Hoardings

The juiciest part of the snail
Is just beneath the shell.
Moving house is metamorphic
I have spun myself into a cocoon
The tattered hoardings of yesteryear.

Departure lounge:
Bittersweet letters of first love lost
Unread for a quarter century,
Posters of bands long defunct,
Shelves of books read,
Bus tickets, bar coasters, keys, id cards
Ephemeral jetsetting tokens,
Lecture notes no longer understood,
Apparrel from the 'Tus Mall' and 'Neverin' ranges,
Embarrassing diaries with secret marks
Plotting dietary battles,
Hand me down furnishings and near antiques.

In Transit:
Vinyl, CDs, instruments
Every recording we ever made
As alternative now as ever,
Paice Ave doodle book,
Poems, paintings, gifts, tools,
My collection of children
Two and two thirds to date,
Aging address books
Wildly innaccurate,
Top drawer contents
Useful, required on occasion,
Non fiction and gardening magazines
More reliable than the web,
Complete scifi works of Phillip K Dick,
Robots.

Wings need to harden
Before they stretch and fly.

Arterialsclerosis In the Heart of the City

Apartment blocks shoulder to shoulder
craning necks for better glimpses
listening to strenuous motorways
articulating anger and aggression
carrying auto corpuscular mobiles.
The city's pacemaker disgorges
clogging congested arterials
feeding suburban organs
infusing tissues and viscera -
a land long stripped
of lush.

Hospital Girl In Waiting.

Her pet Ipod nibbles on her tiny ears
Whispering sweet nothings.
Her thumb dances nimbly
Textualizing shallow depths
Of superficial intimacy
Shared through the ether.
She waits urgently for the next hit
Of belonging.

The long forgotten question "why"
Lies gnarled and arthritic in a drawer
Beneath her premillennial photographs
-on paper!
Of bare footed days
And birthday parties
With homemade cakes
And laughing friends.

A great judge of character,
Today, she is people watching.
'You can tell a lot about a person
by their skins and ringtones,
and how casually they display their labels.'
Her ride, a lime green beetle, appears
And she is gone.