Tom Kelly
The Jobs
I had twenty-one days annual leave,
‘Statutory holidays’,
Christmas and Easter included.
Finish at five,
‘Do not leave a minute early’,
regardless of hours I worked
last night or day before
when the Foreman wanted something
only available in Bristol
for God’s sake.
The plant was closed down,
the MD head butted into the office
wanting to know why.
My explanation to the Foreman
repeated with more expletives
spinning up to the blameless roof
where pigeon shit fell
on all the verbiage,
a perfect riposte.
Tom Kelly
Gloriously New
The house fresh with memories
eaten time and time again.
Sunday nights, dark at five.
No escape route. Gut flickering.
Street lights funnel to tarmac
struggle, stop dead.
Do you have any answers?
His address tattooed on my heart and
thin life: suet pies and cheap peas
sozzled in vinegar and aiming for taste.
See him light on his feet,
running for something: anything to save him.
I allow myself to forget,
make everything gloriously new.
Tom Kelly
Hope Street to brand new council house
where light no longer growls from a gas mantle,
electricity makes everything easy.
No-one lives above or below us,
shuffling across floors, crying out in the middle of the night.
I am ignorant, not able to do anything.
Everything annoys. Worries.
Switching on the radio,
loud Bakelite clicks of music
for anyone but me.
I cannot recall one conversation.
Words glued to the roof of my mouth.
Blanket wrapped around a bony frame,
Giacometti, I have yet to see.
This is the beginning I do not want.
Tom Kelly © 2023
Yasmin Khan
Moonchild
I am a child of the earth
Raised by the stars in the sky
Tended by the moon as I sleep
Scars of the world clothe me
Her wounds rich in history.
I am bathed by the tears of the clouds
When it rains, the wind howls-in my ears
Apocalyptic….
When I cry-the earth soaks up my tears
A piece of my soul
Turning to dust;
And like dust, I rise
A storm of stardust
On moonstruck madness..
The sky calls out my name at dawn
Sparking the sun on my breast..
I am a child of the earth
The darkness and the light
The truth, the lie
Sorrow and joy
It’s all there in the
Pen that I wield.
Yasmin Khan © 2022
Olexander Korotko
from War on terror in Ukraine
On the gentle shoulders
of spring
on the soul of my motherland –
of my unbroken
country,
there was not just the
shadow of war
but death
with eyes wide open.
Do not ask
the invaders
what will happen to them
when their dreams
explode
from the bombs that fell
on our towns and villages.
Kyiv, Ukraine, March 2022
Tom Kelly
Jarrow Tube Works
At eight on a grey morning,
I’m walking over a metal bridge
heading to work at Jarrow Tube Works,
before the World Cup of ’66:
images we know by heart.
I am the only one on the bridge as it booms,
my feet a drummer’s foot pedal.
I work as a Progress Chaser in a Portacabin
inside the Tube Works.
The huge furnace gash shocks me
every time I see and feel it.
Men drag billets of steel
on wires dangling above them,
wearing hand-me-down clothes
worn at weddings and funerals life-times ago.
They tie-up their trouser bottoms.
Some wear bright neckerchiefs,
looking exotic, I think at the time.
The furnace heat hits me and stumbles through
my brown corduroy trousers,
I check to see if I am burnt:
in a way I am.
Unspoken Lives in Dreams
Dad’s brushing the dockside in 1934,
broken pallets pile-up to the rats’ nest,
they squeal as he moves closer to them.
They jumped, he said, at his neck;
they were aiming for the light to escape, like yourself.
I am behind a huge desk, becoming bigger
in this anxiety dream.
For a while I was won over by Friday night brown envelopes,
pound notes tempting under the cellophane.
Years passed, dead slowly. Days were longer.
He has high ambitions, climbs the company ladder,
the firm disappears to the Far-East.
His unsteady climb falters, defeats and victories are etched in his face
as he scrambles even quicker in the next job,
years gallop to the horizon.
‘A contented man’, I thought.
