The School Trip

Sitting in a fug of coffee

in Trafalgar Square

reflecting fame like an extra

in a masterpiece, I share a table

with a language I do not recognise,

take its picture.

Then they swarm, schoolkids

four teachers riding shotgun

debris of trainers, bright caghools

and backpacks,  flock-bound,

over-cooked, bored. The boys

graze round the prettiest girl.

It’s her good looks that spook them;

at their age she doesn’t have genitalia.

One paddles fountain water into the

other’s face, is chased, not funny,

they lock horns, back off,

she’s not looking.

A plain girl with misery hair and

a torn pocket drifts on the edge

already rules-weary. Her friend

kicks a Coke can, lobbies

for her favourite teacher, trades

nocturnal ribbing in the hostel. Others

shoot the teachers, line them up

like film stars, worm, gratify until,

old roles resumed, they’re filtered

into the Gallery like chocolates

on an assembly line leaving me

to flay my latte and renew the peace.

   
Americans for breakfast

Marshmallow floats above
the knotted porridge
in the breakfast room
leapfrogs other tongues
makes you listen over-easy
to scrambled profundities,
barrage balloons
proclaiming the spirit
that won our West,
lucky to have them amongst us
ambassadors of a great nation.
He, cryonically frozen at Woodstock
mops live yoghurt from his beard.
She, Mama Cass in sneakers
a bum to eat off, crunches her eggs,
no need to show the flag.

(first published 2005 Lamport Court)




Paddington
             
A parliament of soaks on park seats
debate the air
sift shit with the jackdaws.
Eating houses pout,
tout flesh in lingua franca,
neon meals and fly papers
fast food vines and creepers.
Utilities splutter people onto
Praed Street
like a running cold.
A druggy sprawls supine in vomit on a pub bench
wanked himself to exhaustion on the Circle Line.
Parking meters obsess like hoodies.
Tour tickets mulch in dry gutters,
ordure of rotting veg clings
to porn behind fly curtains.
Norfolk Square, roué
pimps old tarts for hotels.
A small area set aside for the sky.
From a basement window
an African Grey sees it all
says nothing.

(first published 2005 The Ugly Tree)

 

Coleridge

Squirreled away on godforsaken Highgate hill             
in one-stop St Michael’s with its twee
gravel car park and pointless steeple     
next to that fairground of a cemetery           
and me thwarted by four locked doors   
with no indication that genius lies within,
no sign ‘To the Poet’s Grave’ to ensure
due homage is paid to a nation’s lion.
Only a flat stone in the aisle for the Sunday
pathetic to tread on. Shelley fared better, Keats
Wordsworth at Grasmere, even Southey.         
They’ve blanked Coleridge, the shits.
Willingly I suspend disbelief to lift my gloom   
and imagine the church to be Coleridge’s tomb

(first published Poetry Express 2005)



Chalk Farm

I trap her
in the grease of the tube train
window
waiting on the platform
frowning late teens
shoulder-length coal hair
designer-label white top
something in relief
across her chest,
can’t see
below her waist,
don’t know why
she ‘inches my eye,
doesn’t board
my train anyway,
nothing special
except that
as long as we both shall live
till the train do us part
I will not see her ever.




The Italian Fountain
(Kensington Gardens)


Prancing stone   
chamfered water,
classic white urns
dripping embellishments,
a symmetry injected with
gushing narcissism
immunises against perpetuity
bleeds time from the moment,
celestial whoops where
mallards shower and
fierce water mirrors
Bayswater Road’s
stubborn hubbub.
The inevitable photo shoots
culture dead tissue, antigens
going with the flow,
and Jenner
presiding in sooted
green bronze
mid-inspiration.

A grandson’s photo shoot

Two tricky grannies
lithic perms, aran woollies
in speculative deckchairs

outside Mrs Bonny’s boarding house;
they didn’t ‘want us fotas took’
but they didn’t stop him

pretended not to notice,
stared like fire dogs,
ignored him for the first time.

He only took one
the last one,
a heavy trip.

The shutter click
erased a dimension
stopped their clock

sprung them into corners
in an album
to be flicked through

on poor TV nights,
and jigsaws done.
Curosities:

napthalene weddings
trips in charabancs
reluctant in dunes, in parks,

in wickerchairs in backyards,
a smile for geraniums
grandchildren in arms

to this last one
nothing to follow
full stop.

(first published in Orbis)

           The Quantum Leap explained

     ( by the Theory of Parallel Universes)

The conjuror shows his audience an empty cylinder,
he looks at them through it; they seek his slick eye.

He places it over a wine bottle on a table with a red cloth,
smiles, lifts the cylinder, it is empty and the wine bottle

is nowhere. The audience approves slightly. He replaces
the cylinder on the red cloth, then raises it again. 

The bottle returns. A quantum trick. How does it work ?
The bottle has passed into a parallel universe and returned.

The man in the third row eating M&Ms observes it
to happen, creates the possibility, constructs a reality

for the vanishing wine bottle. Within the theatre his mind
floats free, coalesces the past and future, assigns probability.

But in another coeval universe he considers it an illusion.
In a third he spills his M&Ms and misses the trick

retrieving them from under the seat to his wife’s annoyance.
In a fourth she is not annoyed, only despairs mildly,

more aggressively in another. In a sixth she has forgotten
to bring her glasses, in a seventh she wears glasses

but he doesn’t spill his M&Ms; in an eighty-first a pit bull
ravages the audience as the bottle vanishes from the red cloth,

in the ten billionth and second universe Napoleon’s Old Guard
perform Les Sylphides as the trick is performed.  Wellington

considers it passable though the man shedding M&M’s
thinks the pas d’élévation were a little de trop for his taste

while his wife wets herself laughing at the magic of infinity.

(first published in Iota)





Journeymen


Lately I am bedevilled, my confidence
bevelled with each whittling year.

I suspect a grandfather,
knotted in my DNA like a sleeper cell.

A mute bell, a wheelwright who fled the
knocking at the door; sought sanctuary

in his woodshed, an inner sanctum
ankle-deep in curlicues from the wood

he planed marble smooth which
soothed his war. There he drew comfort

from reliquaries of gleaming blades, his censer
a sooted glue tin, a monstrance for his saw.
   
This anchorite, long dead, looms bold
now, oversees blue prints in my head,

for we are journeymen both, artisans
chiselling speech, hammering straw,

Stentorian in thought,
the last to ask for more.

(first published in The Wolf)

All poems © Nigel Humphreys