El Alto Fairytale

Where did you say
you wanted to capture the portrait?
In the backyard, when the sun sets?
Looking mournful?
...thick ochre dust coating our throats,
coughing in time with each step;
the rubbish-riddled pavements
flanked by funeral parlours
plying their trade with neon crosses...

You see, we were shut out of the house
(no reason given – lack of food, I suppose)
aged six and nine respectively.

Sonnet

Notting Hill Carnival

August bank holiday in Notting Hill,
Stuck in a two-thirds empty sushi bar,
I drink the cheapest soup dish on the menu
And discuss tactics: entry points, how far,
To walk or haggle, Who’s Who. Then the bill
Comes, and I pay. Pay cash, says Jimmy, then you
Won’t waste your cash on beer. We all decide
Vaguely to join the one-way crowd outside,

And it begins, this packed conveyor belt
Of costumes, crowded streets, and creditcards.
Scaffolded billboards boast of low gun-crime,

Strasbourg

Trailing back, smitten through the small hours,
I thought of Anna’s bedhead languor
unchanged these many years,

her unreformed Romanticism
of the first wave – ein Uber-Kunst,
the All in One, the One in All ! –

her Decadence of the last,
draped women, green fairy, industrial smoke
from a Rimbaud pipe –

of her delectable heart-shaped lostness,
« What then is my Destiny ? », and
« I thought the Germans not much fun,

but then I came to live in France ! »

Under the Greenwood Tree

See the songthrush and the barn owl
pray, each ensconced in its hood
of light: brown Franciscan cowl
whose alms, fat panoply of food,

swell to plenty in the twin globes
of the world, one eye at each side
of the head; while slits in robes
peer lustily at the unconfirmed bride,

equally watchful in their facial disc,
huge devil’s eyes computing the distance
from an angel, exterminating risk,
the iron will of happenstance