For him life crumbled before his eyes,
birthdays and celebrations would not stop,
left him unhappy. He never said.
Not even a note in his car with the engine running.
Tom Kelly © 2021
Tom Kelly
Work
Granda embroiders rope
around scaffolding that flies
across the shipyard and dock,
scurries along the side of the boat,
a rat down a gulley.
He was up at half-five
pushed on his boots with thick socks,
headed to a yard on the Tyne.
Thick socks legacy of WW1,
frost bite to blame.
I rarely heard him blame anything.
I will do that job for him.
Sliver
Me jobs were not in-between university,
before working in a bank, lecturing,
writing the definitive novel.
The jobs were repetitive, lasted years
wore the arse out of me trousers
to a fine thread shining like silver.
These jobs stole my very soul
for twenty-odd years,
broke my spirit
as I saw myself in others
worn to a sliver of nothing.
Tom Kelly © 2020
Stephen Kingsnorth © 2019
Facelift
The dirt track is now a jacaranda tree
the neighbours shoes, papaya;
the littered muck is citrus scent,
the drain become a rock-drop shute,
and varicose, a smile.
I see kingfishers where rough seas before,
a raven for past poor consciousness,
the bear, the buffalo and deer,
a new menagerie in me.
I lift my eyes up to the hills,
before I saw the ditch;
I have new sight, surgery,
colour-blindness removed,
the palette scattered now
through leaves and changing sky.
My cleft removed,
the daily shame replaced,
my angled poise now stretched above
and fixed my brave new world.
This face lift costs far more elsewhere:
thin line lips become bolder,
ripe fruits grudgingly a grin,
banana splits with strawberry juis,
rejected pantry shelf.
Boot Scraper
Outside the church, the squire had set
for ploughmen’s boots, an entry stile,
ensuring the tiled nave was free
of soil from land the gentry owned.
The fruit of toil scraped clear of souls,
the lord saved from indignities.
The entry font a stooping test,
the hymnary, enchanting source
of hieroglyphs and blandishments
to coax a faithful apathy,
religion’s outer garment, cloak,
encouragement to mask the truth.
In some hundreds, the boundary,
with annual beating to remind,
tells all within, the ladder gone,
that metal rung, no longer bell
as had become, to forewarn folk,
a leprous colony inside.
The carpenter with sawdust shakes,
swear-box filled by hammered stakes,
the seedsman understanding growth,
aware of seedlings scattered far,
they gathered by the open door
found no demand that shoes be raked.
And soon the radical took route,
with taxman revenue to joke,
vineyard owner, mast to climb,
the lady of the night to light,
some homeless, shelter with intent,
companionship to share fresh bread.
Dereliction
Some derelict, boy soldier old,
known only under sods of late –
his state decided use complete,
dismissed to find his winding way.
His wife had found another cause
as his own troop had altered sides,
political expediency
brought swifter end to that affair.
With comrades carried home in bags,
short shrift reduced to none at all;
he could not face the grocer’s queue,
food bank, account, no interest.
He started beneficial forms
till pride took stand, double cross sign.
Bow arching over stretching road,
bare honesty brought home, to stare.
Those secrets not to be confessed,
lost wife, lost war, loss self-embraced.
Then only creed he could, aware,
declared to priest in curtained box.
Unsure whether condemned, seduced,
the last straw loaded back himself.
He found the dereliction here
that led too soon to bottled fear.
Fast Track
Like fast track post I started school,
my first class stamped, leap year, one day,
the prime remove from norms of life –
now stubborn age confirms that rite.
Eleven when they emptied box,
all then been franked, indelible;
the sorting office pigeon-holed,
a destination clarified.
I enjoyed words, the sound, the shape,
so told that I was grammar-good;
my estate mates ate bloater paste,
while I forced boater, crown of head.
Steered by string, pram wheels, orange box,
the stock car racing, pavement swerves –
lost to buttoned brass, leather brief –
told more sedate for station walk.
