an empty flask, a half-drunk glass of wine.

Calm yourself. By dawn you will have slept again

and gone. You have a ticket for the plane.

Check it. The flight number. Your home address. Your name.

*

Urinous broken phone booths lead you

from street to back street, to this last one

which stands at the edge of a demolition site.

Unbelievably, it works. With a sense of luxury

you light a cigarette. There is time yet.

Your fingers press the numbers, almost sensually.

Tomorrow you return. Below the flyover

the sparkling merging motorways glamorise

the night. The telephone is ringing in your house.

November

How they can ruin a day, the funeral cars proceeding

over the edge of the Common, while fat black crows

leer and jeer in gangs. A parliament all right.

Suddenly the hour is less pleasant than it first appeared

to take a walk and post a harmless, optimistic letter.

Face up to it. It is far too hot for November

and far too late for more than the corpse stopped

at a red light near the Post Office, where you pause

wishing you could make some kind of gesture

like the old woman who crosses herself as the hearse moves on.

The Literature Act

My poem will be a fantasy about living in a high-rise flat,

on the edge of a dirty industrial town, as the lawful wife of a yob

who spent the morning demonstrating in the market square

for the benefit of the gutter press. This was against a book

of which he violently disapproves and which was written by some cunt

who is a blasphemer or a lesbian or whose filth is being studied

in our local schools as part of some pisspot exam, the bastard.

I feel a thrill of fear as I imagine frying his evening meal

and keeping his children quiet as he shouts at the News. Later

he will thrash in the bed, like a fish out of water, not censoring

the words and pictures in his head. I would like my poem

to be given to such a man by the Police. Should he resist

I would like him to be taken to court; where the Jury,

the Judge, will compel him to learn it by heart. Every word.

River

At the turn of the river the language changes,

a different babble, even a different name

for the same river. Water crosses the border,

translates itself, but words stumble, fall back,

and there, nailed to a tree, is proof. A sign

in new language brash on a tree. A bird,

not seen before, singing on a branch. A woman

on the path by the river, repeating a strange sound

to clue the bird’s song and ask for its name, after.

She kneels for a red flower, picks it, later

will press it carefully between the pages of a book.

What would it mean to you if you could be