Ancient

Vacant like an ancient platform, isolated at sea: barnacle-covered and rusting, dustless, blustered by a heaving sea. Memories of bombs and conflict abound in the creaking structure, ghostly helicopters landing and rising in fiery fury.

Karameh

11.09 in the Attic

The chill in my toes
Is my mother's,
Which lets me know
The humdrum drill
Has purpose,
And the snaking day
And silent night
Aspire
To
Something.

Caravaggio - The Taking of Christ

January

The dark is cumbersome
On the Velux windows,
The Northern Lights
Spurt somewhere up north.
And I am here,

Heart thudding.

Karl-Marx-Allee

In May drizzle and
Bursting cloud,
The shoots shield the loose
Lying air, and I think
Of nothing but you.

I am in Richmond
And you are dismantling our bookcase,
Bulgakov and Nabokov,
Divorced, still harbouring
Last week's dust.

Your towel is left where you wept;
Wet washing litters the rack
In the kitchen, curtains flap,
And my wind-up clock stopped
With no one.

Now I cannot bare the
Sudden loneliness of trains,
and buses, and avenues in Kew;
And you, carrying wilting
silk dresses, bruised and new.

And my stomach is full of the
Indigestible bile of drink,
And the sorrow of early mornings
Lying in your dent.

Then I see us walking
Down Karl-Marx-Allee
In the dense dusk
Beneath the TV Tower,
Slowly suffocating

And I melt.

5 Songs About... Building

Kraftwerk - Metal on Metal



Peter, Paul and Mary - If I Had a Hammer



Tom Waits - What's he Building in There?



Lightinin' Hopkins - I'm Going to Build me a Heaven of my Own



Moderat - Rusty Nails