The track took me around the globe,
express train network privilege;
far friends remained in shunting yards,
few points to change direction, line.
The journeys of those loco’s, fast,
no better than they ought to be,
all rest on work in engine sheds,
those mates with spanners, oil and rags.
Pen Kease
Lessons
The first lesson was how to make a straw [1]palliasse
so you had somewhere to cry for your mother.
The second, how to bayonet a straw man
as though he was real.
The third was to fight for a whole cow’s liver,
pipes and all, wrapped in bloodied newspaper
while the cooks looked on, took bets, and laughed.
Care
Now, two years on I’m given the records:
FOUND ON FLOOR AT 05:20
THEN AGAIN AT SEVEN.
FOUND ON THE FLOOR 13:00,
AT 17:00, THEN, 17:20
AT 05:00 THEY FOUND HIM
TRYING TO GET OUT OF BED.
AT 05:42 THEY FOUND HIM
KNEELING ON THE BED,
LEANING HEADFIRST
OVER THE BEDRAILS.
THEY REASSURED HIM,
AND HE WAS ABLE TO LIE DOWN
AGAIN. AT 12:00,
HE WENT TO THE TOILET
BY HIMSELF,
AT 19:00 HE WALKED
TO TOILET BY HIMSELF
AGAIN, AND THEY ASSISTED
HIM BACK TO BED.
AT 23:00 HE WAS FOUND
ON FLOOR.
AT 05:00, IN AN ATTEMPT
TO GO BACK TO BED,
HE SLIPPED DOWN.
THEY HELPED HIM
BACK TO BED.
AT 16:00 HE SAT ON THE EDGE
OF THE BED TRYING
TO GET UP, THEN WAS FOUND
ON THE FLOOR
AT 17:00, AGAIN AT 17:20. AT 19:00
HE TRIED
TO PUT HIMSELF
ONTO THE COMMODE
AND SLIPPED ONTO FLOOR.
We’d watched them help.
They’d hauled him back to bed,
dragging him between them,
the one with the sharp face
and pencilled eyebrows
and the disgusted one
who smelled of grease.
Hup-one-two-three,
hup-one-two-three,
c’mon old soldier, they said.
Family Legend
She took his hand – her handbag slid down, hit him hard
like a brick. Her other held her Woodbine, untipped, alight.
Look at this. He watched his mother
wave an arc of smoke across the front of Temple Meads
station, in all its mock-mediaeval, Victorian grandeur.
We’d be alright If it hadn’t been for that silly-born-bugger.
In 1831, the nobs voted ‘no change’ – crafty buggers –
it meant they could buy their way in and rule us hard.
He got drunk that night, full of his own piss and grandeur–
got angry and shot his mouth off, set the mob alight.
Typical of our lot. We’d have owned Temple Meads.
He watched her in her shabby coat, his mother
somehow, she was different from the others.
A lean and garrulous woman, fond of saying ‘bugger’,
unlikely to this lad she’d ever own Temple Meads
although, true she had a certain metal, was quite hard.
You know they went and set the bloody town alight,
he was at the mob’s head in all his grandeur
waving a top hat on top of his umbrellal – what a grand
gesture that was. The fool. At that point Dad smothered
any thought of truth, although hope remained alight –
a rumour to tell his children. Silly buggers
if they believed it though. Life’s too tough and hard.
Whoever heard the likes of us owning Temple Meads?
It was just land before the railway, Temple Meads.
Trust us to have illusions of our own grandeur,
he’d say, believing rubbish bragged by idiots drinking hard.
‘It made no difference to my mother,
It was the thirties, she believed it all back then. Silly bugger.
Later, he wondered if she’d ever been enlightened
as to the facts about Queen’s Square, set alight:
men found the cellars of grand houses, burned them, no heed
taken of the drunks already there. They lay blistering – poor beggars.
The law was no better. Not justice, but rage and rancour.
No-one saw among the bleeding, the children and their mothers
when the soldiers galloped in, slashing left and right, hard.
