Its comical conical-hat-shaped, greeny-grey shell:

A tongue as well

That rasps the delicate seaweed through its front door:

What’s more –

And this is what gives me the greatest surprise –

Two bright eyes

Indoors at the end of long tentacles poking out, which

Twitch.

But its funniest feature by far is its foot

That’s put

Straight down to clamp it fast to the rock.

(Gulls knock,

You see, at the shell to try and winkle it off

For scoff.)

But the limpet does more with its foot than Ian Rush.

Forsaking the crush

Of its home life it stomps off, foraging, humping its shell with it,

Then thinks, ‘The hell with it,’

And slithers back to exactly where it began.

What a man

Is the limpet, in his wilderness of weed!

Needless to say, they make very good pets indeed.

The Site

Lengths of scaffolding

Bonging like tuning forks,

Grumbling barrows

Rumbling out over the ramps,

Sun-tanned, shirtless workmen singing,

Pulley ropes from high windows swinging,

The bursts of a drill

That churns and chews and champs,

One day will be

Number 1,2,3,

Houses quiet as neighbours

In a sheet of stamps.

Something He Left

An overcoat warming a clothes-hanger,

Alone in a cupboard after his body had gone

To be made into flame and memory,

Standing as still as he placed it,

Or very faintly trembling,

The night before the dawn he put death on.

Dave Dirt Was on the 259

Dave Dirt was on the 259

(Down Seven Sisters Road it goes),

And since he’d nothing else to do

He stuck his ticket up his nose,

He shoved his pen-top in his ear,

He pulled three hairs out of his head,

He ate a page out of his book,

He held his breath till he went red,

He stuck his tongue out at the queue,

He found a nasty scab to pick,

He burped and blew a raspberry,

He imitated being sick,

He stuck a piece of bubblegum

Inside a dear old lady’s bonnet.

If you should catch the 259,

Make sure that Dave Dirt isn’t on it!

Frosty Winds Made Moan

Old Frosty Winds

Is grizzled and raddled and sozzled and saddled

With much unhappiness where he sits

On the bench in the shopping precinct

On winter afternoons.

Sometimes he shouts at the people

And sometimes he shouts at himself.

His beard is like broken glass and his clothes like garbage.

Poor Frosty Winds,

With only a bottle for company

And what he has to say

In the tearing weather

To his sad head.

Soon he’ll be dead

As the litter that blows round his ankles,

As the supermarket tickets, screwed away, useless,

The bang of the trolleys that stack up alongside the wall

And the wind that will turn

On its journey.

What can you say to Frosty?

At least you can say goodbye.

Strange Service

A most peculiar postman

is working down our street.

He doesn’t hand the letters through –