Poetry J – The Recusant

Poetry J

Strider Marcus Jones

Visigoth Rover

i went on the bus to Cordoba,

and tried to find the Moor’s

left over

in their excavated floors

and mosaic courtyards,

with hanging flowers brightly chamelion

against whitewashed walls

carrying calls

behind gated iron bars-

but they were gone

leaving mosque arches

and carved stories

to God’s doors.

in those ancient streets

where everybody meets;

i saw the old successful men

with their younger women again,

sat in chrome slat chairs,

drinking coffee to cover

their vain love affairs-

and every breast,

was like the crest

of a soft ridge

as i peeped over

the castle wall and Roman bridge

like a Visigoth rover.

soft hand tapping on shoulder,

heavy hair

and beauty older,

the gypsy lady gave her clover

to borrowed breath,

embroidering it for death,

adding more to less

like the colours fading in her dress.

time and tune are too planned

to understand

her Trevi fountain of prediction,

or the dirty Bernini hand

shaping its description.

Pyramid Prison

in detritus metronomes

of human habitation

the ghost of Shelley’s imagination

questions the elemental,

experimental

chromosomes

and ribosomes

of DNA,

reverse engineered

that suddenly appeared

as evolution yesterday.

her monster mirrors dark wells

of monsters in our smart selves,

the lost humanity and oratory

that fills laboratory

test tubes

with fused

imbued

genes

to dreams

of flat forward faster

distinction

to disaster

and barbarism’s

ectopic extinction.

this is our pyramid prison,

where all souls

and proles

climb the debased

opposite steps of extremism,

like Prometheus Unbound,

defaced

sitting around

the crouching sphinx

abandoned by missing links.

free masons of money and wars,

warp the alter of natural laws,

so reason withers

and wastelands rust-

no longer rivers

of shared stardust

in the equal symphony of spheres

in space,

filling our ears

with subwoofer bass,

definitive

primitive

medieval

evil

waste.

Helen Jones

Borderlands

You find the border suddenly, unawares,

It snakes through suburbs,

Attacks with its invisible line,

Spins you from one world to another.

I am born to the border.

One grandmother, stiff as a chapel pew,

Tiny sandwiches and pots of tea

With doilies. The other, fierce as

A house held together by sound,

Reverberations of another place,

Pans bubbling on stoves, and sugary pies

Baked every Sunday after early Mass.

School trains me to be English,

Cool, detached,

Knowing the cutlery for every dish

We can’t afford,

Sends me to London with words I cannot say

Knowing their meaning only from my books,

Pronunciation can elude my tongue.

A tutor mocks,

Received pronunciation slices

Like a sword,

Another border.

Language is slippery.

When I come home,

A sharpened Southernness infects my speech,

But slips away, the old language returns,

The slightest lilt, and our instead of my,

Our world is plural,

Theirs singular.

Old haunts are threatening,

The new are strange,

My flattened vowels fall

Like insults on them,

Each one a label,

Marking me out, not one of us,

Not capable.

They flatten me to match my vowels,

Some borders are always closed.

Native Soil

This is the soil that made me,

The blue-black soil of legends, myths

Built from the bones of men who toiled

To dig the coal and shift the lead.

The claggy soil of chapel hymns,

Of Sunday tea and male voice choirs,

This is my soil.

This is the soil that made me, the dry starved soil that formed

From blight and hunger, wasteful death,

Of wilted crops, dry breasts, women in rags,

Of men who dug with calloused hands

The pitiful thin earth and fled

In slave packed boats to other lands.

This is my soil.

This is the soil that made me,

The fertile soil where women worked.

And straightened aching backs in cruel sun,

Of skivvies up at five to light the fires,

Toiling with buckets up and down the stairs,

Of girls dragged out of school to factory gates

For twelve-hour days and dreams of hope long gone,

This is my soil.

It is not your soil.

Your soil is made of sieges and of kings,

Adventurers who sailed to distant lands

Piled up their wealth from plunder and from death,

Of hero generals who killed their men

In great and glorious battles

This is your soil.

My soil is made of poverty and death,

Of men who could not breathe and women dead

Before their time.

The Photograph

Winter’s black gobbling mud

Has gone,

Leaving us only dust,

A playground made of ashes,

For Tina and me.

Two little girls with prams,

We are not yet four,

Hands raised to fend off

The unlikely sun.

The camera makes us negatives,

White faces,

Colour bleached out gives us

Sepia dresses.

You look at us and see

The black and white,

A textbook illustration

Of a type, classify us,

Two slum kids playing,

File us in your mind

For future dissecting,

Use us to illustrate some book perhaps,

Bind us in a thesis that will bring you fame,

We are not real to you; we have no names.

Your alien gaze will miss the vital signs,

The differences which still assault my eyes,

Scream loud reproaches to me

Down the years.

One dress is slightly better,

One pram cost more,

One dad a tradesman,

The other is unskilled.

This lottery of birth pulls us apart,

My school is better, hers has given up.

I go to university, she to a shop,

Works hard for years, never earns a lot.

She finds out early, I take time to learn,

That lack of money always holds you back,

That you and those like you, will always see

A slum kid when you look at me.

Paul Jeffcutt

Haunted Vessels *

Septimus Goring,

unlikely pioneer,

conjured a ghost-ship

that sailed over the horizon

nobody on board.

Rolls Royce and Mitsui’s

unmanned drone-ships,

sensor and satellite guided,

prowl the seven seas

echoing Marie Celeste.

Four-fingered Septimus

slaughtered the crew,

escaping in a lifeboat;

digitised Navi-tronics

terminates all hands.

* Septimus Goring is a character in the first publication of Arthur Conan Doyle, which dramatised the true story of the ship Maria Celeste, found abandoned in 1872. Conan Doyle’s story (published anonymously) was often taken to be a first-hand account of the mystery, and the name he gave the ship is the one that has endured.

Observances

Slicked with oil of spikenard,

cased in alabaster,

entrusted to St John,

Charlemagne, Pope Leo III,

looted from Rome

by the Duke of Bourbon,

exposed at Antwerp,

Besançon, Charroux,

Hildesheim, Le Puy,

and eaten by St Birgitta:

but the foreskin was fake,

avowed Leo Allatius,

head of the Papal Library,

for it had ascended,

alongside the Redeemer,

and formed a Ring of Saturn.

Helen Jones

In Memory of Keith Bennett

His eyes, myopic, flash in light,

A challenge sharp as steel

Reverberates in winter air.

The world’s a blur for him, like me.

I see his grin,

Like a boy in my class,

Causes trouble, makes you laugh.

Each Sunday when we go to Mass,

He is waiting.

He’s horror-shrouded, silent-wrapped,

A name not said,

Heads shake in sorrow, children hushed,

The papers crumpled, hidden away,

The warning fingers raised like spikes,

Cut talk, mid-sentence, silence.

No one will say what has happened.

Spring sirens pulse through our estate,

Force into growth

New horrors from the darkest place.

