Sideman
for Chris Spedding
When most eyes still linger
on the singer, he’s picked out
of the shadows into a cone of light.
No other way would he have it:
More silver quiff than white, thank you,
more Cochran, Vincent, defo more Elvis!
Like a thing dug out of a plumber’s sack
his brass slide top-hats the music stand –
no more rummaging in his left pocket
before a solo – slipped onto his third finger:
lightly does it, a touch here, pressure there,
up and down the frets of his Trussart.
No smiling when he’s right up there
at the dusty end, putting his back into it,
lifting the song into elsewhere,
his playing cutting into my bloodstream.
And once he’s ducked free of the stage door,
does the thrum of the road soothe him
or is his music still brimming his head
like mine, as I’m floating home
between street lights up Priory Gardens.
from Spectator (2025)
Together
at arm’s reach, side by side,
more than twenty-five feet
up our treble extension ladders,
shuddered by artics and buses
thundering up and down
Newcastle Street. But Stanway
won’t lend me his scraper.
It would take seconds,
less than a minute, to run it
around the window frame
where wood meets glass,
scrape off the loose paint.
But he’d prefer to see me
edging back down, clinging on
to the bowing side rails,
hurrying back to our caravan
on the waste ground, rummaging
under the bench seats
until I find mine that slipped
from my overalls at breakfast,
then bollocking me for losing time.
from Spectator (2025)
Daft trying to fang hold of it in the middle
or grabbing it wherever suits fit.
Take one end and lift.
Run it up to the sky on its heel.
Get a shoulder under it – take the weight,
and feel for the point of fulcrum.
Allow it to settle on the clavicle,
horizontal, hardly there.
Fist a rung, no sweat:
between parked cars, down entries;
one arm around it, the other swinging.
Beware of washing lines.
from City Works Dept. (2018)
The Girl from the Triangle House
for Kerry Davis
A gunshot in a one-horse town
is the clack of the latch
of her garden gate. Starlings flit
to the pylons. Boundary hawthorns stir.
Our trailing feet brake the roundabout.
Lithe and angular with a paprika Afro,
she jigs behind a World Cup football.
Forty keep-ups then shooting-in;
Rigger’s drawn the short straw,
paddles in the crater beneath the crossbar,
always fooled by her touch.
The ball gummed to the criss-cross
lacing of her left boot, I’m wrong-
footed by her step-over,
undone by her nutmeg.
Simple passing long after the Evening Sentinel’s
have been posted and the three blind mice run off
with Giannasi’s Ices, until paraffin heat
sweats greenhouse panes and empty buses
flicker between the houses like cine film.
Tonight, the stone I dribble along the pavement
won’t escape me. I turn for home,
head full of those orange freckles
coming out like stars, of boots like hers,
Pumas with the white flash.
from Hearing Ourselves Think (2009)