Bird Trap on the Étendue Sauvage

 

Bird Trap on the Étendue Sauvage

 

You often catch sight of these green

metal contraptions - seen

where verges are somewhat verdant

or they’ve bagged up flat insurgent

arid blooms of grasses, palms, shrubs

and your birds are grubbing

amongst litter and plastic scuttered thinning soil

beneath an incubating sun that boils.

Approach with caution. The common myna,

clever bleeder - ringed eyes like shiners -

has tunneled within, taken the bait,

filled his belly, cleared his plate,

hopped back to realise his sticky predicament.

His fate sealed like feet in cement

and his mate – they pair bond, you know –

is looking from without as if to go

and join him within. No, no, no, no,

he must seem to her to shriek,

horrid morsels mummifying on beak

until he gives up the ghost and his feet

are pointing skywards. An invasive species –

or so the pundits will have you believe,

that does nothing more than thieve

living space – squatting on indigenous nests,

noise pollution, parasites, breeding pests –

must be controlled, it’s humane you’re told

and you shrug, accept, call it or fold

and look - they paint the bird traps green.

When you sleep, you often dream –

shrewd eyes looking from without within

that wonder if you’ll save your skin.

Summit of Beauty and Love

 

Summit of Beauty and Love

 

A desert day fit for hot baking,

your armpits damp, your throat aching

conjure cracked roadside eggs sizzling

and sweet-filled taco syrup spilling -

just oozing into parched cracks.

You’d watched her morning struggle -

arm behind, her fingers juggling

as she's hooking up her cupcakes,

and now you sit outside and wait,

the Pajero’s air-con grappling manfully

with an Arabian summer’s heat.

Her friend comes from dark interiors

of some low-rent abode

bucking bales as she negotiates the road -

surely those buttons will never hold,

or so your inner bad boy hopes.

Later at IKEA, she’s picked sausages

a hearty helping, a wanton portion,

her teeth, her lips perform contortions

and how you loved that word –

tittered at it, when you were young

and growing up, it was among

those you banked for sleepless nights.

Later, among the clocks and lights,

her bag bulging with trivial picks –

she speaks Filipino and licks

the cone as whippy ice cream drips

from wafers onto fingers.

What you’re told later long lingers

into your afternoon siesta’s dreams –

her French boyfriend, of vast appetites

vacationed and had taken flights

of fancy with some other squeeze,

sending evidence in the post –

it must have been a hollow boast

after she’d packed him. Such a shame

but, even so, you feel it just the same,

swimming up the torpor of your brain

and Venus was her name.

Four Candles

 

Four Candles

 

You watch them put people in the jungle

and make them eat worms,

slap leeches in their baths -

been doing it for years – adding dabs of colour -

celebrities, influencers – off they trundle -

I mean, if it’s a Tik Tok Twerk

with followers a-plenty, they better get packing.

Switch it on, how we laughed –

or if you think something’s lacking,

maybe not. Later tonight there’ll be a top ten

of things somehow better then –

Fray Bentos, Dixons Pick n Mix,

Saturday shopping at Woolworths –

but there’s a nip in the air.

Want a national dish? Have an English -

goodness gracious me, you saw that once

they’re putting chips on everything that’s wrong

but you’d rather be caught with a poppadum,

left wondering if it’s dubbed a classic

because the dim and distant remember it.

Who told you to think that,

made it a condition, a living thing,

a terrible thing to lose –

you'd never put yourself in their shoes

or walk around in them

because they know there are those

who laugh at four candles –

even Griff said it’s a shoddy thing to lampoon

shooting sparrows with a cannon,

there must be something worse in the room –

coming from jungles, sculling with spoons

while you’re told those poor people on the rafts,

will make it here and will fail to laugh.

A Jack of all Knaves

 

A Jack of all Knaves

 

Sometimes you’d like to jack it all in,

my Johnkin, wish for the tin tack, the sack,

put the boot in, flirt with original sin

some negligence, misdemeanor, peccadillo,

tell me, is this the way to Amarillo,

Phoenix Nights - show me your Peter Kay,

homeward bound? It’s that way.

But Jack Sprat could eat no fat,

whilst ever-expanding girths of those who lack

for nothing, are in want of filling,

need stuffing, see? Keep on drilling,

keep on running, gimme some lovin, roll with it,

lumberjack, steeplejack - nothing bootjack

will ever have teeth enough to remove shoes,

pining for the fjords, what’s the use?