Engines throb threatens, noise pollutes

The very air.

Children pulled in,

As if through locked steel doors,

Policemen’s gaze,

They too could be erased.

Old enough to learn his name,

I walk to school.

He is still there.

Eyes staring, paper curling,

Still waiting.

The building changes, he is gone,

Buried behind the bricks and lost,

But waiting.

I age to learn a mother’s grief,

She stands, a pillar, in rain and snow.

All clocks have stopped for her,

She waits through conmen’s twisted promises,

Through tiny steps of knowledge gained

And facts re-ordered keeps her hope.

Dies waiting.

Transmuted now, he is more than one,

Becomes all boys that we have failed,

The lost, the broken, the unseen,

Those we have silenced, overlooked,

He is all our failures,

All our boys,

Still waiting.

Unending War

In a crowded back room, Grandad breathed out his life,

Where the bed and the wardrobe jostled for space

And the shouts of the neighbours sliced through cold air

And afterwards we checked his worldly wealth,

The half-crown in his pocket.

His boots dragged through the vicious mud of France,

His rations went to starving kids in Greece.

But when his duty called he went again,

Led by more donkeys to a forced retreat.

Pulled off a beach and sent to camp near home,

He marched his column straight down City Road,

Took church parade on Sundays, slept at home,

The fought again back, through the fields of France,

Sent home a picture with his eldest son,

Same regiment, same looks.

Another generation sent to war.

The Bocage was the worst, he said,

Couldn’t see them coming.

In between, back-breaking, road mending,

Face chiselled; lines etched.

By wind and rain

Called the boss mister, despised him all the same,

Biked round at night to light up all the lamps.

To earn an extra sixpence,

Never went to a Remembrance Day.

His whole life was a war.

Gained, at last, his country’s thanks,

His pension, not enough, he took a part-time job.

My gran, funeral-ready, all in black,

Pinned on her hat.

“Poor bugger was worth a new hat”,

She said.

Gresford

The wheel is cleaned and polished,

Black soul scrubbed out,

Its perfect roundness hard as fact,

Made to contain the misery and death,

As if clean lines encompass all,

Make us forget.

Around it, history has been erased.

The signs that tell of struggle are long gone.

No clinging dust, no fear of sirens howl,

But clean square lines and gardens growing

Regimented flowers.

No black chained ghosts go tramping home from shift,

But workplace roofs that flash in winter sun

Leaving only

A few ragged memories

Shivering in the blood.

A derby match that day,

Men swapped their shifts,

A fairness from equality of fear.

No grace rewards the kindness given here.

They enter the strange lottery of death.

Mt grandad, blinking in the sharpened light,

Up from Llay Main,

Sent home to scrub away skin-scarring dust.

Men must be cleansed to board the pristine bus

That takes them to the maw

Of stinking death.

Resentment coils through generations,

Seps down the years,

An inquiry twisted like a malformed tree,

Courts blank, uncaring,

Records long destroyed,

Lives priced at nothing,

So the memory stays.

As a child I saw

Old ladies still in mourning black,

Scraping a life from the disaster fund,

My grandad, lungs obstructed,

Clogged with death

Struggled to reach the garden gate.

Bronchitis written as the cause of death.

All of these memories will die with me.

My son has never seen a pit.

Yet the bodies lie under Farndon, grandad said,

Bones of remembrance,

In a Cheshire village

Indifferent to death.

Helen Jones was born in Chester and gained degrees from UCL and Liverpool many years ago. She is now happily retired and divides her time between writing, learning Spanish and making a new garden. Poems previously in the Amethyst Review and Poetica.

Fred Johnston

Fred Johnston comes from a family (North) of trade unionists and one of them a budding Communist, (he ran for the old Stormont as ‘Labour’ and holidayed every year on the Black Sea). His father suffered for his shop-steward activity. Fred’s family on his mother’s side (South) didn’t do much of anything and nothing at all political. He was ‘blacked’ in Dublin for unionising the public relations industry in the early Seventies – as his father warned him that he would be.

Testament

God brought him forth out of Egypt: he hath as it were

The strength of an unicorn……

My father said that, since I was still workless,

He’d get me into the shipyard. Harland & Wolff,

Queen’s Island, duncher caps and bicycle clips.

My grandfather was secretary to the East Belfast

Boilermakers’ Union – sons after sons in their tribes.

Well and good, all this; it helped if you belonged

To a Lodge.

Clan writ ran the length of the rails and the height

Of a gantry. I squinted at the grids and girders

Saw in them an infinite cartoglyph, read the

Signs and codes, the black mass of men herding

Over the bridge out of their Egypt, a treacle of black bees:

All of it an intimate speech of sorts, whispers through the iron;

A job for life, rivet and scalding steel, tea from a tin.

All well and good; a word in the open ear, keys

To a Jerusalem of water and iron. Not for me.

Not mentioned again.

Not spoken of, building arks like Noah, tossing them

On the waters like bread: no Moses to whack the tide in two.

This poem first appeared in The Children of the Nation: Working People’s Poetry from Contemporary Ireland edited and introduced by Jenny Farrell (Culture Matters, 2019)

Michael Lee Johnson

Rose Petals in a Dark Room (new version)

I walk through this poem one step at a time.

I walk in a mastery of this night and light

my money changers walk behind me

they’re fools like clowns in a shadow of sin,

they’re busy as bees as drunken lovers,

Sodom and Gomorrah before this salt pillar falls.

In a shadow of red rose pedals

drunken lovers walk changing Greek and Roman

currency to Jewish money or Tyrian shekels-

they’re fools, all fools, at what they do.

Everyone’s life is a conflict.

They’re my lovers and my sinners

I can’t sleep at night without them

by my bed grass near that sea of Galilee.

Fish in my cloth nets beget my friends, my converts.

I pray in this garden alone sweat

while my disciples whitewash their dreams.

The rose has a tender thorn compared to my arrest,

and soon crucifixion.

It’s here this morning and this night come together,

where this sea and this land depart,

where these villages stone and mortar crumble.

I’m but a poet of this ministry,

rose petals in a dark room fall.

Everyone’s life is a conflict.

But mine is mastery of light and neon night

and I walk behind these footsteps of no one.

The Professional Witness, Here Comes What’s His Name

In China I dressed in yellow silk
and timed my entrance with the wind.
In this country I wear gray sweats always
regardless of what the neighbours may think.
My service is just an eye to the memory.
There are clinical exceptions of course.
I have been working hard all afternoon,
resting now above a slight smoke rising.

My dragons are killing me.

