You who run

I. You who left early, drawing the contours
of the Pyrenees around your shoulders
You who are Black Russian - tailed
by the road, guarded by your shadow

Come to me along paths lined
with heavy-bearded English trees
Come to me - you trash, fodder, precious dirt,
and live gremlinlike between spoilheaps

I have unleashed the sun as my agent
He is feasting on stone, wolfing down
the most wide-hipped of mountains
and riding through the pass, following
you who are Black Mosca - the meeting

is inevitable.
He will root you out like a truffle-hunter
You who run from me

but if only the sun were a tool of persuasion
and not sizzling torture!
- my only consideration as I stand at ease
before Armitage Shanks, laughing - lighting up the Gents

II. You who are cornered
You who have come to where the sole of the polymorphic sky joins the
humped shoulder of the French country
find the stitching is of torn fleece and sunflowers,
thin where the hulk sky has pulled too hard at its moorings -
reinforced by scars of barbed wire that hook the flesh of the clouds
and cause them to erupt in cold, blue foment
Anguished, like a baby held upside down by its feet
You who are cornered at last
You who are bedridden

but you peel back the staples of fence and unhook even the sky
It flutters like laundry over the long, thin necks of crop irrigation
machines, buoyed by the hunter sun

You who disappear into the gap - black against black
The fly in his armour of glittering coke
The farmers hurry to pitch the whipping tent of sky, but you have
escaped.
You are gone.

III. Drunk Raa!
Alone in my city hell; half-arrested
(This is called the mortifying of a fox,)
A last smoke; I throw down my juggling eggs
Cross the rails, sniffing oil and feeling sick,
gold-tipped cigarette dangling - seagreen,
board the tram - volpine-nosed slave
and under coathanger hooks, strung up
anteater's tongues
beside a man and his Hohnica
surf steel through Manchester