He lies if you can call it that on stones
below the rapids that he ran last night
on a dare no-one remembers when police
conduct polite enquiries. How he stares.

Let us go then you and I
to a place where wild woodpeckers fly
beneath a pallid piebald sky

and I – ashamed that I live still –
revise each Wednesday my own will
while you – pert, tall and right now shrill –

emit grace notes that rise and float
outside across our castle’s moat
into a book Lord Byron wrote

or would have, had not Neptune felled
him swimming in the Dardanelles,
or Hellespont. All’s gone. Just as well.

Oncoming night assembles stars
that light our paths. Look, there goes Mars:
sword, sandals, sneer and scenic scars

identify him as the sod
who starts the wars we fight for God
and Country when, succinctly shod,

we march off singing, smiling, chanting
or – if we’re returning – ranting.
The gods adore our gallivanting.

They think we are when panting cute
and we’re of all the things they shoot
their favourites cause like them we loot

and lust, and languish, all the while
imagining we’ve wit and style.
We muddle on. It makes them smile.

If you are fishing with some skill and luck and passion
and your hook is in a water where they’re fish
and your lore’s sufficient that you don’t go splashing
or fall asleep or get stung so you pitch
your tackle in the water there are times
you will catch a bass, or root, or trout, or boot.
They can all be eaten fried or poached with limes
if you wash them down with magnums of chilled brut.

The wind resembles treacle if I please,
Lyle’s Golden Syrup trickled over scones
I’d reach would we fly lower. Can we, wind?
The wind prances, less an answer than a portent
of a coming voyage neither of us knows
a jot about and swirls us up through clouds

‘I am old,’ cries the baby, whose parents hear ‘coo,’
the sense of the sentence obscured
by their child’s lacking teeth and a language they know,
and they cuddle it till it forgets.

‘Though I’m young,’ says the baby, ‘I quickly forget
what the meaning of life is, so I
can enjoy discovering it over again.’
‘When he cries,’ think his parents, ‘he’s wet.’