Interpoetry

Our Lady of the Traffic

 	
Black summer tarmac
bubbles in the microclimate.
Rabid conspiracies whisper.
 
A skeleton appears, 
racing into dense traffic. 
Rubber burns with a scream.
 
The bone-woman runs out
through blue thoroughfares,
thin skull opening, shrieking:
 
‘Help! Help! A house-fire.
Grandmother’s in hospital.
Hayley’s sick.’ Verbal props. 
 
A Rolls Royce front grill
modelled on a Greek temple
silhouettes the fallen goddess.
  
Down on one knee,
in front of the radiator,
this Magdalen of the traffic,
 
Arresting still, something once,
scarecrow with scarlet panties
riding up her crack, whimpers:
 
‘Help! Help! Fifty pence! 
The house burned down last night.
Please imagine the flames.’
 
The skeleton whispers
through rolled-down glass:
‘Grandma’s in so much pain!’
 
Now tears on hot tar
steam invisibly, as silver 
slips through a sweaty bra.
 
She, too, cries for a world
gridlocked in pain and smoke
which no one sees.
 
 
  
 
To A Teenager
 
 
Beats crackle from a metal window,
lurid silver frame of modern vistas.
Chrome slows down and accelerates.
The electronic city whines and wheels,
a teenager running on self-hate who
pounds the sky with bass drum fists,
relentlessly cycles mathematical hi-hats
programmed to clam up and close off, 
suddenly open again with golden
grinning lips which spit rhythm,
insult, the contrary and opposite,
anthems of disorientation and fate.
 
Ponder where these wheels turn,
gliding in adolescence forward.
We've come full circle now, my friend.
You exist in two places at once.
Beyond on your own wild radius.
Here at your point of beginning.
 
 
 
 
Apocalypse 
 
 
A crow flies to the top of a steel tree.
Cold rectilinear branches don’t move.
 
Satellites are crashing to earth like hearts
burned out in an attempt to reach heaven.
 
Where a sun-track of gold crossed the water,
swans wait uneasily by a frozen lake.
 
No fruit in branches of iron this morning.
Only a thin daystar frowning in the east.
 
Why these dystopic horizons everywhere?
A man and woman have been in opposition.
 
An insolent princess and her man-servant.
A would-be holy man and his cosmic whore.
 
Now a melancholy rain which hates people
starts to fall in the uninhabitable city.
 
O God. You made the nightmare of existence.
Why did you do it? Are you sorry sometimes?