Inundation

the Land
burstcloud
storm-tirade-down, stone-spitting-fall-rain-downspill pile-down lick-biting down-pattering acne-pitting the water-surface from burstcloud
Burstcloud
Burst clouds tear
Their shrapnel down
Whip down brittle
With tiny tender lashes
That spittle
And prise apart
The candied skin
Of the concentrate dilution
That swabs
Down and round and over
This levelled
Uncomplaining
Water-bandaged
Land
This land
Churned and splayed
Trapped and cloyed to syrup
By the seasons and the humans
Fated to sponge
Without success
The water
Sucked in shucked off nowhere to go
The river
Widening, not rising
Jellyfishing out to conquer extra clumps of land
This land
Shiver-fed in expectation
Vainly waiting respite
From the spillage
From the spillage
From the profligating spillage
From the profligating spillage from above
The river
Turbid-slugging
Weeping to a distant shallow sea
Suspended in suspension
Embalmed in mudpack limbo
By the land
The land
Mud-mashed to deformity
Blanded by a river that is twisted as an eel
In dotage
Its flatness floating hyperactive swans
In muscle-bound
Indifference
Still
Dull wait
Flat pause
Then cranking metal-thunder
Greyed-out helicopters
Mindless mutant migrants
Come rushing through the wind
Warring over church towers
Intruding in the air
Interlocking to the drone
Of the purring pumping station
That exudes a daytime serenade
To the patient-waiting lock-man
They taunt the passive swans
Those bobbing hollow statues
Who scorn their loud bravado
And let them wheel away

the Eel
The eel slides out
Out into the broadwalks
Of the mulch-dark river
Out from the unshallowed ground
That once fed cattle
Fallopian
Liquid-frozen in its tensile body-case
A dislocated inside-out appendage
Finless
Extruded
False
Phantom
Tasting the water
Dainty-sipping sideways like a trembling maiden aunt
Spinning through the withy-trap
That twisted nest of loops
Of woody dry-boiled ligament
Outwitting its malign
Ingenuity
This eel
A thinned-out concentration
A densely-bulging solid ghost
That swims beneath
The static swans'
Ungainly
Facile
Paddling
This eel
An émigré locked in travel
Mindless mutant migrant
Winding through the rushes
Scraping maverick flesh
Across the viscous trails of water
Skin unstuck from skin
Like a dressing freshly ripped
From a wound
An infinity of peeling
skin from skin from skin from skin from skin from skin from skin from skin
An eel
Pure disturbance
A wriggling ripple in the silt suspension
Hoodlum-hustling down the streamlines
As it eels along the submerged mist
Electric as a Geiger counter
Hocketing down the main course
Arthritically clacking
Its wooden-clicking vertebrae
bone to bone to bone to bone
Collective as a colony of ants
Fighting with each other
In a bastardised agreement
To go forward
Meshing knitting pushing
Sonar wavelengths to the surface
Swamped through its eyes,
Time comes trickling
Time comes bleeding
Time comes trickling blood
Like a ritual
The eel
Writhing like
A river in old age
Until the tide turns
Until the tide turns
and the tide turns turns to face its spindrift spendthrift assailant tide against current pull of moon against push of rain lapping across each other spoke-shaving sloughs of water aside in an adhesive twisting somersault boring and biting like rutting mammals neanderthal testosterone gladiators snared in macho frenzy the eel rough-licked to form by the atomising river capsule-pebbles skin-bruise thrashing epileptically flapping like a useless limb caught on the cusp hooked on the prongs of tide-against-current static-charging water-land-and-skin into buckled leather tail-lashing its lethargy to instantaneous action stabbed into sharpness spiked into writhing foetal curve protection lapsing sideways as the waters start to rush sand-beached jabbed into jelly jagged round to a juddering jolt as the blood-pump starts to bite
then frosts away
to calm
The eel
A shiver
Then gone
Long-time gone
Pure long absence
An aftertaste as palpable as thin bones in the throat