That’s what no bugger understands. There’s no glamour – and slight
truth – in this hard story. Did they confiscate Temple Meads
when he was hanged? More like a grandiose myth, told by my grandmother.
Pen Kease © 2019
Tom Kelly
At the ‘Reduced to Clear’
they form an orderly queue.
The youngest has money tight as love in his fist.
He has a note to remind him what to buy, ‘breed an’ crisps’.
His da works nights for a security firm. He is asleep
on the settee in the living room. Ma works
in Cheapland from six til ten.
He is seven next birthday. His sister plays round the shelves,
handles everything she can’t buy. Her dress
see-through under the stores’ brutal fluorescent lights.
Ken Loach- Please Be Dan Dare!
Ken, you might not like his conservative (with a small c) outlook,
his body language may change
watching your films but (for one production only)
can you wear his hat and take control,
save a million unemployed kids,
steer the craft, be Dan Dare and take Digby from Wigan
to something better than this?
So Ken, before you squint through the camera lens,
please take up Dan’s mantle, if only for me,
aged seven-and-three-quarters in Jarrow,
think Billy Casper without the kestrel,
afraid of the dark and Tories me and me da hated.
Please save us from these posh boys that make me so angry I have to lose
myself in Frank Hampson’s drawings of Dan leading his crew
against the Mekon: we need you to be Dan Dare,
“Quiet, please. Roll camera. Action.”
Tom Kelly © 2014
David Kessel
In Memoriam Salvador Allende
The bells of St. Anne’s are ringing down
East India Dock.
Do they ring for Christ or Pinochet?
Tears falling like rain
on the mean streets of London, red as
workers’ blood, falling on the market place,
on a labourer’s fierce decency,
a busman’s daily lot;
flooding the streets with pain and desire.
Plane trees fingers into a winter sky,
beautiful as Bengali girls,
straight as Cockney lads.
We are all alone, but not separate
from each other in the streets and parks.
We live in the spaces of others’ lives.
To spill the entrails of M.I.6.
that worldly terror,
onto the wide market pavements,
between the alkies and fruit stalls.
Life so fragile, death arbitrary.
Lascar seaman and Bantu gold miners.
And I have heard in desperate streets
poor kids whistle like blackbirds,
at midnight.
David Kessel © 2014
David Kessel
Fury
There was a time when I was young
when I first learn to face the sun.
Grew in me a burning sight
bitter and lonely as the night.
Held a girl in sweet embrace
and made her memory my life.
Suffered patriarch’s contempt
futility split my mind.
Came to love old London Town
and hummed an anarchist’s lament.
At heart-rending Peckham Rye
ask, What, How and Why?
The kingdom of the dead
or a living commonwealth?
The Self-Obsessed
for the Tory Party
The laughter of spivs
from the suburbs of Hades.
Insane through arrogance,
does his own head in.
Disaffections of the driven dead,
patriarchs loved in home and head.
Mod-tech love-making,
celestial nothingness.
Vainglory of toff accent,
cosmology of self.
Sexuopathic Knightsbridge god,
gadgets, gimmicks and guns.
Fucks like a machine-gun,
doesn’t know the girl exists.
And his biggest problem,
which wine with his pudding.
Zilch of human kindness,
dust to dust.
When we share
we think of others.
Schizo Care
Schizophrenic Salvation Network
‘Can’t you see buried within all that wreckage he’s craving for freedom’ Malcolm Lowry
Our disability could be a diabetes of the mind, caused by traumatic disbelief?
Solidarity Very often invalidated and demonised, and often bound together. Could become the modern Jews?
Over half of us, discharged from old asylums, died within a year of dislocation, neglect, cold! The Inadequate, friendly simple schizophrenic, the devastated, emotional hebephrenic, the intense, wordy paranoid schizophrenic… we are not told about them!
Also, probably, ‘guinea-pigs’ for secret state experimentation – psychotropics, mind-policing, and short-wave radiation, etc. (no one believes anything we say).
Fellowship Must associate to counter loneliness and stigmatisation.
