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From 'All Told' by Patrick Ingram

Look up at high Ventoux’s white limestone crest,

Topped by sturdy aerials, overflown by mistrals for millennia.

Somewhere above the trees, Simpson’s monument,

Where the road reads Pantani, Indurain, Armstrong.

 

The sunlight shifts across the jagged hilltops.

Pressed lavender clouds from my reopened book.

 

The records of record climbs are precise,

As are the diets and training schedules.

These men are legends, almost gods,

Freed—not philosophising every landscape.

***

The Critic gives us cingulum from shingles,

Dover from Whiteman, truth from lies,

After the anti-Zionist has whistled—stop!

Unbecoming behaviour—and rightfully ejected.

 

From night buses’ yellow glow lost eyes search darkness,

Eyes behind the rain, white and rolling, work to home.

 

Whatever all the contradictions of identity,

(My own misgivings), I do intend

Some thing in what I say.

I see the disbelieving eyes.

 

***

 

The rock chicks talk of attitude

Meaning testosterone, of course.

Without it who’d have sex?

Find me meaning in tequila.

 

Fat head Peter’s corouling robots,

Needing every bit of brain.

 

Byrd and Dowland work at B&Q,

Loafing in the stores. C’mon! C’mon!

They’re shouting out the chorus.

It’s the Rock Chicks’ Gall-i-ard!

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