Voyager i – Heliosphere Ear pressed to cardboard and aramid; fine dialling the warm bakelite, hoping to hear your chattering on foam lined headphones and shortwave eights. Competing with the numbers stations, their cool cold war intonations at odds with the promise of your static blasts. Thrown from the world with a box of memories, arms flailing against the sunglare, silent screaming past a parade of ghost-dancing gods but taking time for an itinerant do-si-do, you persevere. ii – Kuiper Belt Once filled with other worlds, this room, now barren, unkind, dressed only in a thin pane of sun-glass, that splits the air between me and the world. A crumpled sleeping bag, waiting to be zipped and rolled; bundled into the back of a battered Fiat. But luck’s not on my side and the long meadow recedes, the cobalt skies above reduced to a pale blue dot in the rear-view mirror. We fall into quagmire night but persevere. iii – Oort Cloud Head to the power window, in petulant silence, scouring the pointilliste zoo, I see two bears that light the way but no trace of you among the dervish conclave. Hidden by distance and motorway light, charging into unknown territory, I scoop the condensation from the glass and touch the space between the dragon and the woman in chains. A small encouragement. Our heads in the clouds, moved by forces beyond us, to unseen destinations – I never knew if we were falling or flying, but we persevered

Lullaby The frenetic signal lost from Luxemburg at 0045 hours nightly, gave me time to retune the transistor radio to the long wave, ghost whining of empty air. White mono earphone crackling as a warm and soothing treacle prayer filled me with a languid, liquid lullaby "Plymouth, Biscay, Finisterre…"

The Attic Room An autumn storm scowls from the weald forcing feart adrenal insomnia. It’s crazed winds calling, cooing like surprised old women, handbags drawn to the chin, mocking through the High Brooms flue. The brickwork barely hides the frantic flutters of doomed birds, that free soot and smuts to flock the half-blocked grate. A temporary lull and I peer from beneath the sheets, squealing again as Poe shadows steal into windows, birthed by the devious ambuscade of unquiet skies. I count to two, then five, then nine. On reaching double figures, my bravery returns and I watch the world right itself, window in the flickering sodium wash. from the sash window, its cracked glass freezing the lightning; a silicate snapshot. Paint peels from the frame, echoing the trembling suburban trees, shedding leaves to show their limbs in a unco floral striptease. These nocturnal hills, cobbled, and cosseted by raw and shriven air, amplify with pellucid fidelity, the slow clicker -clack of the blue circle goods train. Diesel- puttering, distant headlamps scowling in strobe time, it crosses the rust-fretted bridge, hard-bitten and uncaring; undoing the work of the now distant rains.

. Ullapool – Remembrance Sunday 2019 – A Hai Bun i The sun absent; the moon a papercut. Hibernal lowery. An unexpected crunching woke me. Footsteps on gravel. A faint gruffling noise as something brushed against the chalet door; a light clack-and-scrape against the mullions. Contented grunts sounding as it reached to steal a mossy treat from beneath the step. Across an asphalt scar, indifferent to our presence, prickets came to dine. On leaving, we marvelled at the stillness of the lake. It had frozen so quickly that a wavelet could still be seen, threatening to break, but caught; apprehended by weather. The air so cold, so tight a well-placed pin could prick it, bursting the atmosphere into shards of brittle oxygen. Dew frozen to its surface, A small private jetty reflects nervously in quivering water. The road to Ullapool winds through The Lonely Lands. Singletrack roads flanked by quartzite whorls; muricate gorse and pervious moss. A polecat slinks, flashing its ermine underbelly as it runs from a large unidentified hawk, silhouetted against whetted blue skies, the only signs of life. ii We arrived to silence and ate breakfast at a waterside café. We watched the loch breathing through the condensation that shimmering on silicate walls. The streets trickle-filled with well-dressed and solemn people, all drawn towards the harbour, once a hub of the national fishing industry. Klondykes - long gone – have returned the harbour to hushed sound. We watched as the crowd grew, blocking the roads and the harbour front. To the west, the focus. A cenotaph. A solemn finger, pointing to the heavens. Ullapool exhaled, and a Pipe Band punctuated the breathless silence. The harshness of the pipes filtered by numbed air; softened by frozen breath. The mountains by the loch providing sublime reverberation. The dulcet brume-filtered drone whispers its lament over black, rigored waters. As the service concluded, I glanced toward the Brigadoon hills. Mist slow-raced to the loch – urgent but languid - before being absorbed into its waters. The reconnection of mist and loch, a reunion of mother and child. A metaphor, perhaps? In the mists of life…

An Autopsy i Among mills, warehouses, tenements; stone blackened; cars burned; metal rusted; Each transformed by the neglect brought by progress. Brittle breath clouds brittle glass, as snow creaks underfoot. Reaching up to break and enter an abandoned Police Station. Apt audacity from the sanctioned and disenfranchised. There is shelter in this metaphor. ii Corridors of peeling paint. The stench of rats and other vermin filling lungs with a poisoned air of defeat. Crawling through the wreckage of human lives discarded; hypos; take outs; signs that other victims of the decay, abandoned this derelict building in search of new life, or a final willing journey to the underworld. iii Exhausted, guts ripped, heart torn, searching for small comfort among the squalor; a respite from perdition’s sting; he locates a clean room, cold and tiled, a joyless aluminium table. the faint odour of formaldehyde; He rolls his coat to make a pillow and sleeps on a mortuary slab. The irony does not escape him.

