A MOBILE TELEPHONE MAST AT MIDNIGHT

Beyond the sludge of top field
a mobile telephone mast is
a mobile phone keypad 
lit up like a skyscraper
in a hurricane.

Could be an airport landing beacon
guiding planes into Robin Hood
without smashing into the M1.

The weather is darker than the forecast
and the mobile signal is down.
Beyond the sludge of top field
a man is climbing the mobile telephone mast
and he is a mobile phone.

Airplanes give you cancer.
Mobile phones give you cancer.
Laptops give you cancer.

At midnight, the mobile telephone mast
turned into cancer
and the villagers were pitchfork mad
that cancer was all over top field
like muck spreading.

WOODLICE

When I was four
I looked out of the window
of our old house
in Queen Street, England,

and over the fence
poured a thousand million
wooodlice or more.

My family were playing in the yard
and were drowned.
A thousand million woodlice
in their mouths and lungs, 

and I was banging on the glass
like Dustin Hoffman
screaming their names.

SPACE INVADERS

for SM

The docile turds that curl from under skirting boards

at night, then labour round the carpets and laminate

like ponderous, fecal figure skaters, are pernicious,

though they seem dumb. I catch them by the fridge,

investigating seals with probing stalk-eyes, hunting

weaknesses in pizza boxes left in slime's reach.
Aliens, that come from Mars to drain the juices

of your fruit and veg, may slither by your genitals

as you sleep. You will know they've been by morning,

when a semen slick is pooled around your thigh

Their vapour trails that start and end at nothing are a threat:

you never saw me coming and will never see me leave.

URBAN LEGEND

for SM

The only urban legend I believe
is that deadly spiders travel 
from the tropics in banana crates 
and are hiding under buckets 
in our cellar–head or shed 
to bite our fingers when we need
to mop the kitchen.

I have seen them, and their nit-like
bodies, pretending to be hands
in webs as wide as duvets
underneath the floorboards.
At night they come up
through the carpet like dragon's teeth
and scurry and creep up the walls
and in shoes. 
Our feet are afraid of death.

Nothing can kill them. They live
in my dreams and are covered
in neon stripes that say,
in flashes of yellow and red,
We are coming for you. We are coming
over continents in bunches
of bananas to murder you.