Local Groups needed for fellowship, mutual therapy, political initiatives.
‘Full-Shilling Club’ hope to have regular central London meetings.
David Kessel © 2014
Craig Kurtz
The Elopement Note
To all you clever people
who don’t believe in love:
They’re fixing the numbers on the public clock
& they falsified the weather report.
The sky is rigged, the clouds corrupt;
the sun’s a slut, the moon takes bribes.
From all this invidiousness
I heartedly efface myself.
To all you hipster intellectuals
who don’t believe in fate:
The verities come in vending machines
& destiny is a programming code.
The muses are but brummagem, kismet is cajolery;
free will’s wrapped in cellophane, conation is downloadable.
For all this ignominiousness
here’s your prize — epic abyss.
To all you supercilious cynics
who don’t believe in anything:
Romance is anachronous
& arete is démodé.
Sincerity is a double cross, matedness a despotic plot;
marriage is the in-&-out, loyalty a sucker’s bet.
Hip hip hooray for your ironicalness,
& boo-hoo (ha-ha) on my dumb happiness.
— Your most humble servant,
the luna moth stuck to your windshield.
Craig Kurtz © 2014
Bouquet of Words
I hear like e.e. cummings
when I’m in your words.
My thoughts trickle down
your neck,
then plash back (astonished)
to your lips
(producing sounds).
My abashed, unfocussed
exposals
(do rather)
achieve such
piquant, plangent
definition
when you aliment
my senses
with your uncanny,
daring
mind.
I feel your thoughts
in my arms
but (so true)
caressing that universe
abounding such
pagination (myriads of
alphabets)
might (well, quite)
implore my tremulous,
nonplussed
thesaurus
some inestimable
(no less)
years long.
I imagined
that I heard
every language
ever once invented
(uttered or not)
in your cosseting
(& limitless)
embrace.
Craig Kurtz © 2014
Synopsis of a Courtship
It’s the gentlest storm,
this barometric pressure
presaging a unison.
Curiosity infers a missing.
Trees may sway in the wind,
a future imploring their skin.
Denial unravels when it’s confronting
the problem of rain.
It’s the quietest of storms,
these exchanges of words
exploring respective similitudes.
Assessing foretokens a longing.
The soil absorbs information
to succor refurbished nutrition.
Circumspection submits to acuteness,
confessing the problem of thirst.
It’s the most complaisant of storms,
this ushering of puissance
amidst convergent elements.
Motion concedes desideratum.
Clouds unfetter unsettled satiety
upon earthly circuits of covetousness.
Parsimony capitulates to quenching,
attesting the dilemma of appetence.
It’s the tranquilest of phenomena,
this interosculated motion
redounding dialectics of pith.
Reciprocation is indispensible.
Roots will swell and luxuriate with weal,
transmitting data to enraptured land.
Ambivalence expires, for all matter is made facile
when rudiments of cupidity impetrate the soil.
Craig Kurtz © 2014
Victims
Untenable believing
has neutralized our strengths.
Fiascoes of passion
have anesthetized our choice.
Calamitous decisions
unravelled our volition
when we qualified resistance
and invited our perdition.
We are the victims.
Unreasonable assessments
disordered our convictions.
Our destinies were finished
with inturbidated scruples.
We were undone in seconds
when we deigned to compromise
a rectitude of continence
in untoward occasions.
We became the casualties.
The kindnesses we proffered
pulled restraint out of our ken.
The proprieties we impetrated
hastened our catastrophe.
We derelicted auspices
and bungled admonitions,
unwarily capitulating
to the venom of temptation.
We are insatiated goners.
And now that we wear toe tags,
his and hers unbiasedly,
we find our fates divided —
one in hell and one in heaven —
our oaths asphyxiated
by a bureaucratic mishap.
If time reversed and I could choose
I wouldn’t evitate the risks.
We die to live, and back again.
Lover’s Tussle
I won’t kiss you ’til we quarrel;
I want to know that you fight fair
and strong and long, with love;
so the worst of you accords
with your best that I adore.
