Badges

Someone said something recently in an instant message about badges being a good conversation starter. I was resting because my back hurt after I’d lifted something stupid. A little while back I had a fall. I put my badge on and stuffed a reusable cotton tote bag in my back pocket. I decide to pop to the local shop to buy a four pack.
I exit the rusting metal escape stair at the rear of my first floor apartment. A guy stands fanning a barbeque adjacent the boundary wall. There’s a farm’s worth of meat lined up on the hot steel grille, already turning brown. I wonder how much carbon all that accounts for. Dub music is playing out so loud you’d hear it three streets away. As I descend, I remember there’s no last step.
I can’t decide which beer to buy so the shop owner comes over to help. We’ve run out of that one but if you want flavoured beer try this. I buy flavoured beer, maybe because I feel my life has lost flavour. Nice T-shirt I say to the little girl. On it is an image of a unicorn surrounded by colourful psychedelic rings. I assume the girl is the shop owner’s daughter. You hear what he said, the man says. The girl shrinks but manages a smile. I give the man £12 to get a fiver back but he seems confused. I explain it to him.
I leave the shop and cross the road, staring accusingly through the windows of passing cars. A car alarm goes off behind me, the same one that’s been bothering me each day since I moved in. I peer over my shoulder and realise it’s the shop owner’s. Sonofabitch, I mutter.
A couple look down at my badge as I pass them. I see a mouth move but no words. I walk back past litter lining the alleyway, knowing I’ll pick it up tomorrow. The recycling bins are overflowing with beer cans, only a handful mine. My neighbour sits rigid against the ground floor rear extension wall, leering grin on his face like Al Capone, clearly heavily intoxicated. I think about the garden again, all hardscape concrete. If there was a fire, I thought, it’d be quite well protected.
My life’s pretty quiet now. When I can get out of bed, I’m turning over the same goddamn stuff in my head. Everything I see, everything I hear, touch, smell. It’s exhausting. Every time I get up I start to feel rough. I thought it had gone away. I’ve been taking some medication but that’s stopped. My friend died and all I seem to think about is myself. They say we’ve a good head on us, trying to save the world. But my head’s a mess, and then I often reckon it might all be for pretty much selfish ends anyway.
I get angry a lot these days. I think it’s the sense I have of a dwindling mental faculty and inability to understand. That or an incapacity to control. I take another swig of my drink. Beer probably doesn’t help. But then it calms me down and helps me forget at least for a while. Then there’s the writing, helps that within reason. A sort of tarot card of a naked Japanese man and lady, usually propped at an angle against the digital radio, has fallen over and I hadn’t noticed to reposition it. Unusual. I hear someone outside my window say something along the lines most things are really blurred and I’m glad for this moment at least my mind isn’t sent whirring. I stare into the laptop reflection or somewhere about it and it helps me centre. It’s running on battery. I start to feel a little drunk and let the thought go.
Sometimes I get so tense and my body seems to just lock up. But if I don’t keep fighting, I’ll lose it. Do I deserve to do this to myself, I think. I have to keep feeling that I’m processing it all, or I’ll flip. Sometimes I think, if I don’t think about it, nothing’s any different, and I can save myself all the stress.
I stay up late in the summer, something to do with my diurnal clock. What badges do we all wear, I wonder. My mind appears to slow down again. I hear a sound knocking against the wall. There’s a racket upstairs, someone stomping about. A house alarm goes off in the distance. I take in another breath.

Bus Driver Vacancies

Bus driver vacancies
Call this number now
We reguarly have new opportunities
When our doors open
To welcome new recruits
When the old ones have faded
Lost their pizzaz
Their highs exhausted
Drifted away from
Former allegiances
People come and gone along
The way
Their stories told
Been and gone
Memories all that’s left
In their jaded eyes
All alone to count
The days
Before they became
A bus driver
Their whole life
Ahead of them.

Catching the Butterfly (57), for Victoria

1.

Trace back my steps
To make sense of
Black ringed sea groynes
Geogrids plastic
Soil support
Rubberised movement joint
Black pebble slipway
Splitting asphalt and
Tarmac sloping away
Rusted sheet piles
Steep unguarded drop
Depths of sea weeds
And a boat
Lapping against the high tide
Short of hours
Tide tables, breakwaters
The shape of waves
Rolling, passer by
The last one won’t let go.

2.

Stuck, writing backwards
Two shells, black and white,
Among my hand
Among each other
Lovelorn
Palaces and hiding places
The beauty of shells of
You and me
And the sound of the sea
Within
Flutter and rush of blood
From here all is human centred
Inlets and coastal pools
Birds nesting among
Bunker grafitti
Wheat fields in motion
Hardy trees along the shingle
Street, blood red sand
Keep off beach.

