The Rookery Redux
The rain collects by drains stopped up with fatbergs from the eateries,
in cracks and trips of slabs laid slipshod and craftless. Step carelessly
and soak your shoes. Do you belong here? Do you loop grey nets to foil
the suck and growl of traffic’s heat? Do you open your windows at all?
At night the seven streets pinball each drunk chorus, each deal undone,
each spat. Roused sleepers turn and mutter vows to flee to Harpenden
Peterborough, somewhere normal. Let’s not forget it always was about
money, this star conceived for dosh, more rental by the frontage foot
than squares. Cute schemes, smart ideas leap and crash, leave logos,
hidden eglomise, blind windows. The crack crowd keeps its ground, Soho
to St Giles, between cameras and lights. Watchful, unbranded and urgent,
heads over cupped palm, with sudden limping dashes, they shout, feint,
twist and turn, wry faced and pissen pants, hopeless and eternally hunting
for that one good deal among the pop-ups, the fairy-lit trees, the bunting.
Makeshift
When you’re drowning in blah and good knife skills
so much depends
upon
believing the promised
pops of
a red the greater for being half forgot When the wheel skews
and sweating outweighs the ease
of trundling the barrow
make it a bed for Mara de Bois
a support for those exploding
cucumbers
for these are makeshift times when every chink’s
needful
When you’re thrown back on sand
grit and the nous to gouge channels
wipe your glazed eye so you might see to guide rain
to the right place
Water
your stiff heart for though the world’s
beside itself the Middle White’s
still entirely useful except its squeal and
chickens
too of course in all parts
even their gurgle’s balm
Kathy Pimlott’s pamphlet Goose Fair Night (The Emma Press) was published in 2016. Her poems have appeared widely in magazines, anthologies and on-line. She lives in the Seven Dials corner of Covent Garden.
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