You’d fix that flat, but the jack’s gone AWOL,

the AA  won’t pick up the phone at all,

the RAC used to salute, you know,

but you’re stuck there and cannot roll

or join the great big convoy

and ain’t she a beautiful sight?

Rubber Duck, Pig Pen,

Spider Mike might allow

your tar to plant his jack on the ship’s prow,

watch that pennant flutter South

as she’s churning

her buttered Northbound wake –

HMS Raleigh, HMS Drake

bowling for jacks on Plymouth Sound

as the Spanish Armada’s Eastward bound

for the Philippines.

Or even you dream

of kicking back,

plugging headphones in the jack,

Hit the Road, Jack and don’t you come back

no more, no more, no more, no more.

Ah, it’s all a bit of Jackanory

what’s the story, Balamorey,

while she’s home at home from home

plumping your pillows,

licking her lips,

heaving bosom and see-through slips

standing with her syrups on her rose-hips –

another month brings another wage

while you tell it like the end of days

coming on like a polymath’s sage

but all those scratched spirals speak

to nothing so much as a jack of all knaves.

Please Remember To Mention Me (In Tapes You Leave Behind)

 

Please Remember To Mention Me (In Tapes You Leave Behind)

 

Fishy tissue from the bin

you just put the used trash in

wipe liquid from your puncta

cold smears and the glass is smudged

from side to side

so please remember to mention me

in tapes you leave behind

 

Vans exist in old Qatar

did not know they reached that far

talking T Shirts not the car

lifting artifacts off the hook

that stray offside

so please remember to mention me

in tapes you leave behind

 

She’s got wheels wheels of steel

dentist and her whining drill

his cavalry and his hill

never too far from glorious

but too unkind

so please remember to mention me

in tapes you leave behind

 

Curiosity kills cats

born in skips, but for all that

there is nothing that they lack

and the marimba shimmers

as beaters grind

so please remember to mention me

in tapes you leave behind

 

Magnificent men in their

flying machines windswept hair

up tiddly up up and flares

shoot up dummy Lee Coopers

but where’s your spine

so please remember to mention me

in tapes you leave behind

 

When your world is running down

all you find is all you found

she who’s in will make no sound

but trespasses against you

and love is blind

so please remember to mention me

in tapes you leave behind

 

Shangri-La is sitting here

playing postman’s knock that's clear

name that tune then disappear

and I’ll name that tune in one

I think you find

sometimes I did remember to mention you

in tapes I left behind

Yesterday’s Favourite

 

Yesterday’s Favourite

 

There are bureaucrats and plunging necklines,

you know which you prefer -

and her eyes glittered with half mocked up steel,

viz - well it all depends on how you feel

and some are well past their sell-by date.

It flickers across your mind,

death by a thousand paper cuts and all that

and you wonder why she did not say use by.

Maybe she sees your woman, sawin’ on a fiddle,

playin’ it hot – and raising flames of sin

with her violin, violin, violin –

all yours, Babooshka, Babooshka, ya-ya -

like how her subtonic, snaps to, resolves tension

and release – oh, her buttons be thieves of vision

she looses just one or two -

you’re never caught looking but looking, she’s shaking

think of all the music we’re making

oh, and how we’d like to make even more.

Still, a phone call begets a tap on the door –

something about revelations, elbows, short sleeves,

those boxes need to be ticked you know

so, consider this a ticking off, ears made of cloth -

sweet sweaty brows onto pillow cleavage drips

like sails billow over prows of departing ships.

 

4 Whats, Fool?

 

4 Whats, Fool?

 

Once, when he was very small,

he scrawled in biro upon the toilet wall,

4 to Doomsday.

What made him do this, he could not say,

It was all that university food in the JCR

one too many at the bar

of the student union that time David Owen

popped in – there was going

to be an election – 87 and  Maggie Out,

the riff-raff shout –

all that Two Tone, New Wave,

calm down, behave.

Wait, wait – was it Peter Davison?

Could be, he had a lot on –

A Very Peculiar Practice, Sandra Dickenson

all squeaky voice and Trillian,

Brenda Blethyn, Chance in a Million,

and then there was The Doctor.

No matter, what’s salient is this,

when he returned next day, for a shit,

beneath it, some wag had put

4 Whats, Fuckwit?

with much ado about underscoring.

They’d call that trolling these days,

but back then it had made him think,

wounded and blink.

Still, ask him that question in 2026

and I think he’d have 4 answers for it.