one stamp with a yellow bird on a blue background,

another that must be the flag.

I set it in the corner

beside the toaster and the broken kettle, and think about

a Canadian called Rain, who I expect no longer has a little

silver barbell piercing her left nipple.

Manifesto on Sunday

First of all, fuck the ignorant rat-faced girl giving backchat to the man in the vegetable shop for she’s upsetting my sense of the world order. Second, fuck the man in the vegetable shop for he’s more of a vegetable than the cauliflower. Third, fuck the banker unsure how to wire a plug for he’s already reneging on what we agreed. Fourth, fuck the pundits for they talk too much and say nothing and will not explain in proper detail what they know and why or where and how they feel. Fifth, fuck the ballboys who expect me to buy this shit for they happily watched while the house got dismantled and we were left sat outside on a green Chesterfield and it looks like rain. Sixth, fuck the faith schools because I know what happens in the absence of others, and fuck all those who never got around to visiting the angry kings to state their queries plainly, but moped instead about the precinct, and fuck also the finest minds of my generation destroyed only by the soft lighting of advertising. Seventh, fuck those who want the licence fee cut. And eighth and ninth and tenth fuck this entire co-ordination since in any village A is working for B and C is really not feeling well at all and D, having misjudged the end of the steps, is mid-fall, his tray of coffee mug and coffee and digestive biscuits rising to their rest, then reaching it, then resting, then beginning to descend.

Adeline

When the smallest one among them

tasted air and named it breath,

the others lopped her silver hair

with garden shears and when she wept

all through the second hymn

they hid her yellow duffel coat

and so she ran the two streets home

to where they said they couldn’t see her,

no. Her brother’s glasses trapped the sun

and made his eyes alive with fire.

Each colour had a different flavour.

She ran the taps to free the rivers

then begged her eldest sister let her

count the galaxy of freckles.

But no one ever missed her

with their spit or snowballs,

an open hand or closed. She stayed

so still. She was so good.

They laid her body on the doorstep

like a sandbag for the flood.

Collusion

We’d wake to find the place

strange. Even some treeless

crossroads in the back end

of nowhere could, in a flash,

change: famous for a second

then synonymous with loss.

To commune, we knelt in packs

at altar rails on velvet pads

but still each pose was unalike:

head up; head down; dead tired;

frail; some arthritic twinge

or nerve trapped in the hip.