Against Which
The mantel is already awake.
Carved oak takes the light first,
an old brown intelligence.
A grain like worn scripture,
every vein a sentence that forgot its verb.
Someone’s hand once worried this wood
the way a man fingers a rosary
when he no longer trusts God.
The lions there.
Or are they dogs? —
have lost their teeth to decades of coalsmoke,
their muzzles softened by winters
that came in sideways through the sash.
Empire animals.
They were meant to guard heat,
to believe in hearths,
to face outward.
The mantel receives me
with its dumb, veteran patience,
as if to say: again, then.
History thins where it’s handled.
It remembers the Blitz by rumour,
the war by soot.
Remembers when the room was colder
and belief was thicker.
A fireplace is a witness
trained never to interrupt.
I run my thumb along the carving,
a laurel? a rope?
and feel the compromise of craft:
ornament bowing to endurance.
Low relief.
High expectation.
A bus exhales.
Someone swears at a sparrow.
The street begins its daily argument.
Inside, the mantel holds
like a stern father
who has already buried one century
and isn’t impressed by this one.
I stand there longer than I mean to,
still half-slept,
still unfastened from myself,
and the wood keeps speaking
in the way something made to burn
chooses instead
to last.
The Study of Eyes
Once, they say, a man was left outside the gate —
not for what he’d done, but how he looked doing it.
Clay tablets mention it.
Sumerian words for blemish, mark, unfit to stand in temple light.
The first records of the gaze
as tool, as weapon, as currency.
How long we’ve knelt to be seen correctly.
In the museum of judgement (free entry, donations welcome)
the exhibits are lit softly:
a Roman bust with one ear chipped,
the public pillory from a Devon market town,
a burnt notice from a parish record — excommunicate.
A mirror at the exit, smudged with fingerprints.
Out on the street, the new estates glisten.
Design-approved fencing.
Community noticeboards and curated wildflowers.
No litter, no shouting, no unregistered faces.
Behind the uniform doors,
that faint electric weather under the eyelids,
looking for proof that they still look like someone
worth being.
Psychologists trace it to the tribe:
to be cast out meant death,
so now we call it feedback,
performance review, like, or follow.
Different flint, same spark.
We polish our reflections in the black glass,
each pixel a pilgrim, begging for mercy.
And yet —
how the heart aches for fog,
for unknowing, for silence thick as limewash.
To move unmeasured through a crowd,
unread and unreported.
To walk past the shuttered shops
and not hear the whisper of appraisals
flitting between the gutter and the sky.
Somewhere, deep beneath a new roundabout,
the bones of a man who never quite fitted.
Someone buried him with his tools —
a hammer, a bent nail, a shard of mirror.
Proof he once built things with his hands,
not with his face.
No plaque. No plaque at all.