Laminations I
Amid the crashing,
you missed next door’s soul
shooting free of rubble
deflected off the skip
with a clunking blue flash
towards Croydon.
Perhaps it meant to go elsewhere.
They stack salvaged bricks
in wobbly columns out back
like a garden in Pompei.
A pyre gyres plastic black
cremating many decades
of botchery by innocents
with hammers and laminates,
as cheap as chipboard.
Into the woebegone lawn
an Armitage Shanks
sinks like a senator’s bust
once roost to a hundred bums,
from old readers of Priestley
to the fire eaters of Nigella.
The new owners look on,
faces sharp as smart phones
planning the basement gym
and a rooftop jacuzzi
for the angels.
Mark Fiddes‘ pamphlet The Chelsea Flower Show Massacre was published in 2015 as winner of Templar Poetry‘s Iota Shots competition. It was shortlisted in the Saboteur Awards and was Lovereading UK‘s poetry book of the month. Mark was a runner-up in the 2015 Bridport Prize and winner of the Dromineer Festival Poetry Prize in Ireland. This autumn, Templar will publish a full collection The Rainbow Factory.
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