a couple of poems

Bushes
Ripe shiny bushes play in the heat,
The bees are flicking back and forth
As whittled hopes relax on walls
Of crumbling insignificance.

If you shut down outside sound,
Collapse, your head just by the bush,
You hear so much vibration
Of life, of order, of swirls
Of magic-eye occurrence,
You can almost forget
A world beyond it.

New Town, Old Problem
The three-stories and factories, now reclaimed
By vegetation: old ships with broken windows, brown,
And home to obese pigeons, feeding
From upturned polystyrene cartons
Swept across the glasshouse casino car-park.
Twenty years in disregard, even squatters
Have moved on, these places worse than deathtraps.
The trade decayed because the town couldn’t face
The railway and the outside world, and then, finally,
It had no reason but to hold people in.

The guidebooks will tell you its countryside is
Some of the finest in the region: marbled halls,
and patchwork fields that tumble across the motorway
(the land-barons stopped the train, but not the car);
The locals do not stop to look, as if they know
Somehow, this nostalgia is to blame,
For a “burgeoning retail sector”: all they have to show
For a town that looks regrettably the same
As almost every other New Town craphole
whose funding dried up, circa 83.