The Narrator Warns
I became bored with the view
of investing shapes with meaning
when the suspicion arose they had none.
A couple on the grass, their story interrupted
by hilltops, interrupted by wasteland,
then finally to here: nothing but shapes.
The time it has taken, the time I will take
to settle on top of the colours
that run off this landscape quickly
a singular, a boorish, a comedic even
We have been right and not right for some time.
This unfortunate clambering together of words
of wielding a marker to the screen
applying a thick part darkness to the story
under the clock tower I use for eyes,
the supermarket as a body, the museum as a nose.
The little amount of grass left to rectify a smile
and the final toughness in them as a beauty spot.
You will find my hand in everything
I push the landscape far as it must go.
Paul Little lives in South East London, works in Central London and is studying for an MA at Royal Holloway University. He was shortlisted for the 2013 Bridport Poetry Prize and has had a poem recently included in the online anthology Haiku.