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Right-angles look for their hypotenuse in looping diagonals

Woman on Train with Sideburns and Moustache

The sun levers over Shropshire,
slants her face – scaffolds it.
Apparently benign fields, crows cough in;
deafened through glass,
I eye her askance, gathering
first-hand information about the face:
grizzled, may have warblers
in the hedges.
One thing’s certain:–
our food trolley man has Prozac with breakfast.
‘Years of experience have taught me
how to handle a situation like this.’
He gibes at the rickety lives
of passengers congealing in door areas.

Dungsmell.

Again the face
monumental and enigmatic as
a standing stone, rain-blathered
cousin of Rapa Nui, red pupils,
coral eyes fallen out
on the carriage floor.

But then, really a small face
in the crash-zoom
of station departure, could be
wiped off with a hanky.
Furze of hair, tangled genetics,
clogging a plughole memory.

———————————–

Morning Reflections

William senses pigeons
murdering his thoughts
like pecking a crust
or jam jar lids rolling onto the floor.
Peeeple say they’re not malign.

That puddle is alive.
It’s been moving for the last half an hour;
if he could lean out far enough
and spit into it
perhaps it would be killed.

There is a cloud trapped in the window
(a woman lifting her skirts).
Open the window!

Time to draw a shark
in the ash in the ashtray.
Fond fingers smooth grey matter:
ammunition for later,
for definite casual encounters in the street
that waits like a serpent.

Now he will lay the wires end to end
and see what they make.
Yesterday it was an apocalyptic horse
riding a cracked rainbow.

——————————-

Button It

That button [Home]
takes us back to the start of the line,
one touch black stride back,
a finger bone, the restive digit
fumbles over [End], hovers
and trips up to the beginning,
helps us edit with the dog-leg
key which means ‘Return’.

Hold down and scan
the far horizon, blue sky
on white screen, thinking,
renewing with a flummox,
colourful lurch, saccades,
the blinking cursor: I.

————————–

Tuesday, no work

The panel beater has hammered the sun
out of your car door, let it dribble
ambiguously along the kerb, congeal in puddles
to self regard, until a nightmare
hoof print stamps it away.

Now dog walkers are flecked with light,
panned gold hums on
their dew-merged fleeces.

A beard tickles wetness from the air,
divines a shitty path
among laughing crocuses
and twinkly cyclamen.
Record the cipher of this assault course
on the back of an envelope.

A manifestation
of the great law of averages, the leveller
who comes in the night
and uncocks your hat, knocks it off its perch
on the bedknob, retransfigures your girlfriend’s knickers
from triumphant banner to rag.

————————————–

Journey and Static

The heavy eye of a chopper can be heard
lacerating the overhead sky, slicing
and stacking into pie-charts and stats.

I enter the train.
In the window, a man reads the paper backwards
in the window, making every page
count, turning them angrily
as if slamming a door;
he has no pity for orphaned words
or widowed half-paragraphs.
Having taken umbrage
(umbrage!)
he reflects on it stubbornly,
his face slightly simplified by the act.

Other passengers are treated
to the angle-grinder of passive iPod listening,
gathering 2nd hand the point
where Grime meets Dubstep
bounced onto tracks with the train’s linear drum and bass.

Right-angles look for their hypotenuse
in looping diagonals
as the train imagines it’s flying
over Kentish Town West.

We all experience red shift then,
with the repeated retreat of car tail lights
measured in dirty glass,
snarled-up like the eyes of big cats.

I alight
and the helicopter’s still
there.

——-

© David Hawkins 2010

David Hawkins is a freelance editor and writer based in London. Poems have previously appeared in Geometer Magazine and the Edgeless Shape. He is also an editor of the Likestarlings project.