Not Gold (Redux) A rucksack, mugger torn, spills a life to the floor. Gathering the remnants; wallet, money, destination gone; no choice but a park bench; enamelled metal and stale beer sticky; gooseflesh, nipple hard, through skinny, ripped denim. In Finsbury Park, he gains comfort from constellations, bright as the light in his naive eyes. Orion sighs, and pursues the Pleiades across the Seven Sisters Road, losing them below the Westway. A doomed romance fading as a rose horizon smiles wide as oceans, breaking his doleful circumstance and lighting the way home.

Sub Iove (pretty lights) i - 2 The first phrase I spoke was in awe of the storm. As the sky tore ablaze, my eyes widened and I pointed to the clouds. With tiny voice, I described the scene unfolding, as fully as my vocabulary would allow. ‘pretty lights,’ I said, ‘pretty lights,’ came the echo with a smile attached, and we watched until I slept. ii - 7 The aspen in the garden trembled in charged air, scared perhaps of the oncoming storm. Recognising the signs, I took my position on the windowsill and waited for the rumbling and dagger show. Fat thunder surged but refused to give up its light; tension mounted and the sky, accumulating, finally found its release shattering the pebbled crusted concrete post mere feet from my vantage. Consumed by bluewhite brilliance that dissipated along the now angry glowing wires; humming. whining with primal hate. The aggregate released flew and broke the window in a spray of ragged bullet holes. I ran to the safety of the dalek free space behind the sofa, feeling bitter and betrayed by my pretty, pretty lights. iii – post When the rain passed and the air was not so brittle, I touched the still warm stump. The fence wires, melted and misshapen - slag scabs now frozen mid-drip - made me wonder what we had done to deserve this show of elemental wrath, but I looked at the clouds, now cracked open with cobalt hue, and apologised to the sky.

On Visiting Alderley Edge in the Hope of Finding a Wizhard I wanted to follow in their footsteps - inhaling the clean filth of leaf mould. Terror and adrenalin giving scent to the enemy; to be “relentlessly pursued by outlandish creatures.” Then, when all hope was lost, to hear the gates roar as they opened to a world of pale blue flame and milk white mares but I’m lost on the Wizards Path – tricked by svart alfar- and trying to reconcile the convergent memories of book and prior pilgrimage. I remember my last communion at the well as sodden and solemn in a hollow - the focus of a grove. Opaque sun percolating through fat drizzle – protected by the trees – a wall of stone behind, funnelling us into adventure. But the claustrophobic bole of my misremembered landscape, is an open outcrop, exposed to the skies, battered by wind. Its naked wildness emasculated by plastic safety fencing; an unwelcome barrier between self and prospect. The ghost of a wizard, my Wizard, once bold, clean cuts in the rock, have eroded; neglected. His stilted welcome – “Drink of this and take thy fill, for the water falls by the Wizhard's will” - all but gone; sandstone grit, weather-ground from the face and words of a childhood lost, chases along runnels and dissolve into legend.

Stillborn There isn’t a band to welcome the holiday makers that never arrived, by the railway line, now closed for lack of use. Nor promenades one could walk out with a beau against an apron of sticky rock and bunting. An absence of augured guest-house ma’ams – suspicious of the sharp influx of nervous ‘Mr and Mrs Smiths’ – that cannot scowl at a secret seaside tryst while serving a Full English through gritted dentures and tart-rouged cheeks. Unaware of the might-have-beens, the intrigues or joy, hardy ungulates wear their hooves down on shy kerbstones, that hide and cringe beneath wind-cowed, lank and shivering grass, remembering their erstwhile future in the remains of a still-born town.

Kings (8) With fingers stained and sticky from the juice of scrumped blackberries, I peel enamel scales from the top of the weathered climbing frame. From its ramparts, my pink and mauve fist punched at the sky in triumph, for today and for the first time I was King and screeched my victory to the rascals below. Head back and roaring, sight speckled by low-bright sun, flaming red, I saw a fairy story gliding above the hullabaloo; behind roiling cumulo- nimbus; double daring a storm and beating crimson wings. This chimera soon fragmented, into an autumn murmuration, feathers orbiting, breeze-bound silk ribbons, bending like staves around a jazz chord before hiding in a diminished orchestra of trees.

Pretentious ‘I don’t think you are pretentious’ he said ‘but you are too influenced by people who are.’ I mull this over, marvelling over the Occam simplicity of my favourite poets and think, ‘no, no. It’s definitely me.’

The Tiny Infinity I've an app that shows me the position of the stars. I hold infinity in one hand. Meanwhile outside the stars still shine. Infinity in the flesh.