The Base Jumper Prevaricates
Glistening pods of life
moving on roads like piss
riddling sunrise:
I dare earth's concrete palm
to swat me, falling.
I will surge up,
hurling fat slugs of down
back at God's eye.
Now the shell is smashed, and I
am the first drop out.
Improvements
I got the nostalgia for dereliction blues
…Ed Pope
The city was much as we had left it,
still full of brightly coloured delicacies
and old, tall houses, whose gloom
increased with the distance.
It was the roads that had changed,
sticky with new tops and distinguished
only by painted guide lines.
We were soon lost, looking
for the postbox with the narrow mouth,
the fence strangling among dock leaves.
Healed, rippling under our feet like muscles
the roads unfurled, and the city
skated on them, its dishes
gracefully raised for presentation
and assessment.
We learned to sleepwalk,
call on friends in odd languages;
we dreamed the city lights
floating under us, flares
held just out of water. Sometimes
we stumbled over daylight and
from a bar, the ice melting,
watched new roads seep along the walls
of buildings under restoration.
The city shone like a pebble we'd stoop for
on a hot afternoon, at the foot
of an empire's last milestone.
• Mark Leech does not base jump but has a pamphlet coming out – London Water – from Flarestack Publishing quite soon. He lives in Oxford. www.myspace.com/markleechpoetry
Mark adds… “Ed Pope is a singer/songwriter/poet/performance artist based in Oxford. He's a fixture on the alternative (he wouldn't approve of me calling it that) scene, and the song I took the line from mourns the gentrification of all the crumbling buildings in the city and suburbs.”