SPRING

Spring? You can stuff your spring!

With its catarrhal mists, its naff blossoms and creeping green,

it’ll truly be the end of me.

Before the days of the fuel payments

we used to die in droves in dead of winter,

rigor mortis creeping like a friend

through cold-stretched limbs.

Now we’ll more likely die

of Easter egg poisoning

or a touch of Entamoeba histolytica.

So much damned sap rising

through so many trunks to feed so many leaves

that will soon be as dry as we are;

so many frisking lambs unaware of their

succulent destiny;

so many tender cowslips eager to wilt,

the impression imposes itself

that this is the season of the cosmic leg-pull.

             SUMMER

The three worst months:

June bustin’ out,

bluebottle-buzzin’ July

and exhausted August green

that makes all foliage look alike.

Summer memories attempt to trick me

with happy images:

there’s those silent tea towels

hanging on the terrace against blue

like banners in a church

as we eat our school porridge –

a masterpiece of nostalgia

connected with stultifying hours in poor-pedant-run classrooms

that make all of us look alike.

Our weather chart is full of lows,

our arteries glued up with the cholesterol of hope,

our windows drumming with the summer rain

and our hearts dog-weary with all these years of beating. 

                      AUTUMN

Season of cysts and yellow rotting mess,

a slow deciduous agony.

We love to watch the rigor mortis of your leaves,

the hectic maple reds, birch golds and aspen cadmiums;

we hope against hope they’ll cling to twigs that only spurn them;

we watch as gravitation rocks them down

through the still air

or else gyrates and bucks them in a tempest wake.

Then, when you’re half gone,

we step ankle-deep in their protesting skeletons

that whisper mockeries of the old year at us

before the municipal aspirator sucks them up.

The rest of you is leaner days and fatter nights

creeping towards a vegetable entropy.

The country, racked by trans-Atlantic troughs,

coughs rheumily, spawns early mushrooms on the downs;

your temperature drops, your heart stops, and all I can see

is empty staves of telephone wires against a silent grey.

                      WINTER

The year that once upon a time began with creeping green

exits in style, a prey to lows sliding across the map.

Drizzling, mizzling, dripping, dropping, downpouring,

the rain’s our constant friend,

our own discreet monsoon.

From time to time the weather clears:

we see freewheeling gulls

and then the slow thrust of the magpie gunship

sensing carrion in guttering some streets ahead.

Footballs resound against brick walls,

and artists pause, spray can in hand,

to assess the power of exploding colour.

And now it’s Guy Fawkes each night,

a holocaust of wheelybins, Tesco pallets

and the neighbour’s car.

Final rites of the year burst with rocket and thunderflash,

or the occasional rat – a furry tail that ends

unhappily ever after.