Bare and Brittle Brick and Metal

Framed

The climbing frame, once clothed in flesh,

Stands bone-bare in the concrete yard,

Remembering wriggling limbs like worms

And rusting in the rain.

This infant school in Orangedale

Disowns the mesh of metal tubes

Where accident was sacrifice

To rusty gods of pain.

But thrice a day the ritual dance

Of fresh-scabbed skin on green-stick bones

Surrounds with shrieks the stiff iron web

To galvanise its bane.

The shadows of the bars drawn taut

By torture of the hard sun’s gaze

Complete the grid that re-invokes

The sacrificial stain.

And one who sees that glint of red,

Abandoning his vicious play,

Approaches; at the classroom bell

A straggler will remain.

The iron, the concrete, dark and light,

Contort the vision, then the limbs;

The angles of the crooked pipes –

Down these your soul will drain.

Your body’s what they take away;

The rest of you is twisting still,

An algebra of agony,

Again – again – again –

Gingerbread Factory

Walking the wall at the edge of the factory,

Orange brick head-haze infested with grit

Scraped from the corpse of another burnt Saturday;

World turning slow on its axial spit,

Melting the football to find the best fit.

Down in the park there’s a dry ruined swimming pool,

Brittle weeds browned where they practise the crawl;

Deadwater ghosts scum the tiles in the changing rooms

Caught in the loops of an aerosol scrawl;

Yours are the names they festoon on the wall.

Entities often entwine their environment;

Parts of you crumble and scatter and stick,

Feet worn to stumps on the sizzling paving stones,

Mind just a smear on the road’s tarry slick,

Mazed in the grid of the witch-oven brick.

Sky Dungeon

Clanging iron steps are the only way up to the flat.

Gaps where the risers should be pull your gaze to the drop.

Climbing and climbing and never quite reaching the top –

Falling like bird shit, a soft insignificant splat.

Ground level isn’t the bottom, the basement is gaping.

Litter has avalanched there and machinery hums.

Washing is drying like felons hung up by their thumbs.

Sky is a prison that nobody here is escaping.

Sunfall or rainshine, the steps are exposed to the seasons,

Inside-out dungeons that prod at the clouds with their prongs.

This is the tree where the birds are deprived of their songs;

This is the tower where traitors are shorn of their treasons.

Jacob saw angels ascending a ladder, but here

Devils from Bosch are as busy as insects in meat.

Hold to the railing and fasten your eyes to your feet;

Try to forget that when push comes to shove you’re a smear.