Tuesday 29 October 2013

To the gods, the world, oh ok, it's just a poem by me




                              About It

At first there was a slight problem with bendy tape.
It might have been in metric. Or a half-truth in inches.
I had bought a satellite box, second-hand. I like to peer
into the mundane, like a ball, surfing regional news
because: it reminds me of hotels. Those crumbling cliffs
near Cromer, the shifting lists of Munros, a postponement
(the gift of seeping sewage) of a County Flower Show.
I licked a stamp for old times’ sake and thought of islands shrinking

and a strange e-mail on metrics. Oh the eternal anonymity
of three-star rooms. There must have been a map once 

that fit went a voice on the street, climbing my peephole
window and so a camera panned from the back of my head

and the clothes that didn’t quite, taking in the skies, the streets,
the farms, the trees, like a greedy sucking engine

looping the continents. I saw huge calendars overthrown
like statuary; I saw a scarecrow taller than the moon.

And knew the size of it was somewhere, like a pavement,
or the story of the last thing you’ll ever see.


David Bircumshaw. © 2013

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