A Walk In The Country

At every turn tap the rail

With your stick or feel

Along it with your fingers.

Smell the flowers, hear

The birds at each Wildlife

Station. A brass plate

Studded with Braille

Catalogues all the details

For the blind in this park.

Scents and sounds 

Are cultivated for the visually

Impaired - large, loud leaves

And textured bark from a

Variety of trees are to touch,

To feel, to take in. It is a world

Within a world, our walk

Prepared for those with

Visual impairments.

Stick to the rail.

Stop only at the stations.

Organic fragrances, natural

Sounds and authentic surfaces

Are strategically sited through our 

Wood. Your path is clockwise.

You must tap to the right.

We have created this circuit

For you and our rules

Will always protect you

From falling or straying

From the path. Remember

To finish where you began.

We will be your eyes,

Your senses, your hands.

_____

Published in Virus

Paths to the Sea

Coming up here will be an array of my poetry. This first section 'Paths to the Sea' will centre on poems about or related to The Sea - complete poems, fragments and chapters, previously published poems and unpublished work.

ZERO

Ninety degrees above
The doorsteps and roofs are gold.
A pair of dandelion spores swing
In the asthmatic air like bum notes
On a cleft, bum lives off a cliff.
Sand’s soft under foot, hot between toes.
Neptune’s serpent is but salt,
A writhing snapshot stick of it,
And as Big Sea gently cartwheels on the shore,
A deep water fish sulks beneath a lead-heavy stone
As if a heart, my heart, over which sweat forms
False blisters, while Whale waves’ spray
Hemlines my brow.


Warm words lap laughter on the beach
As I slow these steps where lovers smooch
Between the thick cool legs of Claremont Pier.
The crystal-lit grains of their tortuous bed
Turn into dust and dust turns into the nothingness
Of love, This Love, as beachcombers
Gather in the deck chair hut
Humbling cold sunset to hurry up
And away a peopled day, for hot pennies from heaven
Will raise their heads in their hands
From littered sand, as lifeguards wax loins,
Polish orange torpedoes, turn rescue into pints.


No, it is Zero

The doorsteps and roofs are silver,
My breath a bubble of dull speech,
The Esplanade a fickle fur underfoot,
Triton’s snake a twist of misted sugar
In de-boned stone hands; and as sea gossips
On the shore, a shipyard light,
Dipped in liquid pearl, throws a lowly halo,
While a deep water fish wriggles free
From my well-heeled hell of heavy skull,
Salty sweat cold in my flesh pits. Breath’s small clouds
Turn into steam train’s trail as I quicken my steps
By the black under-hang of Suicide Pier,
Where lovers spoon, dog-legged in pitch...

Foot on the Beach

Laughing like a twisted plimsoll
You ran soft-skinned through the sand
To a bundle of gently blown clothes.
You crossed a barrier of pebbles
As if on hot coals.
Picked up a few pebbles for your pocket.
Felt their wholeness, round and firm.
Your expressions faded as you dressed,
And as you tied the laces tighter round
your tongue
Solemn evening killed the sun.

Towers

Eye-glistening pebbles chatter
On the hard skin of the face:
Night stiffens and shivers
The belly rock.


In pitch black the crack
Opens and the body shatters,
Sand dulling the fall.


The pull of the sand, gently, fiercely
Grinds us to dust
Between the stepping stones
Of time on our hands.


Rinsing ourselves we rise with the waves:
Finally, after the millionth tidal step
The leg-bowed arches can stand no more
And the spire crumbles into the nave.


My mouth will never be this moist again.
Only stones cannot be enslaved.

Beckoning Edge

Have no beginning or edge.
All in taking, blind and transparent.
Am an organism pulsing in an oily skin
Pressed under glass.


Water slips and gossips on the rocks
Where I lie, stranded on sand between stones.
Am a dogfish - a purse full of meat.
I have to break the skin sack
To breathe water.


Scurrying over shingle - am a moonlight dancer
Growing a fresh pink, feigning arm.
Am a crab submerged in toe-warm sand midday
Against the probe, the nail spike - my predators.


I have run up to the scar but am scared of the crag
From where men with crab-pots come.
I claw the foot on the beach in revenge
At the water’s beckoning edge.

Beyond The Sea Front

In the mist, in the rain,
a bitter taste fills the air:
the inflictions of a match
on sand towards ignition.

She lights the cigarette.

The wheel is still turning,
chasing lights full circle.

A sigh covers her flesh.
The hem of her dress always wet.

She clutches the handle of her case.

And for her face a mirror,
appearances a comb.

The salt on her lips
spells "home."

The Water Boatman

In her pool
in the garden
a single water boatman
scurries across the skin
of water tension.

Behind a blue silk curtain
shadows move across her skinned eyes.

She smells of Opium perfume
and her flesh is a beautiful complexion
fetched from her favourite lotion.

In her bedroom
there is a silver mirror and comb
and a violin with sea in its strings:
sequins tossed onto the ocean
of her new black dress.

The pull of the moon
beckons her as dead eels flex.