Vinegar Hill

Unfortunately, I don't get many chances these days to write poetry, but I can't let another year go by without having a crack. I know what you're thinking: still using rhymes, at your age? It's a bit rum, I agree. But beggars can't be choosers, and it's the best I could do at short notice. I've decided not to use rhymes again, though.

Spat out each evening through the glass
revolving doors, he speeds like a dog-track hare
between shivering fronds and dripping shrubberies,
fleeing glaze-eyed through the urban square
the duff reggae as the festival crowds disperse;

glaze-eyed he slips down a narrow thoroughfare,
avoiding the outcasts in winter macs
who, standing in solitary pub doorways, stare
into ragged puddles as though at treasure maps:
mimicking vents, they wheeze an atmosphere

that chases him once more up Vinegar Hill;
again from a flowerbed bordering the fence
come pebbles flung by the grabbed handful
as if by a skulking, unseen malevolence:
the day's humiliations rain down like hail,

though if images wobble as on a screen
in front of him to roll like ripened pears
down into gutters and over the cobblestone,
the lines of the bards of despair are the bars
he grabs for his treadmill's steadying frame,

which means his gaze won't break, composure
sustained by the zesty scent of the limes
that line the walkway to the top, where
he's just in time to see in the mind's
intense Greek sunlight a galley disappear

over a blue sea between carnivorous rocks,
which doesn't ruffle the oarsmen, who are skilled
and determined—though this vision drapes
like a turf-green tablecloth over scaffold
hauled taut by a system of pulleys and knots

so that shaving each morning in the dim
half-light pre-dawn, it’s the jackdaw's caws,
ironic, mocking, cut through the illusion:
as he's plunged back down, the spectres
of the hellish tomb-world come back to him.

(December 28th 2008, Holborn)