CODA: AT THE CENTRE


A usual kind of paralysis
Installed here — is it compassion fatigue?
The years one spent in there,
Its administrative clatter,
The years of lost good causes.

Another meeting has been called
Sings the party of permanent government —
What meeting in a meeting?

These are the Minutes, read them, be unshriven
And how the live thing in you suffers
Open at its most tender part.
Maybe it's an illness you've subscribed to.
I came out, then I went back in,
Years spent climbing an endless staircase
Like an aural illusion, a note in music
That going up and up gets nowhere.

For half an our or so perhaps I'll come
Closer to the one wish in your head
And moving off from there
The photocopier spews it,
Fed toner ash. We've each
A code embedded into plastic.
The machine grows hot all afternoon
Where it sits, just underneath
A window full of traffic.


2

Which architect designed this mania,
Arranging pronouns in the social order?
Being privatised will hide behind a logo
Even unto the air we breathe.
Post-modern are
Greek columns waxing lyrical in sunlight
Beside a half-emptied river,
Bitter the polluted air that eats them.

There was the one who always wore
His wound on the outside,
A suit of lights and carrying
A battered suitcase patched with labels, saying
'This is the nothing I was meant to bring you'.

But here consumer particles
Move all too quickly to be counted,
Passing abandoned dockyards,
Extending to the city's river delta
Where it empties itself in ocean.


3

In a tower block beside a river
Just touched by morning sunlight
I imagine you learning the names
Scrawled on the walls there,

And, hot on the track of exile,
Is a voice weaving its way
Like the ghost of a refusal
Reflected in passing shop windows.

So we go on defined by our absences.
This is the shop windows' message,
The carefully chosen colours
That flare with a dry radiance.
Shortage, depletion,
Headlines manufacturing scarcity,
You are what you shall not have
And the noise of it, it was light on water,

It was gold falling out of the sky,
Those trees blurred in a hot heavy wind
Engendered by the thrashing blades.
To what purpose? And then, this intoxication,

It crept along at ground level
In a haze of scented smoke, and the men
Who pass and who will not be recognised
Are the dream we endure, of the parcel recovered.