Let us tussle, then rebound
refreshed for tempests
much more kind,
not less profound.
Craig Kurtz © 2014
Tom Kelly
SWAN HUNTERS CRANES
(Demolition Friday June 4th, 11.00 a.m. 2010)
i.m. Marty Kerrigan
“I maintained the cranes for five years.”
He felt disjointed, ill-at-ease,
didn’t know why.
Dreams about climbing cranes,
wind hanging out his overalls, watering eyes,
stuck to the ice-cold climbing rail.
Left the dream early, sat in his kitchen,
watched the street empty as a grieving widower,
alone, derelict but no tears.
His wife found him with the TV on mute,
asleep in overalls he had not worn
for eternity. Pushed away his tears,
left him alone.
Tom Kelly © 2012
George Korolog
Edgemoor Gardens 1958
The bloodied residue of hapless fig and lemon,
carefully infused with vodka and left
alone to dream, she says, builds character.
With her, caution breaks with time
and secrets stick to stories, scorched edges,
like tired nicotine stains between your fingers.
She says that she is going to love you
when she knows the real you,
and you curl like a tensed spring under the bed
waiting for yourself to show up.
Who did this thing? Who filled the world
with these pained echos, shards of gin
and vomit winding its way into your heart?
Is the darkness in me too?
30 May 1431
Burn her. Tear out her tongue. Shadowy hooded magicians cough rites. Spittle of caste and chief. Brushwood sage. Screams pronounce the roasted aires. Toes churning in excrement. Sweat dripping from clouds. Recite mysteries. Beg forgiveness. Scratch signs with charred and crooked sticks. Grimace. Teeth crack. Hearts roar. Hands blaze. Souls rage. Eyes melt. Cremation ends. The gift Godsends is ashen shrine.
©
Mark Kirkbride
Outsiders
The kings of anarchy are coming.
While you sleep, we are plotting our next move.
We’re on the street, with hate in our hearts
Where only love should be.
We are at home in big gagged night.
We daub graffiti on gravestones,
Daring death to come and get us.
Then we set fire to the city.
Look at the pretty flames, darling.
And when the revolution comes,
Meet me at the barricades.
To our enemy, the Establishment,
Set your alarm clocks.
World on my Shoulders
I was born fighting.
I was schooled in sadness.
And love didn’t die, it was killed.
Barman, another pint of Lethe over ‘ere.
I thought I’d feel better, but I don’t. I feel worse.
So it’s out onto these dead streets as the rain slants down,
With the mind yelling, ‘I’ve got to get out of here! I’ve got to get out!’
All too sober, I go back to my rented room in hell,
Crawl in through the catflap, over a slew of junk mail,
And climb the stairs, in this house of stairs.
Up in my room, I warm my hands over the bedside lamp
As rain blurs the darkening window.
The ghost in the glass keeps looking at me,
Before turning away, as I turn.
For, tonight, I’m in an end-of-time mood.
I feel the pain of a million people. – But what’s that?
Mr Krook’s knocking because he wants his money.
How am I supposed to write with this racket?
There’ll be blood on the carpet tonight, I know it.
I’ve a lot on my mind and not much time.
I’ve got to finish this before the world ends.
Mark Kirkbride © 2010
Prakash Kona
The Ten Commandments from an Indian god without a sense of irony
And the Indian god who was more Indian than a god spake all these words to the peoples of his nation, saying:
1) I am GREED FOR POWER AND MONEY the LORD thy God, which hath put you in bondage for hundreds of years and will continue to do so. Thou shalt have no other gods like KINDNESS and COMPASSION before me. Thou shalt not dare treat anyone as thy EQUAL for it is written that thou must CRUSH the bodies and souls of the lowly especially if they happen to be your country folk.
2) I MONEY, the LORD thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me and showing mercy unto thousands of them that love me, and keep my commandments.
3) Thou shalt not spend thy MONEY in vain to reduce human suffering in any form for I will not hold him guiltless that doeth that.
