Month: March 2016
empire of Marmite
lacking, as has so
often been impressed
on me
the salt of the earth
I languish here
at the end of Xmas
resembling one of
those final men
who will exist
after everything
the no-clue men
in no-men’s land
listening so hard
as if the self was merely
a filter for it
to Shostakovich’s
rare 8th Symphony
– the anti-Stalinist timpani –
after folding two slices
of Sainsbury’s wholemeal
into halves like
a butterfly print
to supplement the salt
I require as
an unravelling
wanderer in
confusing temporality
the Russian project
after its Modernist
phase gathering
the dense
entropy – retreating-
due to
the usual
ever-predictable
territorial over-stretch
just like Ur, old
Babylon (a stellar place
to be on a Friday night)
or America itself
too thinly spread
those imperial forces
Good Friday
West Street
In the Brighton
West Street Odeon
Costas franchise
the three-piece
family to my left
– a mother and two kids –
quite calm before
some animated
candy-floss maybe
and the sea the
colour of blue
jade on a Chinese
Emperor’s ceremonial
armour, visible
shifting its surface at the
plate-glass window
past the counter,
while I read R.S. Thomas
– and he takes a
pretty bleak view of
our human prospects –
between his poems
emphasising the
extreme brevity,
checking the
Grindr App for
no-strings meets or
possibly more,
the selection of men
apparently endless.
Disabled
Coastal Puppets
Walking across
the corroded
car-park concrete
between the
Worthing Station
and the road
I come to the
peaked block
of low-rise flats
on the corner
which that pub
since demolished
once occupied
and remember
working there
employed by the dealer
in Es, speed and acid
who used to
manage the bar
and we were
having a lot
of sex, running around
the deserted
hotel corridors
above the pub
laughing and tripping
and playing games
and now
I’ve passed
there, walking
along a
row of shops
with lorries
to my left
grinding seriously
elsewhere
and in one of
the shop windows
a group
of marionettes
is set up, their
jointed
limbs lank
from strings
wide awake eyes
mouths grinning
as I pass
like the memory
of acid.
Make it Work
On the Internet searching for something…something…(well I think I know what it is, really) 
About
Iain Graham writer, reader and walker. Also posting photos, blog entries, and anything else that comes into my head. I live in Brighton, UK.
Source: About
