Greasy tired fingerprinted window
framing my great, tiny outdoors;
brick peaking through bush
pricking blushing bubbles of urbanity
lost amidst a manicured, curated
unnatural certainty.
The sunlight shines
and the scenery sprawls away,
over hills
beneath boughs of trees: for
four metres by four and a half metres,
not quite square.
The window fingerprints form fists
at the neighbouring predator,
fuzzy fat smug moggy bastard
digging crapping crapping digging
chasing waiting on the blackbird family
nesting somewhere in the roof of the shed.
Climbing up the ancient oak
at the edge of a town planning masterpiece
to be chased back down as prey to the tiny tiger,
the blackbird’s bleak existence
seems servile and at the whim of the cruel raven,
and his magpie whores.
Darkness tumbles and is thwarted
by the buzzing inflection
the guardian of the garden’s glottal stop:
a second-hand security light,
reflexed by the salutation of the ivy,
flinches at the uncomfortably wavering towering fir,
or that bloody feline again.
Inconsistently it is timed by another second
hand, pressing palm prints,
all over the already filthy glass.
I drink from the green and dark brown
that fills the windowpane to its brim.
Gulp and swallow down
a tiny finch or a teenager
climbing the sturdy fence.
“Help you?” Now gone,
safe in his palms, the blood
he didn’t spill on the rusty nails
banged into serve any fucker right
but never a sentence,
to detract from the shade
of the robin’s red breast,
before hopping and lost to the day,
nor prey for that condemned, damneded cat.
Long and wide,
framing my wilderness and its glory;
horrific, sultry, dusty
from the motorway,
from staring too long,
at beams of sunlight breaking through.
Framing me, inside,
my parochial paradise
the garden observes me
through greasy,
fingerprinted twins of glass.
Book of Pye 