A Hobby Horse on Holiday

 

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


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