IN TRANSIT

Six hangers tap each other as the door closes.
It is good to have arrived where blandness can't distract me
From the timely quiet of my senses.
I can sigh, look down at the car park, and
No dormant messages of scorn are strong enough to surface.
Which bed? Shrug. Coffee? Tea? Downstairs for a beer?
The shower hisses at incompetence.
Tick, Tick, Tick. The radiator speaks, but has no alarm
to warn of its power to scorch.
Here there is only the present. My environment has nothing left to say.
And tomorrow's goodbyes will be the offhand tappings of the hangers.

CAROL

Coming to the embrace of my consciousness
when she chooses, texturing the air with stories.

PASSING STRANGERS

There is this hollow with trees underlit
by the canal reflecting.

And past me on the towpath comes a woman
in embroidered flares, all sunburn
and buttocks
and velvet hat,
and she swings
and sways
and flaps her hands
and treads a line
like a catwalk model with an appetite,
and nobody to please except herself
and her reflection
and me. Astonished.

Who cares where she is going
and why
and whom to meet
and the appointed time?

DESCENDING

Pantomime trees drift past each other,
Dwellings stacked up the valley’s north side.

There are no shadows in the noon sun flattening roofs,
Starbursting from a window, immunising me against reason.

I swing one leg past the other down this friendly pavement.
Can you hear the scuffing of my jeans?

BOSSA

Yesterday's waterfall was paradiddles on peat,
Soggy backbeat.

Today is raining fit to flood. The moors are

Storing enough to release another rhythm.

Perhaps tomorrow will play bossa nova,
That I would die for.