1.
Two birds scoop white sky
into the lank pines behind your stone
as if to say we’re with you.
In front the road crofts and peaks.
You can’t pinpoint the sector
but it was adamantine
like your knowing to pull out
to sail through the lock, ink a renunciation
into an oiled bay.
The monstrance twinkles ahead, a wheeled pizza,
while catastrophe tourism tails them with its clothes.
My friends in books clash
but offset the revenue stream.

2.

Another glassed city, its users a charnel house of vacuous donations.
The stray cat enters the soft-hearted,
as hooped magpies cry
beneath the lamp’s ‘pitch and tow’,
the kale-faced dog moored to its owner tilts as you pass.
Gossip enlivens a queue
dimmed by its saviours
who puzzle at the gated votes that snuff them out.

3.
Sagely, we reach the bridge,
its pylon rows in cataract sky.
You couldn’t elsewhere, broken up.
Slide guitar bends sunset. Planes crunch. Do what you like,
some flutter will tether you aloft
while we remain, dripping palace, spectral heath.
The phone sparkles in your hand,
your life on a plate.

4.
A wall of art chops to heaven,
isolated showers and plaintive consumerists
wobble from strasse to jalan
beneath the book’s mite of optimism
and Khachaturian’s clapped jigs
that tease the spray-on air after the election.