Rags and Shags
Watching news, your gaze is held, braced
as if by the locking arms of a service structure
before a rocket launches into space.
When you went to Everton primary,
you’d chafe at the bit for the mobile library,
lend The Big Book of Space and devour it.
But they’d shot frames of a pink deck chair,
abandoned tattered, cut to it over there
in amongst the killed concrete.
The deck had gone, it was incomplete
and as for the fabric – sailcloth, canvas -
well, these artists brush in broad strokes.
Later watch as a bridge is detonated,
surrounding brushland decimated,
causing gaudy peacock plumes to rise.
Meanwhile, on a littered Corniche
they’re building oilskinned cities of tents,
tarpaulins draped from tailgates, low rent
one ringed stoves slowly boiling over.
There’ll be no school today,
instead, a brother pushes his sister to and fro,
doing the Science, counting the holes,
contemplating a combustion chamber’s thrust,
delivering its payload, driving aloft,
doing the Math, stirring the dust.
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