Fringe Theatre

Nick Burbridge

One more deftly timed device
of block and line, played out
to a posse over a pub jukebox,
and you come to in the bar below,
drinking with an old lover,
as if tasting some lost licence
will assuage the emptiness
that hits you, after all the hours
locked in leave your thirst unslaked.

Home again, you close your front door,
hesitate among unsold prints
too familiar to pierce their mounts.
Upstairs children slumber at all angles,
and your husband mumbles in the iron bed.
You tread landing and hallway,
handling evidence of years’ work,
until dour thoughts of corridor and class
end your tour at the wine-rack.

If another bore these gifts, these burdens,
you would love her from her dyed roots
to the precancerous cells she keeps quiet.
But your trials to lay a blanket of ordinariness
over fires within fail so constantly
you’re left half-burned, seeking a lost twin;
anxious for a few lines even in the local press
to prove she exists. Like this, in time,
you will be consumed. You have all it takes.

---

Kiss Me Hardy

Nick Burbridge

Sea fret spurs from the shore
and swirls over scrub paths on Race Hill.
Piecemeal, the city is obscured;
but lost in his own wreaths,
walking from gray blocks to the west –
locked windows, fire-escapes in nets –
the bowed man notes only the quick chill,
like commentary and grandstand thrum
heard vaguely over sentry voices in his skull.

Yet where chalk track meets tarmac
carpeted in fake turf, and the course fence forks,
among insurgent shafts of sun
he is attacked – a sudden cavalcade
of spangled vests, caps, goggles, gleaming bits
and bridles, leather whips and saddles,
silken flesh that springs and stretches,
manes and tails flying, hooves hammering,
scatters his dark guard and streaks through him –

kicking up the past, raising ghosts
of fest and pageant, sport of kings and gangs,
exiting as fast to what cannot be seen.
Spared a moment stalls and nets inside,
he glances coastward, as lost larks sing
over him, at the immense dance
of wrack, sun and edifice,
and laughs: for, whatever blinds him, still
he is a man who notices such things.