Colin James was born near Chester, England on the border of Wales in 1950. He now

resides in Massachusetts with his wife Jane and son, Liam. Some of his poems have appeared in Tsunami, Exit 13, Pica, Blazevox, Shades of December, Lunatic Chameleon, Cenacle and others. He has a chapbook from Writing Knights Press, Dreams Of The Really Annoying and another chapbook A Thoroughness Not Deprived Of Absurdity from Pskis Porch http://www.pskisporch.com/?page_id=139

Weeds Left

weeds left,

wilt in the sun

without work and water.

their seeds

are the wild flowers,

waiting for volcanic wind

and ash to fall,

so the fertile cinders

can colonise herbaceous borders

ending the old age

of selfish sediment

treading it down

in molecules of time.

another Marxist

dons his trench coat

and tears pages from his red book

planting the old words

of revolution

in minds of homogenous compost.

over-privileged gallows begin to swing.

bullets sweat in their chambers

waiting for the right heads.

Antony Johae

Rome Poem

They say when in Rome do as the Romans

but I don’t see many to ape.

It is Bangladeshi boys who herd the foreign hordes

from street to touring bus or tout made-in-China souvenirs

– pietà, opener, pendant, purse –

through the melting day, martyrs to business.

When you wander in the streets or stop at crowded fountains

Africans off leaky boats hail you with their begging bowls

and bring to mind, in this excess, survival in far places.

Sitting in a roadside restaurant we hear an ill-clad man

on well-worn accordion play a joyful jazz;

his fingers race crazily, our feet take up the beat.

A black car draws up and a heavy man gets out;

he’s here to check the player’s papers – to move him on.

My daughter asks the waiter why?

“Romany,” he says, “thieves!” and puts down full portions.

Accordion shoulder-slung we see him pass along the street.

Without accompaniment we eat half-cooked pasta in tomato paste,

at eleven Euros a go – a waste

and wonder at such home-grown theft.

We’ll dance with the Romany

but we’ll not do as the Romans.

Streetwise

It is starting to rain.

Umbrellas are going up, but I don’t own one.

In Oxford Street they’re going home,

but I don’t have one.

I take cover in a station entrance.

The air smells wet, car tyres hiss,

and I shiver.

I settle by the river.

It is night and I lie under the canopy.

I stare at the stars and at the moon’s fullness

and wonder if there are better places.

The pavement penetrates my bed

of newspapers and squashed boxes,

and I shiver.

There’s a girl not far off in a corner.

She talks to me and I get up.

She’s running from a father who beats her.

She’s cold and says she’s hungry.

I go to buy her a burger with my last pound.

When I get back I find her in my sleeping bag.

She takes the burger and tears at it. A wind bites,

and I shiver.

We lie in the bag together.

She sleeps – I feel her warmth

and catch the heat of her breath.

I sleep too and dream of another planet.

I wake at first light and find her gone.

There’s a note: “Thanks – see you again.”

It’s going to be a warm day.

Green Line

“Only poetry knows how to marry this space.” – Adonis

The combatants stuck their guns in the window spaces

Fired across the ruptured streets in spurts

At shredded curtains blowing in the pregnant wind

At pockmarked walls riddled by ancient war.

Then could be heard the blast of a car blown up

Shells shattering the dome of a goodly mosque

Bombs dismembering the church of Holy Maryam

And raining mortar fire insidious before the mortuary.

O mutilated city – where puffs of hateful smoke

Put out the puff of life, where concrete crumbles

And pipes ooze as if the streets were bleeding –

I see your people clinging to its wreckage.

Along the paroxysmal line of mortal fire

Red tracer bullets marked the pungent sky

And detonations sent shrapnel searing into schools

Shops, banks, brothels, and the municipal museum.

Caught ships lay rusting in the rotting harbour

Nets hung torn and holed on the sinking quay

Sandstone houses stood gutted in the rubble

Columns, stained glass, and arrowed windows gone.

But now I see a woman in wedding white

Meeting her groom with roses and carnations at night

And multiple green springing from Adam’s clay

Among the ruins, quickened by the heavens’ ray.

Lebanon 1975 – 1990

Morning Star

“Morning Star!

Get your Morning Star” .

He holds a copy high

for all to see.

A whole constellation

under his left arm.

“The only national daily

owned by its readers”.

Chest swelling

with pride in his class.

With the zeal of a

true believer.

He kept the red flag flying.

But these are the days

before Thatcher.

Before the castration

of the Left.

Before the Red Giant

reached critical mass,

and his utopian Socialist dream

collapsed.

Kevin N Jelf is a 50 year old graphic artist who has lived and worked all his life in Birmingham. For Kevin, writing poetry is something of a compulsion. His subject matter ranges from the personal to the topical. He has previously been published in The Cannon’s Mouth Quarterly and Here Comes Everyone. His work has also been seen on The Open Mouse.

Slave Currency

Copperopolis :

once empire of that metal,

precious as coal and iron,

as Rhondda to one

and Merthyr the other

ingots, cable and sheeting

smelted and carefully crafted,

a valley mapped by workings ;

companies growing with every ship

whose flags whipped above waves

but manillas, slave currency,

seem like bracelets

or good-luck horseshoes,

coins which clasped fast

and weighed out wealth

30 manillas = one man :

from furnace-heat of African sun

to holds where they were rolled

and beaten and marked,

or thrown away like impurities

now these have lost their colour,

become dark as if tainted

by the hands that traded them

and resemble manacles,

blood staining away any shine.

( Swansea Industrial & Maritime Museum)

Martin Jack

Incendiary

Any tongue needs a saviour.

You can’t escape the flash

even that shatters the architecture

of words, sculpts a savage city

flaking in the morning

aftermath of an incendiary device.

Gargoyles speak of it

in their masques. Words scratched

bloodily by an angry couple add

to their number, a hostile takeover

of spree killings immortalised

in stone that breeds new possession

an outbreak of sleep walkers

on the wrong side of the bed.

Soon you hear the pitter

patter of tiny daggers, unsheathed

as we stab with amplified thought

waves that leave a pinprick

on our souls brushed

with the ferocity of locust wings;

flying with the biting swarm

until famine intrudes into our face-

to-face coffee breaks where just

the espresso tastes warm and filling

and conversation is sandpaper friction

bantered till it hurts.

Dear Mr. Demille

Mr. Demille my happy font

is cracking. I can’t feign makeup

of brightest use for your reel

to reel. I might wear red

but arctic night lurks hungrily

underneath supressed in the bunker

of my frost bitten mind.

Do you dare to play auteur

with thoughts that croak crawl?

Can you tame them with the whip

of a clapper board scripting chaos

into a starring role where even

depression gets the girl, wooing

her with scissors and knives.

Mister, there will not be a sequel.

I’ll go undercover on release

no electronic capture but a fog

exchanged for my costume melted

into the cutting room floor.

While I live on as gas embers

one step ahead of the studio system

that would smother its audience

with your razzle dazzle

of my swimming with sharks,

suicides pretending a smile.

