Cracked mirrors dribble tequila from hare-lips.
There’s a littoral landscape spreading inland;
Space shifters building castles with sand.
Television is an unoccupied classroom:
Families gather round for faggots in foil,
But information is incompetent.
Between now and navigation
Contours have dribbled,
Memory has sprung a leak,
Persuasion is antique.
Dividing leprosy and liver sausage
Is a choked thrill on the sun-spotted savannah.
The brass bust of a lonely man
Gamely scribbles in his Mongolian diary
What he gone done next week.
Bisecting the rhythm and the river
Is a bridge over Old Father Time.
Impala scamper on the plain;
Papa looks at his watch.
In Paris the arcades are full of glitz,
And there’s a crater as big as the Blitz.
Place has no place in geography;
Everywhere is only a footstep.
In the queue for the black market,
A promising claimer catches
His foot in the stirrup pump.
Between the fly-spotted atlas
And Sunbury-on-Thames
Is the rugged slate of winter:
A roof with no house.
The wireless is no piano,
Though the news is black and white:
Night o’clock shutters the sky.
There’s a bruised bitumen ribbon sneaking home
Past roadside caravans on bricks braising hearts.
A ravine is no place for a wedding
Julian Isaacs
Illustration Nick Victor