I have seen the kindest hearts of my generation wither from
the fruitless duty of prolonging the thrashing of the dying old,
whose feet grow mouldy from redundancy, whose voices
hoarsen from screeching fearful into the night, whose minds
can't remember the names of their visitors, nor the tasteless
taste of the mush they spat out into the dimmed morning
of breakfast.

I have seen blackbirds chirruping as they hop back and forth
across the Barrier, as their ancestors migrated carefree
over the Wall, where bleeding men floundered watched and unaided
in the death strip, as their ancestors hopped between the wire
barbs, where men lay cold and flapping or dead, like fish
hauled onto the trawler in thousands

I have seen magpies building perfect nests without conferring
while workmen and councillors and residents and tree-surgeons
gabble among themselves how best to cut down the trees,
and the dogs are barking in the yard.

I have seen unnecessarily aerodynamic slugs suck themselves
successfully across a road where the girl was sent spinning
into death as a parody of Van Vuuren by an unblinking police car,
whose friends were taken bound and howling into the van, as
her deboned body soaked into the tarmac.


Once I swam from the shore against the waves and into
the colder land of the ocean, among the drifting kelp
and the jellyfish on blue downs and valleys, whose wholesome
geography I found alluring enough to chase forever, ploughing
onwards to abandon with unheeding breaststrokes but
when I looked back towards the beach I found it to be merely
a hundred yards away, as if I'd been swimming uphill
all those reckless minutes, and the waves tipped
me like gold-panner's slurry onto the sand.

Once I poked a silverfish from point to point across
my clean bathroom floor, each time missing it until
it squiggled into a crack in the corner and evaded
my death wish: I like you Silverfish, but not where
you've been.

Once I lived in a room whose walls were made of hardboard,
and I heard every sneeze and snore, every cough and every burp,
and when the fucking couple, fucked next door to me,
their bed and my bed separated by an inch of plastering, I placed
my naked butt-cheeks against the wall and farted with all my strength
rattling pictures off the walls, and knocking them completely off
their stride, the moaning ceased but next morning a condom
was stuck to my door handle as a 'thank you';
it remains my proudest memento.