Mike Jenkins

In County Derry : ‘Masters of War’

We were singing ‘Masters of War’

at the piano in the classroom

the green-eyed Gaelic teacher

with her waist-long hair

and slim body a country

I’d come to know much better

singing together ‘Masters of War’

I stood behind her, voice rivering

deep below the strata of the choir,

at home now in the harmonies

in a strange land of pointed barrels

which had met me from the plane

where my mind recalled ‘Masters of War’

when the Deputy Head burst in

and spotted two pupils giggling,

he quaked and cracked with anger

punishing every one of them ;

pain made their voices louder

sensing the meaning of ‘Masters of War’

at the window an army helicopter

before it landed near the estate,

squaddies with machine-guns ready to fire,

to lift suspects and drag them away ;

houses where the tricolor was raised

none heard us singing ‘Masters of War’

and as long as that song lasted

we were marching, fists held high

like those of Burntollet and Derry City

who had stood against batons and bullets,

pounding riot shields with music and rhyme

the power of ‘Masters of War’.

Note – ‘Burntollet’ and ‘Derry City’ – scenes of Civil Rights marches in the 60’s.

Mike Jenkins

The Tree Council

{Tolpuddle, 1832}

Under the sycamore’s shade

our secret council gathered,

whispers joining the breeze.

We knew gentle blades would fly

just as others spread and grew

in the many places of the desperate.

The canopy enough to hide

our vows and our union,

our shares of the plough.

Six of us sat with promises,

knowing that to bend

was not to break in storms;

knowing that the masters

were experts with their axes ;

how easily resolve could be splintered.

There was a future, but no fruit

that we could reach and pick

to feed our needy families.

I spoke up, my brothers agreed,

each plan was a wind

to carry and plant those seeds.

Mike Jenkins

Settin Fire t Tescos

Orright, I wuz off of my ead

on drugs an booze

the day I set fire t Tescos,

the day it rained in Tescos.

I tried t burn off-a tags,see,

t scurry through-a securitee,

when all ell let loose,

yew’d-a thought I wuz a terr’rist.

I done nickin before mind,

goh away with it loadsa times:

but I woz sober an clean ‘en,

knew wha I wuz doin.

‘larms begun t ring

like the panic o wakin,

sprinklers begun sprayin

water over ev’rythin.

Me an some o the staff

wuz chokin with-a fumes ;

they soon catched old o me,

my ead a Waltzer spinnin.

I woz liftin clothes tha’s all

coz I carn afford none:

arf my benefit goes to-a dealer

an the rest is jest f survivin.

What ope f the likes o me

when there’s fuckall opportunities :

sirens blarin all over town,

theyer message – ‘Goin…. goin down!’

IDS ADDRESS TO MERTHYR

Well, little Merthyr folk,

subject of much media vilification,

especially that Sky documentary (you know the one).

This is your friendly ex-Tory Leader,

I’m sure you remember

the great things I’ve done.

No? Well,there’s……and……never mind!

I’m here to inform you about getting a job :

with haste, get on a bus!

Stand 15, it’s the X4 to Cardiff

only £5.50 return, price of a latte in London,

one stop Pont-er-prid…..don’t get off….no jobs there either.

Why not walk along that Queen Street with a placard

advertising your qualities, I’m certain

you’ll fit everything on it.

Or you could just walk into an office

and say, not ‘Gissa job?’……what is it?

‘Any work yer, but?’ (my researchers googled it).

So, it’s easy little Merthyr folk:

get out of your wheelchairs, cast off walking-sticks.

After all, I did it once, equipped with tie and handshake.

Mike Jenkins

No Worries, There’s A Royal Wedding!

Lost your job

lost your home

lost the will to ever sing?

no worries

cos there’s a royal wedding

lost your benefits

lost the holiday you planned

lost to pawnbrokers your wedding ring?

no probs

cos there’s a royal wedding

lost relationships

lost your head in debt

lost in dread when the phone rings?

no sweat

cos there’s a royal wedding

lost your pension

lost your kids hopes of Uni.

lost your life’s very meaning?

no hassles

cos there’s a royal wedding!

Mike Jenkins

A POEM CANNOT BE GRADED

A poem cannot be graded :
it is not a 1 or an A*,
or even a 5 or a U.

It sticks its two fingers
up at all examiners,
ultimately refusing to be dissected.

Even if you put it on the wall
it will come alive after closing
and hare down corridors.

A poem can have no criteria
to box in assessment :
emerging like a dream embodied.

It can be googled for meaning,
caught in the net and pinned;
but its words will grow new limbs,

so it jumps through open windows
into the rain, snow or sunlight,
tearing off its uniform as it goes.

Mike Jenkins

A BIG PARTY

S’ we decided to ave a Big Party
t celebrate-a Big Society
(it woz-a best way
t get on-a telly).

Better still, this bloke up-a street
woz comin back from Afghanistan
with a small wound on is leg,
so summin else t celebrate.

First time since-a Jubilee
and even them Thomases Welsh Nat’s
Welsh-speakers never turned up ‘en,
sayd they’d come along this time.

Ev’ryone ud be there cept Dirty Dick
number 69 done f flashin
all over-a local paper ;
if ee come ee’d ave a good kickin.

It woz all ready, booze n buffet
(even cold pizza f’r the veggies),
journalist from-a ‘Merthyr’ with a camra,
but telly coverin a Big Orgy up-a Rhondda.

Never seen tha soldier before,
is mam wore a t-shirt sayin
‘MAM OF A TOTAL HERO’,
ee limped bard, toasted-a Queen;

Thomases started complainin in Welsh,
s’ this eero Shane ee tells em –
‘Fuck off ome t wherever!’
They jest sayd -‘We woz born in Merthyr!’

It did get better arfter tha,
we ad a Big Cake we all shared
and a Big Larf when some o the boyz
pissed all over Dick’s garden.

Shane showed the kids is scars
an got to autograph a few girlz t-shirts;
it got barkin as the evenin wen on
with Big Drinkin Competitions.

Then Alan up-a road puts a dampener
on the whool bloody evenin,
stan’s on-a table, one foot in-a cake remains
an gives off t ev’ryone –

‘Big Fuckin Party!’ ee shouts is ead off,
‘yesterday I gotta Big News,
the Council’s on’y laid me off
an now I feel like a nobuddy!’

Shane yells out – ‘Yew should join the army!’
Thomases start singin ‘Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau’,
I done a Big Spew in-a drain
an a Big Party become a Big Pandemonium.

Notes –

Welsh Nat’s – Welsh nationalists

Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau – Welsh national anthem

Tom Jayston

Blank

The words don’t come. The page intensifies in its whiteness

Like a freshly laundered moon, and I resent its purity.

The pen is obsolete, a poetical firearm with a critical

Shortfall of ammunition. Perhaps a sharp jab through the

eardrum

To allow the words to tumble out, or filter in.

The blood may at least stain forever the bleached

Sheet that scourges me, flays me with stark evidence

Of nothing. Nothing! It might even coagulate

In such a way that it creates a verbal universe

Within my evacuated mind. It disturbs me

To think I’m relying on the soul-blot of Rorschach.

The days, the planets, slide past.

