Hit Record

‘Yesterday’, as if anyone
who has that old ubiquitous song
by heart needs, in a car or supermarket,
to hear it ever again, today.

Yesterday, once,
one hundred million years ago,
a slow dinosaur strode
through clay – tellingly
it squelched – its weight

impressive; stamped a confident
Jurassic track towards the next day,
the now fossilised
footprints show. In that lost time

the sedimentary rock’s part
has been to learn to keep
them firmly all by heart
for, as it happens,
repeat viewings in a museum – so popular
for an exhibit that’s largely missing,
a yet-to-be exhausted hit.

Vulnerable Type

Starting off from where it last stopped
the portable manual Olivetti typewriter was a creature
of its time, heard in the next room
or down a long corridor –

a tap-tapping racket,
now fast, now slow,

as if it was trapped, by the typist,
in the realms of its alphabet;

adequate for its happy
adaptability, and appetite
for letters, business or personal, in all their variety.

Lever, ribbon, cylinder, keys –
parts of the efficient anatomy backed
by rapid modern evolution,

destined, in its multitudes, so lamentably
to concede – overrun
so suddenly – under
competitive pressure, and fall

silent, like any exhibit now
behind glass, remaining,
in the end, a model example.

Lost Touch

To Azerbaijan or Alaska
perhaps or, more amazingly,
around the corner –
who knows where that friend
for years or, ah, that summer lover
has disappeared to without any binding
intention for it to be final;
a train line closed, a landslide
across a road, related
cuttings off from possible links,
the ubiquity of phones
serving only to enlarge
the mystery, the unknown
habitation, a jungle
of possibilities, like an online
search one idle afternoon,
rain falling on an actual
verifiable location on a map,
which provides no possible clue
about a person who, in all probability
isn’t lost if, let’s toss a coin,
they’re still alive in a place
that shares its daylight
as equably as anywhere
its latitude allows, and birds,
presumably, chirp in a changing
climate that could be worse
elsewhere and, what’s more,
a quick admission none of the above
speculation is of any help at all
establishes the real position.