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Poetry Library Southbank Centre - The Poetry Library housing the Arts Council Collection at Southbank Centre

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Mark Day

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The White Box

Forty-eight boxed pencils point
North like a bed of nails
Post-it, note-it
Sign
For this controlled abundance.
An aid to the bleached-white statistics,
Matchsticks
That scroll like trickling taps.
The shifting culmination
Of a million small decisions.

A sub-group to subsume, Re-group, resume.
Slack-spined diaries confer open-mouthed
On an agenda seen through thoughts
Of quartered mushrooms, or a sinking glove.
Face-time for forward visibility
Masking family secrets
Of a cork leg,
Or wayward child.
Behind the loud acrostics, the missing 'I' in Team.

A dendriform compulsion to weigh
The neurons that idly calculate
The weight
Of experience squandered
Between the bronzed-plaqued gravitas
And the squash-court squeak
To that familiar pen.
Fearing escape, not exile.
And the sheathing of a jeweller's eyepiece
From the light of this connubial farce.

Moorings loosed
From elderly fingers grown fat
Around a ring.
A waspish blur and recollection
Of the day that dissolved
like a pillowed face
When we learned that Zeus
Is the name of your dog.
Not your husband.

 

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