Oyster

I dib my oyster on the tube.

A Floral Skirt

A walk down Oxford Street produces no images.  Everyone is anonymous, faceless, more or less not there.  I wonder if I can come away with a single image.  What sticks in my mind is a girl in a floral skirt, skinny legs, splay feet, black shoes, standing by the curb.  Her upper half doesn’t register. 

Swallows 2, Quarantine

Fiction can be used as a way of quarantining those parts of the world with which one does not identify, that are inimical.  Forty days and forty nights.  Swallows and Amazons.  Tintin also … What is quarantined is never stated.  But the effect is to render the world innocent of the quarantined thing.

Tube Map

hanging from that abstraction the thread of the city

Another Grey Day on Mount Numbskull

one day I am going to write about what makes sense

sometimes it is like washing one’s face, bandaging a cut

making a valley and tunnel in a sandbox for a toy bulldozer

or sweeping the floor gets it, clearing out the shed

choosing a particular breaking strain

a rod and line and spinner

Two Straight Lines

Sunlight on trees

branches twigs, no leaves

like water drops the passenger is space that

drops on the inward

like tossed peas

over the ice of rails

that the air widens into 

the zone that sterility keeps fecund

the carriage like an hourglass

straightened