Potts - Feral

Now all the boys Ive loved are married off, ensconced.

They bide in milky, clean-hewn terraces, in replicated seaside towns.

They wear matched socks. They wash. They see their own fathers chins

and petulance the kindnesses and tics grow strong

and coarse in them, and this is comfort. They lullaby

their round-faced wives in lusty, baritone, newsreader voices.

Pour me a slug of this late August clarity of light: the contrast turned up high

blunt as bone, acerbic as our windfall apples.

The gardens overrun with teetering foxgloves, cigarette ends, soup tins,

broken televisions; luscious, hoary, interloping weeds.

A fat fox grazes the rubbish sacks. Cars lope, tacit, by the kerb.

I hold my breath in tightly and bless the motoring

wish, wish of my pulse. On TV, the newsreader speaks of riots. His voice

is muffled pips and swells is someone underwater.

(with electronica)

Already the weekend recedes into the distant distant distance. In the kitchens blue fog, Sundays plates and glass rims bleed spittle, our glamour remainders: fish bone, grits of mashed potato; Rioja! Smuts of chocolate kisses! The living-room sofa is mournful (but haloed with sunlight, mornings exposure spilling on into beatitude). The sofas haunted by the dint and notch of spines, our slumped arses; the beating spectre of our voices. Outside, London revs and stammers in, cranks out Monday. My earphone music keeps me heated in this earliness: sirens and foliage phasing low on the soundscape. My footsteps shuffle hi-hats on the frosted kerb. The houses cough their callow squares of window light, hug their angles close. My soundtrack veers me from commute to noirish trek, from link road to film set; from slog to mission, assignation, backlit by a grainy, mantling sky. An epic not a workday engine powers the drive and drumbeat of my breath. This swell and scratch is code, is the gutter and throb of pigeon wings; they wheel and hike up, numinous, above the Old Street roundabout.