So loud, the sound disorientates. Look up and see panel joins for oversized baggage about the size of my problems below islands of cloud in the month’s freshness.
Something in the stacking structures life below, unseen above. An impulse to enter that sky one day or at least find comfort in sharing space
feels adjunct to worldwide business or mere witness to a holiday opening or closing.
We’re not quite in Bedfont here where you wonder about the runway and tyre companies or locals breaking.
Sometimes at night, lifting into purple-black for smudges of distant grey, you wonder from that little window why
when you know the watering holes, stadia, streets’ confluences, springs from Hatton Cross and all the places people in their hundreds walk
the roads and gardens are always empty no matter how calculated the look.
‘Half a thought for Hamish’ has been included in the autumn edition of London Grip. It was initially submitted (unsuccessfully) for the summer edition but I’m grateful to editor Michael Bartholomew-Biggs for suggesting a resubmission in June for this month’s magazine. I didn’t change anything, so I imagine it must have been deemed to fit better with this month’s poems (introduced below). The poem was written with a very specific setting in mind, which is the Windsor side of Eton bridge.
N.b. There currently seems to be a problem with the link below – poem posted here in the meantime
Spare half a thought for Hamish McGinty, his boots spattered by river mud, geese and sea birds peppering his temporary table under the sky’s off-white Sunday.
Spare half a thought for Hamish, his grey and white head smiling without direction.
Spare half a thought, he thinks, if you can, but for what?
Spare half a thought for Hamish McGinty: those river walks he’ll never vlog. This is the man without subscribers.
Spare half a thought for Hamish, caught between Mephistopheles and the raging salt chuck rails of The White Stuff; half local, half tourist – both parts mystified.
Spare half a thought when the dawn means nothing, when you’re clambering around sealed boxes from the past on the lorry of the mind and heart.
Spare half a thought for Hamish McGinty. He restrains himself from talking: would do so if you asked him.
The mind isn’t ‘out there’ for him yet on communal pavements – you wouldn’t mentally file him as another babbling shipwreck.
Spare half a thought for Hamish when he has no satellite pre-sets or passengers for the road ahead.
Spare half a thought as he gets up from the table and over the bridge past Wren’s hotel, an ancient church and the reliable indefinable grey and violet of the river.
Spare half a thought for Hamish. No-one can search his catalogue of the present from a distance and click some heart. Spare a thought.
Unfortunately we’re booked up, sold out – all the major graveyards and burial grounds, odd patches of land and even driveways people used to book on our app are resting places of people squashed together like faded burgundy landfill coffee cups. In fact, ‘Just Burial’ has gone into liquidation. Where we used to charge the earth we’re undercut by conglomerates of ash. They keep your memorial in the cloud just as safe as if you were in the ground. No fragments to reassemble on ascension, no odyssey of the skull, but a 64-bit virtual mansion forms the many rooms of our father’s house.
(This is one of the first poems I wrote, over 20 years ago. I probably wouldn’t go with the same rhyme or rhythm now but there haven’t been many revisions over that time, other than an oscillation between ‘when storms rip up and’ and ‘when rip tides occlude or’).
In Christchurch, under old management,
A Ship in Distress was Grandpa’s favourite restaurant
(though the pleasure was transient).
Ships in distress are hostage to
unseen forces manifest
beneath the settled blue.
A ship in distress withholds cargoes
of human immaterial,
emotions and suggestions
unheeded, individual.
Ships in distress are obviously so
when storms rip up and defeat them,
but many a vessel is quietly low
as warning sounds die on emission.
Wilderspool Causeway 