4.
grief is lead
caught on the honeysuckle
a backcloth sunburned
by lightning
cornflowers of sleet
gather on a child’s palate
downpours
updrafts
might be like earth
breathing a nightgown
of mould
revelation is thrown
through a millennium
of seafront propagandists
while the courthouse
gondoliers the waiting
three by three in caravans
of catacombs
that slip into distance
9.
novelty moves like a blackmailer
backhanding pistols in the likeness
of next year’s garret
feinting and stunning to become
a pall that shaves and guns
a shambles of thorax
in the insect of a poem
mountains sit like fowls
clocking the broken turquoise
seconds cackle by to coronations
of boulders in headlights
seen through cataracts
there is prophecy here for natives
in the yews that lurk
and the tinctures of sloe honed
staterooms winked on bedspreads
an airline of creepy-crawlies
riding on the sideboard
their lifetimes simultaneously
implied and poleaxed
along with ours
13.
once in a while a rose of apparition
moves the blade to the nub
of a limb like a comedian
come to the rim of a shackle
that breaks among the strata
of its sturdier fellows
a prince might thrash towards the palm
that oscillates between two sunsets
a mourner daubs a broken day
the critical monk wallops his fear
quixotic as the belt of a windmill
blade in the turn of the headwind
a corporal is seconded to account
like a lunatic lender watching
two kimonos lilac against a backcloth
colour downgrades itself west and the air
is louvre-filled like cards falling between
a footstep so certain under the bus
20.
an intellect
of coalition-tories
stymie each other
in the fens
the wheat-like drain
of a restricted opus
and a frailty of sex
in the turn of hearses
on the go-slow
we discover the regulars
the square youths
crawling in like light-years
as the season moves
statuettes in the politics
of implosion
drumbeat and drumstick
white in the baffled distance