Rain, Everywhere

Tap-water, grimy and dank, maintains the posing flowers like a pretty corpse, on the dead wood of the table-top. Domestic life, under the fizz of electric light. Envious all of the outside: where blankets of rain make sculpture, make symphony, of the dark, London night.

Who can compete with that plash and pulse? Tell me vase, tell me lamp. Tell me hung clothes, usual but damp. Tiny moutains rise and fall every moment on each lake, whilst valleys race from centre to shore. A gust of wind, and they rove back once more. The umbrella of St Paul's has never hosted such a choir; no pottering Priest ever heard such a prayer. No smart banker ever summed your worth, that the city of trees, soaking, always knew. The man in the moon has the best view: a vast sky of aloof cloud-faces, crying cold features, right across our places; without hope or home here, but back down to earth.

Rain, you're ascribed heights and times in the Weather Office. An audit of anorak sales offers another record. As does this. And it is gone now, your gift. But you will return - to eyes, to ears, and to flesh, always uncaught by the written word.

Strays, Athens

They look almost dead, flat out on Cathedral steps.

Or limping down side streets. Unable to muster the breath to bark or to beg.

Noon. Summer heat. A solace of scraps in shadows?

Perhaps. Dogs without Owner, dogs without Master, become dusty, drifting ghosts of their species. Foreign to their cousins who fight.

Night. The sky above the city grows dark, the Acropolis lights up upon the hill, crowds sprawl from café to street, friends from restaurants spill - and, then, awaiting lovers, dances, dangle dainty feet from balconies.

And into the indifferent humans of these late pleasures, the howls of the stray dogs call: From the magnet of monuments, past the swirl of the central square, to the rubble and rubbish of fringe estates, howls more honest than any poem, howls as simple as a child's prayer. Howls of one hope. That in the millions, there must exist one who loves them, somewhere.

I am . . .

. . . tired, tired, tired. Limbs hung low like loose autumn leaves - then complaining like elderly slaves - all as if there was nothing left to seek - except, the drop down into endless sleep. Tired, tired, tired. Such terms surround me like a tomb.

Why must this I suffer this body, asks a thought? But then a rebel rumour goes round the arms - that the hands still know how to dance. That these old legs might still run for more than a bus. Maybe even for a girl, in lust or in love. And that the tired thuddings of the brain - well, that they just sum to naught. So the stereo turns up to fill the room -

- and as the feet come back from their chore (the week's rubbish left outside the door) live flesh gives the finger to dull brain. The illusion of summer's heaven - dancing round an autumn kitchen. The alarm clock, meanwhile, waits in the bedroom's corner. As reliable as ever to pound on the wrong side of seven. As ready as an office to renew morning pain.

Tonight's Something

Whatever you say about the place - the stoned Australian staff, thirty minutes over each burger; the Primary School dirty wooden floor; as gaudy as an Estate Agent, the bright blue sofa; two suited and booted boys cheering - with barely-secret love - the goal-scorer Drogba; the empty rows of wipe-clean seats; dotting this and that table average bottles of over-priced wine - one old poem at least wasn't true:

Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home

Wasn't true tonight, here. Here admist a passing, grand dream of European football. Admidst the neutral air of some random London bar. Where after the whistle blows, everyone just wanders off, bored. Whilst, there - an eternal poem. Or at least another little hyperlink.

(Me, not pretending this time means otherwise. Not < insert poem here >, nor anything.)

Office View -

- surely no poem could be made out of you? where a fragment of sun seeps down through fat oblongs and jagged diaganols of random stacks of buildings, and not even the skeletal arm of one winter tree can be seen. Always growing and always glowing! a great oaken umbrella of harmonious mankind! - each city was first designed for perfect human life, or its dream.

Now night falls. Random office lights go off, and pubs pour out their poisons. Concrete, stone and steel become sillouhettes, draping the sky with dark curtains, the colour of death.

Here?

Should I tear down the bricks of this rented pad to hunt you down, impossible poem of the present moment? Rip out the wires, take to the fittings with a sledgehammer? Search for you in the anger of an exploding boiler? Leave on for so long the bathroom heater, that flailing towels ignite as a line of flames? Cook a hob of oil on the highest heat, let the microwave smoke on metal coins? Then stand outside on the street, to seek out a first verse in the wisps of a deadly firework?

Or batter down the door of the rolling washing machine, and maximum all the taps, and lie back and bathe, as the flood spreads down through the flats, transforms anonymous strangers into nightmare neighbours? Then fish out a song from their shouts? Or net a sonnet from the sirens - streaming to here though the city like water snakes?

Or: I could open all the windows, and summon as if a minor god, stood naked and shouting, the blue ice winds of northern winters:

Bitter arctic weather! Pure and clear, come here, and with full whirl make a hurricane of all that is called mine, the CD sleeves and bills, stereo and TV, the books, newspapers and magazines, the lost receipt and stray shopping list, and the shelves of DVDs. Assault, assault this body with all that stuff in a vast swirl, like a fist!

- in the hope the random words of it all will unravel, to write out the story of my soul, or paper my nudity with a profound cloth of language, or print wizardrous words upon my eyes, so tomorrow I see this world as beautiful and true. Heh, if even one word might stick, or just draw blood, or just one little cut, then: Do it, breeze, do.

Impossible poem of the present moment. As closed as a concrete wardrobe. From old jeans the scent of past lovers already is washed. Female fingers no longer lift up jumpers from this old flesh, with that urgent touch. There is a cliché of cobwebs under the stairs. A remark is ready for the office lift; X is gaining in chins what he's losing in hairs. The lipstick on that white shirt is utterly lost. Frozen morning light makes it a grey ghost, collapsed on the bedroom floor. A cold city day yawns awake - and impossible poem of the present moment, even your dream will soon be no more.