4) Remember the day thou hath become a SELF-CENTERED, CORRUPT and RELENTLESS EXPLOITER, to keep it holy.
5) Honor thy MONEY and thy POWER to RIP others of what is rightfully theirs that thy days may be long upon the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee.
6) Thou shalt not hesitate to MURDER wherever and whenever the occasion demands. Thou shalt also gossip, slander, suppress and injure others for otherwise thy life hath no meaning in this land of milk, honey and downright crooks, loved and revered by gods and men alike.
7) Thou shalt commit treachery whenever thou hath the opportunity since nothing is greater proof of thy INDIANNESS than betray those in need of thy succor.
8) Thou shalt LOOT as much as thou canst as long as thou hath the good sense not to get caught.
9) Thou shalt bear false witness against thy neighbor for thou hath to disclose to the Lord, thy God that there is no neighbor like thee.
10) Thou shalt gladly COVET thy neighbor’s house and his wife and his manservant and his wife too, and his maidservant and her mother, and his ox, and his ASS and everything that is thy neighbor’s especially if that one happens to be poor and without means to challenge thee. Otherwise thou hath no moral right to exist in this country or any country on earth.
“Feminism” – Bollywood Style
A woman can love only once.
A woman gives her heart only once.
A woman marries once, loves one man, and cannot conceive of loving another man.
Indian women can never do what western women are doing which means sleeping with more than one man at the same time.
A woman that is raped is not fit to live.
Whether a woman says ‘yes’ or ‘no’ it still means ‘yes’ if that’s what the man wants.
Virginity is a sign of purity.
A woman must be a virgin before she is married.
Virginity is the woman’s only “treasure” that must be given to no other man except the husband.
A “respectable” woman is a mother, sister, wife or daughter irrespective of whether she is a person in her own right or not.
Mothers are asexual.
Mother’s love is absolute.
All women want to be mothers.
Pregnancy is fun and all women enjoy being pregnant.
Abortion is sin.
Love is what the man wants of a woman and not the other way round.
Possessiveness to the point of obsession is real love.
If a man and a woman are in a room by themselves they are having sex.
Friendship between a man and a woman does not exist.
Indian culture is the best especially for women because it gives them home and family life which means the “privilege” of cooking, cleaning and taking care of husband and children – and all this does not mean work.
A wife fails in her duty if she is not ready for sex when the husband wants it.
If a man cheats it’s a sign of weakness and he can expect forgiveness. If a woman cheats she deserves to die or get killed.
A woman doesn’t mind being slapped and beaten once in a way as a proof of love.
Women fall into two categories – pure and impure. The impure ones want to be pure but cannot and therefore they must die.
All women are lustful creatures behind the mask of innocence.
Wife-beating is a part of married life.
A woman knows how to seduce when she puts her head to it.
Women do not have orgasms.
Women cannot be sexually satisfied.
A man is finished once he has an orgasm but a woman can go on forever.
Love has nothing to do with sex or the body.
Once a woman loses her virginity to a man she belongs to him forever.
An Indian woman cannot do what a man does.
There’s no greater happiness for a woman other than family life.
Something is wrong with single women.
A woman needs the carrot and the stick the same way as a child.
Women who divorce are shameless and have no respect for Indian culture.
Women like men who boss over them and treat them like dirt.
Ultimately a woman is not to be trusted.
©
Prakash Kona © 2010
Tom Kelly
Hunga, Hunga
everyday’s blessed
with nothing.
Hunga, hunga,
never escapes,
my dad’s chant.
Hunga, hunga,
each bugger’s face
lined with want.
Hunga, hunga
hangs in the air:
hunger pains.
Tom Kelly
Breathed It Everyday
Aa back number,
ye wor born
aa lossa,
you never said,
breathed it every day.
You were brayed
soon as look at you,
love faraway as the moon
you never said,
breathed it every day.
I borrow your voice,
breathe you,
hear you, see you,
breathe it every day.
