Lighthouse
Where has it gone?
That little lighthouse on the horizon
twirling like a boyhood barber pole
where inside the men chat wares and ends,
odds and past fair plays of the weekend
before their hair thins further and falls
to be swept under a Persian rug
bought with a tourist’s haggle. I squint
to see deeper into the distance, nothing.
My buoy rocks. A still sea. I tend
to its growing rot, its fiery rust, its little lies,
slow bobs, fungal calm.
Finally, I see the light
flicker like a rolling eight ball –
dark and white,
shine and black and back
into the gutter
to wait for the next penny drop.
Halfways
It was a body dying
on the road, they said
cycling past. Not just
a body – at first
it was an ambulance
and a crowd come to
glance and some bikes.
Then it was a paramedic
puffing pulses into a chest
lest she should be able
to snatch the body from
the vice claw of death.
And I curved my head,
my sickle neck flicking
round a crowded bend
but could only see half
a body, half up to the end.
There is a bullring in Spain
carved into the edge of
an Andalusian mountain
like a pore or volcano’s ash
pushing puss into the air.
I remember I saw a man
painting the spectator’s steps
white, he was shining under
the arch as I stood at the step
and waited by a shrine
at the old entrance
where the matadors would
pray before Mary and the bull.
I left before I could see
the wearing steps completely
white. Seeing the ambulance whir,
a blur over tarmac streets,
I imagined the bull
shining his nose ring
and praying.
Kerby
To learn a thing or two about the indecision of memory
I tore a piece of pink petal from my skin & chomped down
on its already curling, yellowing edges. It tasted like rubber or
tarmac trodden upon by a boy racer’s car or a little like leather
from a deflated football from when we were boys, the days
when we would stand on either sides of the road and raise
our arms high above our heads, World Cup 2012 footballs in
our palms, eyes bricked upon the thin strip of concrete
at the opposite set of trainers, taking it in turns to throw,
waiting for one of us to land, to have the leather returned
to us & we could finally go home under streetlight moons.