a while
to the cagey bearings hung
in the smudge-brush triptych: Three Figures In A Room.

As a premier clear dribbles of faeces,
envisage the loo-bowl and loyal subject
as one, the coincidence of impetus in their guts.
The stutter of paint is performance, it’s gamble
absorbs the very plunge of the cistern. Hear
the waves drumming through the troughs
of the long narrow room.

Would you be staggered if the second was nonchalant?
A little disgruntled, somewhat unfunny?
As it may be he is bothering a heart-to-heart
or sweeping his eye over I Love Lucy
on the tangerine valves of bakelite.
There’s a scuffle in his liver, gurgling,
a fly-spotted destiny on his face.

The pleading of the third will ruffle him up.
Being is shoddy. He cracks at tense repose,
a full-size grizzly on a slinky stool.
We track his wince, see the grit in his muscle,
hold an ear, standing quiet
prickling for clues.

When You’re Young And In Love

On the drophead coupe’s audiofrequency
a Bluegrass dout harmonizes
“we don’t smoke marijuana in Muskokie”.

“Dock, dock,” the sky’s voice drops.
On a whiskey-sour night
paranoia stomps
waist-deep over Highway 61.

We’ve been to a sit-in rebel-rouse
after a tub-thumping at County Hall
and have a Hillbilly truck-wagon on our butt.

Left, the parkway’s a furry skull.
I shoot the bottle to Betty,
mess with the tuner
and spark up the last reefer.