He's The Town Crier

Battleship crowds cruised overhead today
but were later sunk by a desert of
solid blue, pierced only by a
white jet plane that cut a chalky margin
into the sky above our heads.

So many of us gathered together
to see the soldiers parade through our town.
A silver flash of fixed bayonets,
camouflaged uniforms creased razor sharp,
each rank and file in perfect alignment.

A child ate a huge ice-cream and wobbled
on her dad’s shoulders like an egg on a
greasy spoon and wondered “Who is that man
shouting? The one in the funny felt hat?

The Invisible Circumference

It feels that so much time lies ahead of
me that the only image that comes to
mind is a fishbowl filled to the brim with
brightly coloured marbles. It’s last owners

flick their tails and glide silently into
open water. For too long I have been
the marble buried in the centre of
the bunch, the one gasping for air but not

able to kick to the surface. I have
also been the fish patrolling the wide,
invisible circumference, watching
the multicoloured gravel scroll beneath

my belly on a never ending loop.
And tonight the house is quiet, save for
the sound of the clock ticking beneath the
mirror - a sound I did not know it made –

now a tut of distain that can only
be meant for me. No tonight is not the
night I had planned. The ink is loaded in
the barrel of the pen like a bullet

but you just cannot shoot pool with a jump
rope. I intended these words to circle
the skies, to rise on warm thermal drifts and
then vanish like the silver bubbles in

a champagne flute. So I will sit here like
the fisherman’s float, and wait for the time
when I am twitched once and then dragged
beneath the surface.