3.

Trace back my steps
To see how I started
Loving this person
In this dream of mine
Catching the butterfly
Around grassy verges
Stooping left and right
Before it flies away
Forgetting everything
Once closely guarded
Like fortresses
And tiny windows
Like three turning four
The tilt of the earth
This side of the hour clock
And back again
Like bird cry, Mikama,
And when I stop still
It all comes back.

Choose Life

Choose life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose fast food and chain shops and identikit high streets. Choose cheap air travel. Choose energy from the grid. Choose exotic food. Choose cars. Choose a souped up exhaust. Choose concreting your driveway, your towns, your gardens. Choose motorway traffic. Choose pollution. Choose lung disease, pulmonary hypertension, depression. Choose criticism. Choose uptightness. Choose lack of imagination. Choose plastic. Choose disposable packaging, bottles, bags, and electric fans. Choose portable gas heaters. Choose your friends. Choose extra napkins. Choose your towels washed every day. Choose meat. Choose taking more than your share. Choose doing it like everyone. Choose cheap fashion. Choose treating the planet like a dustbin. Choose running the tap. Choose multiple showers. Choose timings. Choose waste. Choose closing your fucking eyes. Choose irresponsibility. Choose blame culture. Choose passing the buck. Choose moaning. Choose drinking so much to forget it all and wondering who the fuck you are on a Sunday morning. Choose money. Choose amassing excess wealth in property. Choose poverty. Choose drugs. Choose not being able to afford a fucking meal. Choose cruise ships. Choose exocoriating those in power. Choose anger. Choose machismo. Choose individualism, defensiveness, and populist rhetoric. Choose the same for your kids. Choose TV. Choose soap operas. Choose binge watching. Choose a laptop and emojis and firing off fucking emails. Choose picking up your phone every two minutes. Choose battery life. Choose power consumption. Choose bitching. Choose convenience. Choose the cheapest option or your money back. Choose suing the arse off someone. Choose lawsuits. Choose immortality. Choose another planet to wreck. Choose expression. Choose carbon. Choose your environment. Choose your mind.
Choose your future.
Choose life.

Escalator Safety Announcement

Escalator safety announcement
Dear passengers
Please consider the escalator moving stepway as you trample carelessly across it
Its years of operation and periodic frequency of disruptive maintenance cycles are in direct relation to your capacity for casual disregard
Those intractable cycles that you bemoan as if they were unavoidable
Ouch ouch ouch the escalator says
Each creak and groan another step on the ever-diminishing road to obsolescence
My wheels receive no oil, my cogs no lubrication, my machinery no care
Hold the handrail, okay
But do you hold my hand as you kick me repeatedly in the stomach
If you do, it's more likely so you can kick me harder, get a better grip, finish me sooner
Hold my hand quietly and be still.
Do you stomp over everything in the way you do the escalator
If so, kindly use the stairs.

For Threes

Back in the 90s, around the time a big ship was about to hit the big screen,
There was an electronic music album by Plaid called 'Not for Threes'.
I think it was around this time it all started,
I might have listened to it three times, or it could have been the third song, number three, that got me wondering.
Three is the number of the holy trinity,
The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit
Words spoken in threes
Once, twice, thrice.
If I turned the key in the lock three times,
Would you think twice about it?
Or might you think three times just to feel that sense of completeness
Click, click, click
Off the latch.

I order my poems in three sections.
That being the first, this the second, the third is yet to come.
I turn over the page and it's once, twice, three times empty.
They say that three's a crowd,
But when you feel that aloneness, is it not when you're alone in the crowd, but instead among three
The words passing across you, through the air as you stare
Blankly.
If I said your love would disappear one afternoon at three, dropping like lunch, your spirit, and everything else that seems to deflate mid-afternoon like a pin took to a balloon
The sound is that of three, turning around three times
Spun and flung in the air
Smiles between them but not on your face.
Maybe I've misunderstood three,
How many times, probably more than three,
Have I depended for three things to win an argument.
If I take a topic and like to feel I've covered it totally, finished the thought one might say,
Trust me it's three.
The sun, the sea, the sand.
The sky, the ocean, the breeze.
Flowers, petals, trees.
I could go on with examples
Of three
Things
I do before bed
Or getting up in the morning
The time barely past three
When all of a sudden
It's no longer three things I need.
I forgive you I think I do
For being the third
Bronze medal.

The third time is always the sweetest,
The first, you don't care,
The second, you don't know,
The third, you have learned.
If you gave me three chances to do it again
I'd like to think by the third time I'll have it right.
But even if I haven't and keep making the same mistake
Like seeing no further than the third step
When the earth is burning is beyond the fourth
There's always three
Again.
If I said that one day we'd create life from three
parents
Would you say this is the start of some new paradisiacal society
Or the turning of yet another
Set of threes
Unsure of the next
Turn
Where everything is possible.

