Thames:
River slotted neatly
Into the green baseboard
Of a winter layout
Studded with stubby trees
And grassed with wet hair.


On Being a Road in the Rain

Wet black jet
Black pavement set
In tarmac shaped
And roller scraped
With tyre marked
And puddle parked.


Verbal Disjunction

My Friend Larynx has had a terrible
Verbal Accident.
He's in Parentheses
Kept alive on a Speech Reinforcement System
Interjected with painkillers
Barely able to struggle
Against the slightest inflection.

It happened in normal conversation.
It was terrible to witness.
As he opened his mouth to declaim,
He was gobsmacked. Bracketed
In mid-quote, struck in the colon.
The exclamation mark on his face
Said all the things he'd just lost the power to.

The doctors are pessimistic.
They don't know whether my friend
Will ever rhyme again. Will he ever
Parse wind or pun chair ecstatically?
A question mark hangs over his life.
They say the discussion is deep-level:
I hope he gets off with a lighter sentence.