20:03

Bagging and tagging

plastic table latches
for aeroplane seats

my hands are each its twin
and my copy of Gawain

is contraband beneath
the frosted-out skylight

all a-tinkle
with rain coming down

as rain must
to make itself heard

but the factory will never glisten
as it glistens this evening

when out of nowhere,
at the industrial park entrance,

two hares are each its twin.

01:03

A pigeon has strickened its way
into the factory

and before Joey the pigeon-racing fanatic
snaps its neck in an act of mercy

whatever language pigeon is
the pigeon is speaking death,

its undesperate eye open
and blinking like code:

We’re not long for this world
where we once carried messages

and sometimes lost our way
over patchworks of misery.

04:18

The last time I flew Flybe
I recognized my own handiwork
in the pristine edge

of the endbay that made up
the seating’s lower half,
four hours to Italy –

even on holiday,
even at thirty-five thousand feet,
at five-hundred miles an hour,

you can’t escape.

01.29

When we look up at stars on break
we see only stars behind
the exhaled Milky Way
of Bobby’s Golden Virginia,
ways to navigate shift patterns,
nothing seismic or anything approaching
truth; for us stars mean only night shift,
insanity of depth,
the slow individual seconds
during which the dotted starlight
doesn’t burn fast enough.

05.29

It was wee Gail’s seventieth birthday
last week and she has a special
seat to sit on all shift

and her hands are old at the task,
old at working the tricks that come
with having laboured

in the same place for so long

and she’s making light work
of sifting defective ring washers
from those within tolerance and

her bench could be a grand piano,
her patch of floor a stage,
and, in another life, it is.