Time has tiptoed away to a distant flaring sun

Fuelling a world of linguistic motion,

A place I despise at this infinity of now,

Where all thought’s directed toward the paper,

That milky rectangle, but the words don’t come

And my frantic hands, at last artistic,

Start to assemble an aeroplane.

A Losing Game

Melting into a mattress composed more

Of corpuscles, platelets, urea and sweat

Than fabric, stuffing and springs, I swat

The switch that kills the light.

A comfortable, blinding gloom settles gently

Over my coffin. I am alive.

The image that always drifts through my dark,

Death-cluttered mindbox is laughable in

Its irony: with nothing worth anything

Around or in me, I dream of winning

The lottery—not of what I’d do

With the money, but with the feeling

Of winning. I’m still alive, dying of sadness.

Your Prayer

You knelt upon the cushioned grass and

Prepared yourself for prayer;

Larks hung, dipped and fell, and in those

Avian missiles a deity revealed.

Pursing your lips to breathe in their wisdom,

An unending thought of embarrassment

For you addressed your own knowledge

But called it ‘God’

And the larks pitched, banked and rolled and you knew

The betrayal was not total.

The Piano Man

Black and white is too severe sans ascending gradation:

Fingers dance a rolling jig, spin a magical sensation:

A language alive in the digits alone speaking a sonorous tongue,

The music he conjures are songs never written, but songs that

can always be sung.

For the words we seek are form poor communications,

Verbal trash can’t replicate Antiquity’s vibrations—

Hammers fall on tense strings; springy smiles in the hospital

room;

Twinkling chimes, repeating rhymes bardiche through

amnesiac gloom.

Downfall

Before the rings round Saturn scarred the universal calm,

An infinite thing, if ever there was, held sway on an infinite arm’?

Before “Let there be light,”and the paths that afterwards were trod

The darkness whispered savagely, “If you must, let there be God”.

Because I do not hope to turn

– T.S. Eliot, ‘Ash Wednesday’

Come, turn again

to the blessed voice

while twisting

on the vacant stairs.

The bowl is full of ashes

honey sweet for the transitory hour

that strikes as a priest whispers

his first confession on the air

his conscience knee-skinned,

kneeling on hard marble floor.

After mourning God answers

the dry bones with life-

giving wind that blows where

it will in the quiet deserted lots

of the mind, redeemed

at the edge of the garden.

Ash marks the spot on the brow

where God claims his people.

On their face ashen crosses

unveil new creations

before the groaning rocks

who cannot pray

but bend their wills only

to God’s reign, awaiting

his mysterious timing

for the redemption of flesh.

All our Lent Wednesdays

spent breathless in the pews

quicken to Easter birth,

the memory of sins shed

like skin in the shadow

of the cross, until finally spent

purged with the fasting

of trinkets for a time

forgetting ourselves in the light,

that swallows our darkness

and spits it out of mind

into the sea.

This is preparation,

smoothing what we thought

was beyond repair

as the blood beckons us

to redeem the dream

of holiness where trees flower

and dress themselves

in a white gown,

where we hope to turn

again to the Word within

and without, leaving the lost

heart at the cemetery gates

as we throw the ash

over our shoulders.

iii

Within, we listen to the Comforter

teaching us to be a cathedral

made of the supernatural fruit

of the vineyard.

Without we sing hymns

that rise upwards

carrying sacrificial music

out of our scattered voices

to the beating chamber

of God’s father heart.

There the Word rests,

whistling amidst the noise of men

praying for those who oppose

until this ash-tinted day

becomes theirs,

and the whole world turns

from adultery to sowing

the seeds of grace;

and smokes the blasphemous

names on its swollen belly

in the Valley of Slaughter ,

glad to be united

with the Eminence

as its prayers for mercy

shake eternal whispers

from the dust.

Martin Jack

Reformation

I listen for Him

out of hearing in the underground

spaces I breathe for

uprising space inside

where He arms me against

a speech of thorns

like a reformed army

newly fitted in prayers that bind

the undertow, spitting

out bushels of comfortless vandalism

with the speech He gives

before dark

an idea of my present future

my whole being rapt

to His expanse of torchlight

where positivity

must be

lived out

Martin Jack

Charismata

(Greek: grace gifts)

We walk in the floodlight

ministry of the Spirit

who as matchmaker

points us to Christ’s glory throne,

our charisma to be

his body on earth,

shining Christ forth

in grace gifts that recover

enemy territory;

holy hands laid upon

a rebelling world whose sideshows

twitch for hype

tongues speaking to God

of groans within creation, urgently

waiting for the day of adoption

Martin Jack

Red-Letter Day

Red mist leaves black bruises

on language, breathing rage in short-

hand until words turn bloody

sunrise.

Christ’s red-letters surround

the darkness with his redeeming blood’s

font-type baptizing the page

of errors,

a back catalogue of abuses

he recycles, pneuma descending

onto pulp diction until its rubble

breathes again in apologies.

Psalm

Disciple me Lord

graft your mission statement

onto my heartstrings, so they’ll strain

under the weight of injustice,

which wears a child’s face

tear-streaked with blood.

Tend me Lord

a young shoot still afraid

to stretch towards the sunshine,

nursery-bound to immaturity

which asks what about me

as friends mourn in open sight.

House me Lord

inside a praying church,

whose members go two by two

into dark, undiscovered corners,

driving out cobwebs with the rest of God

anointed in their hands and voices.

Send me Lord

where you will, alone and unarmed,

in partnership with faith

that guides me by its pillar

of light racing towards the prize,

New Jerusalem, your promise of home.

Come

The open invitation to meet

Christ’s holiness, and be ransomed,

arrives almost unseen among

the junk mail, except by that poverty

of spirit crying for right relationship

on its death bed.

All that wearies,

historically,

Christ buries in his blood

that seals and completes each love-

letter from the Father,

born deeply in grace.

For those who open the letter,

his blood justifies as instruments

of spirit who intercede for creation;

the seeded works of committed

brothers and sisters planting laughter,

taming a slaughtered world.

‘Come, to new life

healing the sting of old ways

and appetites that leeched

you dry’. So –

the invited become the inviting;

to Christ’s smooth path

they witness

drawing out the near-sighted

into understanding,

ambassadors of human hearts

touched by God, testifying

with the ripe fruit of their lips.