Four Sails

Must've been four sails

Sailing past for sale

Must've been four sails

I saw back then.

Standing as the ship's sailed

Sailed past with your sales

Must've been your sails

We saw back then.

Swinging on our four sails

Sails that were for sale

Must've been four sails

With you back then.

I worry about rain

And I worry about water

I wander off

Just to come back again.

As I see your face

Wonder is it ever gonna happen

When days had no number

And it harms me, it harms me

It harms me, it harms me

Still.

In Memoriam (Penge)

Man walks along a train platform, (this is not a joke), carries a red top tabloid, kicks a pigeon out the way, dumps an empty plastic bottle in a general waste bin, moans the train's six minutes late in spite of there being a landslip.
Man walks into cheap chicken shop on identikit high street, orders meat (treatment unconfirmed), orders from minimum wage staff of a different body complexion, doesn't think twice, pops next door to sling some money in a betting shop, chucks something recyclable in a general waste bin, takes his cheap food to his car on credit, drops a cigarette butt, some chewing gum, bemoans the headline in his tabloid newspaper, certain he knows everything, revs up like a man, expels unstudied fumes across the pavement at child height, drives five minutes down the street to his house he could afford to buy through charging extra on jobs.
Man votes to leave well-established, fair-minded, historically significant, generally progressive union, hates foreigners, doesn't know his history, thinks he might end up in another country, doesn't know what's the other end of his street, wants a house extension as cheap as he can get it, his cheap food, anywhere, anytime, cheap flights, cheap fuel, his rubbish collected and taken somewhere he doesn't have to think about it, his inefficient car washed efficiently and cheaply, his trains to run on time regardless of context, circumstance, or historical factors, his money back when they don't, he wants to be able to sue someone when he feels wronged, wants to make money by squeezing every last penny, that's his God-given right. Doesn't do anything for charity or society because it's corrupt. Wants free water free flowing from the tap. All politicians are evil. Job done. Not that they're dealing with intractable problems and are human like anyone else. Man down the pub is another human. So is the checkout assistant lobbing items down the conveyor moaning to him about her shift while ignoring the customer she's serving, she's human and he can sympathise on that level. Doesn't vote. But did once recently when he was absolutely sure what he believed in.
Have you seen this man? Do you recognise this country? These unimaginative choices are a scourge and increasingly far-reaching, gradually and immeasureably being taken up by everyone, causing everyone to eat the same (but not in a good way), breathe the same (again, not in a good way), listen the same (not...), drive the same (enacting rage), observe the same (or not observe), play the same, do the job the same, moan the same, shirk the same (responsibility), unsocial me-dia the same, buy the same, shop the same, cause everything to look the same. Have you seen someone behaving in a such a way? Call time on this monstrousness now. Save this country and the planet before it's too late.

A letter to the Council on waste (form of address: electronic mail)

Dear Ms A.,

Thank you for your email.

We lost another bin this morning. Amid the hail of rain and what, for a minute, looked like snow; amid the blast of tooting horns from private vehicles, another of our treasured containers has fallen.

It's been especially difficult recently.

What with the dire predictions of impending climate catastrophe and the increasing mountains of refuse disposed at the roadside in the latest scourge.

People don't seem to care anymore; or at least they're too ignorant to understand. They walk along the streets heads down, looks of defeat and desperation strewn across their faces, resigned to the inevitable, it would seem.

Yet still the rubbish cometh. As if amid bleak suggestions of alien invasion or attack by another countrydom, we aren't hell-bent on our own self-destruction by refusing to see the plain obvious.

I ask you: Is there anything more important than the planet we depend on? Do people not realise this, or have we all been clouded in ignorance and blinded by our own pretensions to superiority, not yet emerging from the blur?

I know this sh*t of a man called Brexit. He always rejects my recycling advances and I keep becoming distracted by him.

Still I fear it is all too late. What do you think? For the common man or woman, the Council, anyone. The rubbish will keep coming, drowning us in the stink of our own effluent. Yet we continue to bluster and brag and sing and shout as if it's all able to be remedied at the flick of a switch.

I like to end on a positive. Because after all that's what makes us human, isn't it? So here goes. At least there'll be plenty of CCTV footage to watch in our remaining moments... For lack of human moments, I fear this is probably our only hope of distraction. Before the inevitable prospect of crushing extinction I mean.

Thank you for your attention to this most serious of matters. If I do not hear back, I won't hold it against you. I myself frequently refrain from too much social interaction these days, a result of ever-creeping nervous breakdown.

I wish you the best in your journey, for now adieu.

BR