After mowing the lawns and
sitting outside on this warm evening
eating a boyhood inspired American sandwich,
Bob Dylan’s Like a Rolling Stone is
playing on the radio
and I think I should do this every evening,
drinking similar inexpensive white wine and
smoking loads of dope,
listening to his lyrics and
hearing and thinking I know how everything said
still applies to this life here and now.

A young hen sits on the apex of the
barbecue’s arbour, staring at me in anger and
frustration at my clapping-interruptus that drove
her young cock away, my having already done the same
when he tried it first on the apex of the larger shed,
but I don’t want them shitting there and
everywhere else as they do during the day,
too many pigeons nesting in that screening of trees
lining the all-weather pitch and floodlights
constructed all those years ago
overlooking this house
and patio.

Earlier when cutting grass around the plum tree
I realised it was only ever a metaphor in a
poem about examining English papers,
still without any fruit in this July
many years beyond planting, but the pear tree,
also used figuratively for writing about
vigilantism and urban riots [as well as
fulsome fruit] is in fact heavy with produce
once more this year.

Up in the clear blue sky there are long curled wisps
of stringy clouds, elongated arms with kindly white
ghost-fingers upturned and beckoning, urging
a following to wherever they had begun,
somewhere out of sight behind that
screening of conifers where the pigeons will
sleep tonight and fly from again tomorrow
to the apex of these edges.