Creative writing

Dictionaries and guides and books

I can’t yet read are mounting up,

closing in with their unknown spaces.

My desk is a shambles. There’s nowt

in poetry (as has been said before) –

though sticking at it might bring

the kind of small change you get

from a corner shop in a different city.

Each stab at it is like running across

a contested traffic junction, trying

to buy a rail ticket in a language

that’s not your own. Occasionally,

you have to put your foot down

and there it is in every casual remark.

Tom Phillips

Любовта

Walking along the high street

beside posters for films

I’ll never watch,

I saw the crimson wing

of a butterfly like a splash

of sunlight, a stain of blood.

Already its lustre

had disappeared

and nobody stopped –

or stooped –

to pick it like a flower.

It fell from the sky

but nonetheless survived

a thousand footsteps.

Tom Phillips

The signs along the road

There’s something awry.

I’m coughing more than usual

and undergrowth leaf edges

are pale with blight. It’s spring

over half the continent

but shifting patterns deliver

cloudbanks only

and cold hard fronts.

We’re watching pictures

of chapped fingers hooked

through steel lattice,

unfurling rolls of wire,

some kind of bodying forth

at a convenient distance.

Or misplacing them back

into memories we’d thought

were past their sell-by date.

There’s something awry.

On flat plasma screens

tomorrow's forgotten articulate

stories that will be there

to be unearthed in future times.

For the moment, the hot air condenses

over lecterns, in passport offices,

across the lens of a camera.

Over woods that embroider

the foreshortened horizon,

buzzards or some other birds of prey

circle like lonely wolves.

Someone has spent half a day

putting up a sign to warn

of an underground infiltration tank.

There’s something awry.

Tom Phillips