On Sunny Vale steps
a man sits

blowing clouds 
of apple smoke

A woman in a onesie
inspects a battered broom

Gnomes, windmills
Coronation bunting

Their fibreglass flamingo
is giving me the eye

Asbach Alt being a kind of Brandy
Sekt being a sparkling wine, dry
Schrippen being warm rolls from the baker
Volkswagen being our car
Grundig being our radiogram
Eiffel being mountains and holidays
Beckenbauer being heroic
Messerschmitt being an Airfix model
Gewalt being occasional, surprising
Wachsamkeit being normal

A mock-teak radiogram
on spindly legs

A good radio and amplifier
a half decent turntable

Forget James Last
and his trumpet a go-go

Herb Alpert
and his Tijuana Brass 

Let's try something else

Live! from Folsom Prison
or Something New from Africa?

the last robot-king
dismantles itself and

according to protocol
overseen by Bishops

and old-money gentry
recycles its parts

(rarest metals, ancient codes)
to a fanfare of trumpets

A stoat in ermine
half turning to repel
a falling hawk
hackles
bares its teeth
braces for the fray
prepares to go
full-feral
forgets it isn't real

were always blue in summer
Blue morning haze

lifting from the valleys
Sky blue days, made for

larks, wheeling hawks, swallows
and boys with box kites

running hard
to find blue lifting air

Buckle up!
Think of this as an adventure
a fleet of thirty thousand!

You'll need a catchy name
The New Vikings, perhaps
or Skegness Armada

Arm yourselves, organise
Lay in supplies
good stuff and plenty of it

Think food and water, tools
Think durable, think sharp
Learn about the stars

Choose captains
You'll need good captains

(The barroom butchers)

At home in dim-lit kitchens
they hack and hack away
everything at arms length
afraid of losing thumbs
slicing thumbs and fingers
and barroom reputations

claims to smoke his own bacon
slipping flitches up his chimney
which sounds like something
Sid James might have said
in that long-lost film, Carry on Butcher
a classic film I've recently invented

(Recovering the bodies, Falkland Islands)

Seen from above
it's almost medieval

what, with all the tents
and flags

the young men
lying on the ground

the distant shoreline
rocks and stunted trees

the whole scene
blanketed with snow



My friend, Bills, was part of an army detail 
that, post-war, searched for and retrieved
dead Argentinian soldiers in las Malvinas/
Falkand Islands

The ICRC has subsequently carried out extensive 
forensic work, often in extreme winter weather, 
to give these soldiers back their names