Martin Jack

unpersonage

to lie is to protect the social order,

to speak the truth is to destroy the State

– Custine, La Russie en 1839

silence is a medium

of State that wages war

against being

in the Soviet Encyclopaedia

substitutes buried men

fallen from grace

devouring them under a tissue

of undoings, truth bent and softened

until names were felled

the root filed to unpersonality

in the halls of temples

erected to clerks

while the Emperor waved

hearing no evil in the Russian climate

untouched by a soul

unborn

I am figment

no voice on the operating table

mother don’t look down

imagine blood isn’t thicker than water

I am jigsaw

morsels of me line the laboratory

doctor detach and study the harvest

imagine you did no harm

I am speechless

on the pulpit choice is for the breathing

senator I couldn’t vote

imagine you never kissed me

I am outside personhood

the law is dismembered by forceps

judge are your scales silent

imagine you never brought the hammer

down on God’s creation

this town is wrong

in its slant way

streets speak bent

out of shape

a shorthand for crimes

and misdemeanors that only

discerners read, sensitive

to hotspots where the past

seeps through volcanic

written into the landscape

of names where evil grins

its face paint briefly

before melting in the light

Out of your Hand

mine is empty

cracked fingers stretch

out for promises

that overflow your wells,

named for posterity

when you chose deserts

in covenant, for dryness

to become laughter

and strongholds that grind

to become dust

you trample in victory

until I see and rejoice

over your welcoming shadow

all I need to drink

A Front

garlands consecrated in terror

fashioned its godhead out of virtue

Robespierre’s coronation at the Festival

of the Supreme Being

repeats itself with every new

salute from the tennis court

towards some fresh revolutionary flag,

its rouge bordering on misanthropy

as its stripes made themselves

a front felt on the back of history

engineering their lordship cult

through the ballot box

of mass graves, to the tune

of thunderous applause

The Lighthouse

set on a rock
Christ sweeps the bay
for lost ships draped in mist

our tears stained their deck
but his light called us homeward
warm arms flocking

around our wincing hulls
dry and brittle to the touch
airbrushed where the surgical cut was made

he broke the mist
clothed us in ribbon
the crimson of his righteousness

swinging from a lighthouse
at the right side of Father’s
storehouse of grace

pulling us from the hull-crushing
rocks which drown men
in static

our fragile stations
gifted an economy ticket
to glory, which cost us less

than a dime but cost
him an empty patch of flesh
the nails anchored for our rescue

Spencer Jeffery

A Still Life of Dead Flowers

He chose to pave his way

With no confidence to the grave;

Little money working long shifts,

Never paid enough to save.

He travelled by bus, rail and tube

Half his days to work eight hours;

A pittance paid to blood-red nails

And a crumbling grave, among dead flowers.

Simon Jenner

June 7th, 1980

The day we struck out stories from the fans,

my sister flirted with Corinne

who loved women, but later married.

Delingsdorf’s one lesbian commune

let one vetted man listen on moon-blanched throws

to Joni Mitchell, millennias of male oppression.

Cristiane, Corinne’s once straight sister, brought us

to twin her birthday with Sian.

‘We’re the Gemini in convex mirrors’ – she laughed

her laissez-countess height down on us. ‘We’re

monkeys who talk. Corinne’s Cancer,

she talks in between like fans. It’s time.’

She led us rumpling past once-ruby drapes.

The fans lay breathless as stuck butterflies;

one from the epoch of smoke-glass judges

inscrutably squint from behind the 12th century.

We trusted such fragility, sneezed the other way.

Drapes swayed, breathed out their dust-tooled legends.

She plucked the freshest with shell-blue motifs

never stilled to image or fixed telling. Sixty degrees

the sextile of opportunity; straked down

for disdain. Pinking ears to stop others burning.

Nose tap; right lobe: quiet; yes, after this charade.

Later – a flick – when men here left forever.

‘You both need to size down your words to your eyes

here. We’re tough but there’s a grain – like the –

parchment? – we crack along your promises.’

Past the sudden wing-patterned rug, flecked for the stars

burned ominous to umber patches, cig-flicking

grounding the fancy, she touched our fluttering down.

Who died young, breathless to her dark lungs;

led us down before the dope ceremonial.

Corinne’s high-bright cerulean eyes

glittered china from china pouring light gold.

All slowed to a sister’s arched eyebrow

lashed to her elder’s answer.

It kicked in, magnified; faces sprang open,

each blurred wrist-flick shook smiles

from us, tendresse from my sister. ‘Silences

you lead gently from their crude esperanto’

Cristiane spieled, ice-sober between giggles.

‘Now you can understand your English better.’

Simon Jenner

M Courtney Soper

He threatened sense with

his wet origami. It crumbled to a rope

of tattery verb-ends, frail precious papyri

and, from across a damp culture, a wyrd

of word hoards. No devout SAE ladened

his one-way song, addressed to

another feudal editor.

His sweep of us all promised

a heavy trapeze artist who doesn’t

care to be bounced back, but

kept forever suspended by a poem’s

hairline in a Damocles of undelivered

rejections, blithe of his words, struck

down and crumpled; kernelled by

a fist to the basket.

But I remember his disjunct name,

his emptying gesture, clearer than

most of my acceptances.

Does absence make his heart go?

His singularity’s a black hole

on ‘no’, where he’ll not

come down, not let me back

to haunt myself, where he found me,

but in a banquet of his choosing.

He’d find me at home to

his chop-fallen language.

Simon Jenner

March 6th

The toothed aroma of the municipal

smoke, a drift of early March, studs its soft

calendar of cumuli, this date snatched

from the park’s brief pulse of crocus strip

to the acid tenements you flung yourself from.

Three weeks on, your shivered life was a

pyramid inverted back again by radio, shy

showmen of expiry: a rag doll, lying there.

You, proud in despair and child, elude their

shrink, sound-bitten image of twenty-five

years of solitude; repeated.

This day I started writing, you were written

up and out, tape-wiped to a yellowing

memo in some head, scarred to a few more,

like the self-harm stripes your kids would learn

down reverb damp stairwells

spiralled out of them:

Emblem of eaten-out urban shells,

early eighties, my fade-out contemporary.

Now waged, a shout from your block,

I’d look out, ashamed of its gaunt spread

of stone-dropped silence

I’ve drawn to closer as I come near

lichen swart, a gulfed oval of brutalism

condemned by a flurry of social

engineers, to flay your children now

taking your station of blasted air

for their own site-bled vigil, as if

the blood was theirs.

Simon Jenner

Number Six

The O2 Dome’s moonstone

rises global out of the beryl zenith

of Greenwich, shadowing their white buggies,

like the bubble pursuing the novice Prisoner,

in the convex sixties, when you took it all in.

Blue-lit, it’s playing futures back to you;

strokes complicity, soporific soft-

strobed spends. It’s defected out of its time;

twelve steps to the muesli belt colour

of developments, to eddy in a bureau

of crashes, jittery with brownfield takeovers,

where redbrick recedes like gums.

My cousin collects me for the last family home.

The clinic’s ceased. They’ll no longer

re-tread his alcoholics. Concrete

overcoat them, someone leaked. The earth’s

yawning for it as they close in here,

meaning nothing but they’ve squared

the sphere and how it comes for you

out of nightmare and a force of decades

when we were playing. It’s settled, found

its purpose, how to breathe with playboy

millionaires; take all the oxygen it can dream of.

Simon Jenner

6 Somerhill Avenue

I’m voting in the imagined shadow

of my demolished house. Straight up

opposite this calico-faced school swaying

next to the developer’s scoop.

I smile my Janus of exile to these candidates

bright in their outdoor faces.

