Three Poems for Autumn

Apollyologies for the recent dry spell. But to make up for it, here's three poems all at once.

Android

 

There was a pain like a gravel pit inside.

I bought a flapjack and a Lucozade

and drove six miles to an unconventional wilderness

just outside of Frodsham.

It was here

amongst the gorse petals and defunct Rentokil

bait stations that I first kissed a girl.

Rebecca or Rebekah, I don’t know how

she spelt it,

but I do remember her skin as cold as an android’s.     

 

Presentation

 

For an hour, nearly,

I had to sit through a presentation

on your death. Slide after slide

about the terrific mutilations

carried out on your body.

Had I willed it somehow?

I felt I deserved to be a suspect,

even if this was Birmingham 1989,

a year before my birth.

 

When my sister smashed

a white hole the size of a fist

in the kitchen sink, I was fourteen.

She protested, they stuck

to the facts. I was hiding my hands

behind my back,

I was hiding myself behind my back.

 

New-Born

 

I wasn’t there at the births

of Callan and Aidan. They might

 

have been born in the Arctic Circle

or on the decks of The Tardis,

 

I was no less aware of it.

I was probably more concerned

 

with the birthing

of a second litter of puppies

 

that we would sell at £200 a pop.  

The first labours I saw

 

were the labours of this little Thai woman

on The Baby Channel. Children

 

were excluded from this sort of thing,

usually. But there she was,

 

wheel-chair winged and well into her throes.