Surf Paradise


At dusk ducks surf minus movement
Tulketh’s turret directs a drowned ship
Canal of an ex-mill still Northern town
Stuffed with roaches and sunken stories
Of this four metre wooden man who stands naked
Hands masking manhood he guards lone addition
To British Waterways in five score and forty
An African slave who weighs his suicide
Abandoned god who has forgone all power
In a mad attempt to will his creatures to love him
As most mutter, ‘who’s ’e meant to be then, eh?’

The three cartoon-white ducks, once merry
Slips of things skipping aside the baleful bank
Naughty children who played away the future
While the oleaginous woman in a wheelchair fishes
For lost legs and sex with a bag of chips vertiginous
Under the bridge over liquid length of King-dumb
The tunnel of love splattered by pubescent
Each k k k-ripple a notion of thoughtlessness
Every un-n-n-noticeable nod of skull calm kindness
In a peace that nudges numbness and barges —
Those of forgetful star and fish compositions
Cotton fingers molasses eyes concrete mallow
Minds: to fill the universe with time and space
No matter.