Fridayam

The bee bumps the butterfly

off the laburnum, while beneath,

in the shade, the cat

cocks a lazy eye then

rewinds herself to sleep;

a child, chided outdoors,

thumps a ball resentfully

against the fence, fracking the

sullen summer silence;

a solitary seagull searches the sky

for any hint of a thermal to ride while

high above, a silent jet is a

tiny silver crucifix on a

I have moved to a new (old) town and I am still trying to work it out.

Some days it seems a place of walking sticks and OAP go-karts;

other days it is a town of toddlers furiously asserting their independence through the new-fangled thing called walking;

then there is the sudden torrent of schoolkids which inundates quiet streets before swiftly draining away;

this is also a place of plaques wherein is hidden a quiz— which King or Queen didn’t visit, stay, was given a banquet or is buried.

But no, above all else this is a town of dogs—so many that this is a place where one treads carefully.

Soft insistent rain

summons smells of

tarmac and roses

dampened dust and

delphinium to the court of

shortlived Summer

wedged uncomfortably on the

year's bench between

three cavorting cousins

hope decline and death

determined to deceive them

just once with an

The aisle is full of strange noises, students struggling with shopping in this posh supermarket, losing their Marx in the pages of their textbooks as they search for the perfect pasta— penne, penne, tekel, upharsin.

How do you tell a great actress

she’s got it wrong? After all, she was

knocking it out of the park when I was

still in school, beautiful and brash yet

innocent in her youth, sharp and

subtle in maturity and always

on time, off book, a perfect pro.

Nevertheless, today she was skating, and on

my thin ice, since no one would blame her for an

off day, but I was supposed to be

directing her.

“Are you sure, Steve?” she would ask after each

gentle nudge, as I felt like a tug

towing the Queen Mary out of an

extremely tight dock until suddenly she

grasped exactly what I wanted and,

under her own power, left safe harbour

out onto the fathomless

ocean of her art.

I don’t suppose he will be missed,

the bee I found dying on the

garden slabs.

I doubt there’s anyone

counting them out and back again

in the hive.

And does death mean anything to creatures

so small? In nature, after all, death is so

commonplace.

Still, it crawls—perhaps searching for that

out-of-the-way place the living seem to

seek to die, for

only the snails, whose trails end in

sudden corpses, carry on their backs their

own cairns.

Our annual starlings have vacated for more commodious lodgings in the neighbour roof, evicting the sparrows who now noisily inhabit the servants’ quarters under the tiles, above the guttering, though they don’t seem to mind.

Meanwhile, another starling—an offspring perhaps, drawn back by the smell of struggle, warm worms and fledging—takes up the vacant tenancy, clueless initially, rummaging through last year’s squalor, haphazardly filching the lost property of the garden: a gull’s quill, the underdown from pigeons, a piece of greenery too long to fit and left hanging from the gutter.

But somehow it works, a female approves the refurbishment, moves in, mates, lays, hatches, and they ferociously feed some maw I can hear but cannot see, while

over us all, a woodpigeon flaps like laundry.

When climbing a steep hill

I find it best

not to eye the crest

but to study my feet and

watch my step as it’s

safer not to know

I’m imprisoned by my cat’s craving

for company and warmth, her

declension of nose-rubbing,

paw-kneading, purring

finally settling into that

curl of fur, pinioning my

human hopes of doing

beneath her indolence, her

thrumming and the

occasional sigh

when dreams of

catching mice

It’s the fought that counts, isn’t it? That I fought bravely with blunt scissors, sentient paper, cellotape with no obvious beginning, tags too small for a large hand, rectangular objects that became somehow multi-dimensional, with two left hands in need of a third.

Living on chalk, even

thirty-six hours of stolid rain

vanished quickly into

deep aquifers, the late

sharp sun chiseling

laggard clouds into fat

insistent tugs nudging the

bulk of rain into a

deeper berth out at

God,

even at this late stage, please

give me hips, to spare me the

indignity of my trousers

falling down in the

presence of others, no matter how

tightly I tie my belt.

 You wouldn’t want me to wear

braces would you, with all their

connotations of plutocrats or

paunchy old men shuffling in slippers?

No, make me for once like my wife, whose

gold-link belt seems to

swoon about her waist in defiance of

gravity and, dare I say it, you

I’m lost now in the Region of the Summer Stars. My preference was always for their Winter brethren, but I could find my way to the Summer Triangle— Altair, Deneb, Vega; follow the curve of the Plough’s handle to red Arcturus and Spica in Virgo; could even riddle out hidden corners like Scutum Sobieski; and once gazed on the green, milky oval of the great Andromeda Galaxy; though in murky, lamp-lit England I’ve only seen my home Galaxy, all splendour and dust, a handful of times.

Now they are just stars my failing eyesight cannot resolve, their beauty impervious to my ignorance.

My paternal battlefleet is formed in line ahead, led by my great-grandfather—a mid-Victorian ironclad, clunky but potentially vicious—followed by my grandfather—a sleek Jutland battlecruiser in his prime—and lastly my father—a workhorse but fast, a Leander-class frigate perhaps— making signals to me to “Put on all speed” and to “Close up”.

He wants me to join that proud if obsolete line of battle, all of whom fought on into their nineties, but whose number I shan’t make up, my seams already sprung, the pumps struggling to keep me afloat, surrounded by tenders doing little good.

I wondered if these

brain-babies would be

born deformed with all this

Thalidomide I’d ingested, or

whether they’d just be

differently-abled, better

perhaps than my old self at

working out who or what or

where or when or

“Ow” wasn’t quite cutting it, wasn’t

getting my point across, and

modulation, tone, timbre all

ran like raindrops off the

PPE surrounding me until

my body twisted my “ows” into

bellows which cowed the

bustling E.D. into an