the Memory
I remember you
I know you
As an eel
You slide within me
Bonily invertebrate
Immune and yet still vulnerable
I was a chime child
Hooked you from your birth
And you
Slid within me
Before my birthing day
I sense you
You were my elver
I your Sargasso
And I shall suck you back across the damp grass
On an oozing summer's night
And I shall catch you with my hand
And tell you all the things you are
And I shall catch you by the tail
And gaff you with the things you
Mean
To
Me
You should have stayed an elver
You should have been caught young
And jellied in some pie shop in some outskirt city street
Dispossessed from future
Just muscle-pumping-weaving
In phoney youth bravado
Beneath the willow-roots
To you
I am plankton
Insignificant as rain
Insignificantly painful
As a gravelled speck of grit
Tossed, swatted
In the river's wandering eye
To me
You are plankton
Everywhere but not quite there:
Alive like electrons
Airless and artless in the heartless-rushing river
You were my Sargasso
I your elver
Teeming deep inside
Your Medusa-tapeworm writhing
But recognising you
For what you were
And still are
For you and I are eel and water
Never parting whole
Never quite unpicking
Just skin to skin to skin:
An endless stream of failures
To go straight
But I know you will not go
Not whole:
An eel cannot fade
(Its fretful spiky frequencies
Can never quite decay:
The water folds their echoes
In its parchment-like embrace)
And I know that you will leave
An aftertaste as palpable as strange bones on the tongue
Immune and yet still vulnerable
But twisting from your fate
Not fleshy as a colon inside the heron's beak
Not jumping to that foreign state
Involuntarily
Not dangled in the wrong place, the foreign element
Not impaled on another's ego
With your tiny twitching smoke-bones
Beneath a higher power
The heron may have failed
But I shall capture you myself
And I shall have you smoked
And snap each fire-starched bone
Hard between my teeth
Imagining your ghost-squirm tickle
Thin within my lips
Falsely memorising
Eel blubber on my tongue
I shall become you
And you will be smoked dry
Dry like reclaimed land
And you will be thrown out
To my dreams
in dream you block my gills bits of grit that spit their vapid fury in a rapid flurry of singleminded molecules the bomb and barb of rapid-entry fire pebble-dash and pebble-smash my angry rebel heart with smuggled half-wit flattery but fire flame flushes down to pull your heart full out fire flame flushes down to blind you from all sight

the estuary
Dream has robbed me
You
Now
Gone
You have slithered through the nets of my intestines once again
You
Have now
Been canalised:
Your spirit
Cracked
Bent to a widened, straightened course
Your slacker wanderings stiffened
By the Army
But I remain
Stuck frozen in a long-curve
Eel-twisted as a sickle
Crippled in a stuck meander
Curving out of sanity
And curving out of sanity
And curving out of sanity
Beyond the river's push
But I endure
And I
Must reach the mouth alone
My back bows
The sodden sand
Banks up behind
Back-shoves me to the ocean
Back to be unborn
A salt-strewn wasteland beckons
Beached-up in the wash
The river now fragmented
Spread like flat-raked sand
Sand-shredded to solidity
Flattened to the flat horizon
Clouds like waves
Shake onto shore
There are eel-shaped holes
Within the water
Eel-casts stuck but wriggling
Trapped inside beneath the river bed
An after-image plastered into clay
The sea goes black
Discarded bits of cloud flop down
Like flaccid burst balloons
And slap upon the surface
With a sound like wettened fish
Get dragged beneath the uniformly-darkened slick of water
With a gulping pulsing suck
The sky goes black
Am I home?
Escape
The water
Loping away - empty now
Silt scours and seals me
Sea-salt preserves me
Struggling in my vanity
Waiting for the next wave
To pick me up and take me
Limply ebbing back to mother
And it's farewell to foetus
Farewell to embryo
Farewell to you
Farewell to all of you
Time to slope back out to sea
Time to leave
The river
Writhing like
A river - nothing more
So be it
So be it
It must be