They’re suspect, next to repel

this brownfields landslide of themselves.

Just the doss-house held off millions.

Now the distinguished dove-grey blot

mirrors on the greedy glass spirals who

suck the shaven close salaries of London

to the square root of the old, lived-in spaces.

Too tight to wheeze my asthmatic child’s dust in –

a boy’s stride across the mahogany Thirties

landing would take in three pine lives, fresh sick

with new paint; ghosts of a future haunted

by being for ever cornered.

Here, I can navigate from the garish canopy.

Maybe I voted for time and them, complicit

to quell the tuxedo dinners; a shell of privilege

my years here occupied in a rasp

of bookish dust in the throat.

But I’ve elected the pre-fab vision,

my rosette-dismantled self packed with

these returning officers, who breathe

brickdust, swear in those who tear up

quiet quarters, and look out to a sky-hard

desert studded with giant noon-yellow locusts,

no history lesson to counter their coming

no shade to darken me with language.

Simon Jenner

1348, by St George

Edward conjured me through the

smaller trade routes: Portugal, Capadocia,

to displace the fazed sainted idiocy

of that elder Edward, who’d muted England

to a carapace of white submission.

It was a perfect leapt year. Plenty stalked

those commercial veins: spice, fleas, pearls,

diced wth the sailors. They spliced

the Death of course, tetchy in its

guttural progress. I was Edward’s double

purgative. Ever after, English teetth

bared a tighter rictus like a corpse.

Crecy was nothing on Poitiers, Agincourt.

I’d doctored your blood; who survived

the bubo was bellicose.

That’s not truth, but metaphor becoming

truth, down to the last yew-drawn

hung obsession, to the last regalia’d

corgi jest: you have the Georgian grin,

the age’s shadow of my sword’s length

whispering the rust of all saints militant.

You’ve made your death, you’ll have to lie in it.

Simon Jenner

Two Early Poems

(c. 1984/ Revised c. 1997)

To Hartley Coleridge

Your father’s Ariel, greyed alive to a stumpy

gossamer prodigy, you dreamed too alike –

the gifted negative of paternity near blinding.

If Samuel flickered at an incandescent pain of sleep

you feared the half word’s being blinked awake.

The shell haunted touch of one who rose at dusk

to drink, and trouble Wordsworth’s later dreams

or a knowing cottager, for conjured paper, pen to set

down the enchanted sonnet vagrancy of who you were:

the scribbled down, uniquely scribbled out child of poets

inspiring as a prototype four year old

with the child slowly pressured in your voice

knowing better, the prisoner of others’ great words

they’d no spell left in age to release him.

The Live Things

The live things darken. This, a pink room once

admits a greening shred of light to foliage the wall

and paraffin stove, pea green, its flame quibbled

to flower in blue, as though cornetted in dark wind –

– a world dimmed round – fingers piled blue fields of heat

for cornflowers – the whole creped round like a miniature,

in winter when the live condense and the living sleet

of breathing’s chilled. And curving in this portrait

glass we lie beyond the heat, a clove erect perhaps

twined with its plant; we see beyond and cold.

The twiner breathes: “I love you.” The dark’s a language now.

I cannot see reflections branded in its steel of sleep,

blue sculpting curls your chin and lip to mine

in this our tangled frieze of winter flesh made marble.

We kiss; but this is summer, and the strange things burn.

Simon Jenner

Cavafy’s Headstone

I’ve been sprinkled with death before,

a light covering, a spray of coffee beans

over me, my friends’ pre-emptive café talk

to strike my doubts and doubters dumb.

It tasted more of ground obituaries, as

myrrh might in coffee, and it slaked me, as

coffee never does. This anointing was better

than any modern headstone, which lack future

or feature, whose incisions crumble to hunches

more than the sand, or tiny porphyry chisellings.

It’s such a grain of talk at such tables speaks me

cleared away, by the white surpliced waiter

Obituary Writer

The fifth age brings obituaries.

You conjure its additive rhythm, scrawl

some bladed fancy of one, read some for an iron lunch.

Then your ancient phones, too close, he says, to the friend

whose forty years on yours, makes a hinge into the dark

of your ancient, merely twenty up, or a drop shelf to the word.

So he directs the quality to you, the editor.

Young, she’s your companion now, to walk you

so many deaths you write on brandy tinted evenings.

This is the life in eight hundred, you gnarl,

geared to her malachite stone commissions.

You start at so many boring old friends

she thought you knew, and you will, so

compact they are in your fingers, as she is in your arms

who steps you this way death; you’ve arrived.

Simon Jenner

Descended from a Line of Legs

Clank; his leg shows its metal

Down the pungent antiseptic corridor

Whose double once wheeled his flesh one to the fire.

Now he spawns comedy; these are Volvos,

Volkswagens swimming down aluminium,

garaged by his infant son daily and forgotten.

Veering to some vacant ward, he dismantles

Hs white consultant self to the buff

Paint and straps, to slow scars quickly examined

Stumped behind surgical socks, to a child’s Dinky rattle –

of himself years back, embryo memory of his whole.

but it’s his son who’s almost complete bar eyes,

scar tissue he sees to himself; eyes blind

to their blue-chipped reliquaries he’ll now return.

Smiling to anecdote it, he winces rising.

His son will keep missing and forgetting

till he’s only metal and memory. He’d

not see him seed in the father’s hangar leg

what burns him to flay, late, to the same titles,

limping preferments, not the predicted lyric scrapheap.

But the son’s legs are blocked out, own no magic cavern

to welcome his own infants. Flesh stops with him

who limps like his father with a pint less excuse

who fires steel and sterile children as a fertile offering.

Nicky Jones

Bankers!

When did we, the people

say banks could invest our money?

When did we, the voters

say councils could deposit our money?

When did we, the public

say our favourite charity could risk our money?

….in shares, in dares,

in who cares repositories,

in off shore safe havens,

in craven cottages leaking like sieves?

Spivs could do better,

put cash under the bed,

in lead, in gold,

in something solid and old.

The game’s up!

It’s out of the bag!

Fat cat directors carrying their swag,

are seen dragging profit home,

to shore up their upper crust,

while we are toast, at a loss,

you can be sure it’s going to cost.

Well, I won’t be gagged!

I want to gag!

This is a gag, isn’t it?

If it is I’m not laughing,

barfing all the way to the bank,

a think tank of bile,

spewing vile thoughts

towards the men at the top.

They have their eye on the Dow Jones,

are playing footsie with the FTSE,

flirting with the Nikkei,

as they size up the market.

We’ve been duped,

pooped upon from a great height.

No time for blame’s ablution:

Viva the revolution!

Michael Lee Johnson

Gingerbread Lady

Gingerbread lady,

no sugar or cinnamon spice;

years ago arthritis and senility took their toll.

Crippled mind moves in then out, like an old sexual adventure

blurred in an imagination of fingertip thoughts.

Who in hell remembers the characters?

There was George, her lover, near the bridge at the Chicago River:

she missed his funeral; her friends were there.

She always made feather-light of people dwelling on death,

but black and white she remembers well.

The past is the present; the present is forgotten.

Who remembers Gingerbread Lady?

Sometimes lazy-time tea with a twist of lime,

sometimes drunken-time screwdriver twist with clarity.

She walks in scandals; sometimes she walks in soft night shoes.

Her live-in maid smirks as Gingerbread Lady gums her food,

false teeth forgotten in a custom-imprinted cup

with water, vinegar, and ginger.

The maid died. Gingerbread Lady looks for a new maid.

Years ago, arthritis and senility took their toll.

Yesterday, a new maid walked into the nursing home.

Ginger forgot to rise out of bed;

no sugar, or cinnamon toast.

-2008-

Harvest Time

(Version 5 Final)

A Métis Indian lady, drunk,

hands blanketed over as in prayer,

over a large brown fruit basket

naked of fruit, no vine, no vineyard

inside−approaches the Edmonton,

Alberta adoption agency.

There are only spirit gods

inside her empty purse.

Inside, an infant,

restrained from life,

with a fruity wine sap apple

wedged like a teaspoon

of autumn sun

inside its mouth.

A shallow pool of tears starts

to mount in native blue eyes.

Snuffling, the mother offers

a slim smile, turns away.

She slithers voyeuristically

through near slum streets,

and alleyways,

looking for drinking buddies

to share a hefty pint

of applejack wine.

-2007-

Charley Plays a Tune

(Version 2)

Crippled with arthritis

and Alzheimer’s,

in a dark rented room,

Charley plays

melancholic melodies

on a dust filled

harmonica he

found abandoned

on a playground of sand

years ago by a handful of children

playing on monkey bars.

He now goes to the bathroom on occasion,

relieving himself takes forever; he feeds the cat when

he doesn’t forget where the food is stashed at.

He hears bedlam when he buys fish at the local market

and the skeleton bones of the fish show through.

He lies on his back riddled with pain,

pine cones fill his pillows and mattress;

praying to Jesus and rubbing his rosary beads

Charley blows tunes out his

celestial instrument

notes float through the open window

touch the nose of summer clouds.

Charley overtakes himself with grief

and is ecstatically alone.

Charley plays a solo tune.

-2007

Rod Stroked Survival with a Deadly Hammer

Rebecca fantasized that life was a lottery ticket or a pull of a lever,
that one of the bunch in her pocket was a winner or the slots were a redeemer;
but life itself was not real that was strictly for the mentally insane at the Elgin
Mental Institution.
She gambled her savings away on a riverboat
stuck in mud on a riverbank, the Grand Victoria, in Elgin, Illinois.
Her bare feet were always propped up on wooden chair;
a cigarette dropped from her lips like morning fog.
She always dreamed of traveling, not nightmares.
But she couldn’t overcome, overcome,
the terrorist ordeal of the German siege of Leningrad.
She was a foreigner now; she is a foreigner for good.
Her first husband died after spending a lifetime in prison
with stinging nettles in his toes and feet; the second
husband died of hunger when there were no more rats
to feed on, after many fights in prison for the last remains.
What does a poet know of suffering?
Rebecca has rod stroked survival with a deadly mallet.
She gambles nickels, dimes, quarters, tokens tossed away,
living a penniless life for grandchildren who hardly know her name.
Rebecca fantasized that life was a lottery ticket or the pull of a lever.

-2007-

Mother, Edith, at 98

Edith, in this nursing home

blinded with macular degeneration,

I come to you with your blurry

eyes, crystal sharp mind,

your countenance of grace−

as yesterday’s winds

I have chosen to consume you

and take you away.

“Oh, where did Jesus disappear

to”, she murmured,

over and over again,

in a low voice

dripping words

like a leaking faucet:

“Oh, there He is my

Angel of the coming.”

I Am Old Frustrated Thought

I am old frustrated thought

I look into my once eagle eyes

and find them dim before my dead mother,

I see through clouded egg whites with days

passing by like fog feathers.

I trip over old experiences and expressions,

try hard to suppress them or revisit them;

I’m a fool in my damn recollections,

not knowing what to keep and what to toss out−

but the dreams flow like white flour and deceive

me till they capture the nightmare of the past images

in a black blanket wrapped up

and wake me before my psychiatrist.

I only see this nut once every three months.

It is at times like these I know not where I walk

or venture. I trip over my piety and spill my coffee cup.

I seek sanctuary in the common place of my nowhere life.

Solid footing is a struggle in the sock of depression

it is here the days pass and the years slip like ice cubes.

Rose Petals in a Dark Room

I walk in a mastery of the night and light

my money changers walk behind me

they are fools like clowns in a shadow of sin,

they’re busy as bees as drunken lovers,

Sodom and Gomorrah before the salt pillar falls.

In a shadow of red rose pedals

drunken lovers walk changing Greek and Roman

currency to Jewish or Tyrian money-

they are fools, all fools, at what they do.

Everyone’s life is a conflict.

They are my lovers and my sinners

I can’t sleep at night without them

by my bed or the sea of Galilee.

Fish in cloth nets are my friends and my converts.

I pray in my garden alone; while all the rest

who love beside me sleep behind their innocence.

The rose is a tender thorn compared to my arrest.

and soon crucifixion.

It is here the morning and the night come together,

where the sea and the land part;

where the building crumbles

and I trust not myself to them.

I am but a poet of the ministry,

rose petals in a dark room fall.

Everyone’s life is a conflict.

But mine is mastery of light and night

and I walk behind the footsteps of no one.

The Ballad Of The Poor White Boys

O Fellowship called to the great supper

[Canto XXIV Dante Translated by C. H. Sissons]

The Streets here hunger for pedestrian soul

like Christ hungered death, amidst physical

and spiritual pain, to be whole:

to be one with life so abapical;

yet existing as well as one could do.

To open ones’ eyes to an evenfall

and painfulness inflicted by the blue

scum, yearning for the burning of Toxteth,

they’ll settle for this bloody rendezvous.

For you have been sentenced to civil death,

poor white boy, by pious middle classes,

before they cleansed you, before you drew breath

before cheers, before they raised their glasses,

they condemned you and your kind, poor white boy,

to emptiness where nothing surpasses.

Careful of the metaphor they employ

when writing letters to The Guardian.

élite the elitism, an alloy

made of one-part antediluvian

and blended well with copper-bottomed fear,

dispensed with wisdom and grace and élan.

These feigning lovers will not shed a tear

(they deem you undeserving of their care)

and no dirge they chant when you are not here.

The hearse carries you to the house of prayer,

to atone for sins against their reason,

as the body counters make you aware:

your soul belongs to them for the season.

Like this song, you will return to the street

where you’ll haunt them with a lack of vision.

You will not chalk up another whipping

for you cannot be ground down where you are.

A world that hates its young can never sing

of a future, for it can’t see that far.