Tom Kelly
Dad in the Rain
1933:
I’m talking to you,
rain sheeting down.
At the end of an alley,
harsh cough rattles,
phlegm spreads.
Grasping his coat,
fingers chain the collar,
cold barb-wires your face.
Words dry up
in the rain.
Tom Kelly
No Laughing Matter
Living next to dread,
close to the lip
of everything but food.
Standing on corners
pushed by police,
poor whites
-violence caged.
1930’s hard;
then a wild practical joke,
you’re a prisoner of war,
no laughing matter.
You were never surprised
what life threw at you,
quality always poor.
Tom Kelly
‘Nye Bevan Dies’
(Wednesday 6th July, 1960)
Three words
made dad cry.
I did not understand,
“Nye dead,”
the reason for his tears.
He had passion,
came from Wales,
spoke for the working classes,
dad said.
Dad read ‘The Herald,’
canvassed for The Labour Party:
Nye was a saviour-
“with feet of clay,”
Tony Benn said.
Tom Kelly © 2010
Tom Kelly
Two poems taken from the forthcoming Red Squirrel collection SOMEWHERE IN HEAVEN
http://www.redsquirrelpress.com/index.php?events
Green Clock
His breath putters,
apes the gas fire.
Solicitor makes notes:
dates, jobs carried-out, contacts…
He forces replies.
The green clock
bought last Christmas
five minutes fast.
Tom Kelly
tomkelly60@hotmail.com
Walking Without Yeats
Looking behind the wall:
cramped hawthorn,
mess of defaced carrier-bags,
sunken half-empty cans and note:
‘Two bottles today.’
Pox marked earth
along with me
derives no pleasure slouching
nowhere near Byzantium.
Tom Kelly
tomkelly60@hotmail.com
Friends, Indeed!
I feel free Madame Bloom; the Northern wind has cleansed me
you kneel before sculpted flowers, eager to recreate a village seen through skimmed postcards by a sender you’ve wished to ignore
I, on the other hand, forgot to water mine, last year’s Christmas present –
shrivelled like prunes. Funny that, it was as if you expected it. Yet, you didn’t utter a word. I’ve come to accept that you’ve been silenced by a genocide you rarely mention.
to you my lady I am faithful, a fact you can’t deny. Pleasing you with my bourgeois ways and discreet departures
Unexpected that Southern wind, knocked me to the ground
an omen. I’m sure you’d agree.
©
In His Memory
Amazed how he could have done it
Forgive them in that way
Was she expected to take pity on the
baker who deprived her of change,
boss for giving the job to his niece,
husband who bedded her sister…
The beggar, (pocketing twenty pounds),
prayed for pardon, before nailing her to the wall,
arms pointed at the heavens
to know his pain
A man whose heart was far greater
than her own.
Karl Koweski
Shrapnel around the heart
The boy sits beneath the shadow of the juniper tree, album splayed open on his lap. His fingers caress the pieces of his collection.
A friend joins him an album of his own tucked under his arm and they fall into comparing favourites.
The boy proudly displays rusted corkscrews, shards of spark plug ceramic, two nails twined into a crucifixion form pulled from the radiator of a bus near the detonation of a female suicide bomber in Tel Aviv.
His friend showcases his own crown jewel, a ragged circle laced with silver thorns. His father brought home from work, last week, pulled from the chest of a five year-old girl.
You can still see the blood on it, the boy marvels, holding the disc up to the fading sunlight.
still life on a shelf
the dull roar of the furnace,
so absolute and implacable,
this must be the sound of all creation.
The lampworker honey spools
molten glass from the crucible within
and births it onto the marver.
Sure hands find form in the formless.
shears sever the cooling placentas.
A breath through the blowpipe
instills a center around which
all else coagulates.
heated tonsils creates an orifice.
A paddle to the bottom imparts balance.
Varying degrees of flame
renders frozen perfection.
Smoky glass shot through with
tendrils of blonde and cerulean.
This vase too immaculate, precious
to know the scent of flowers.
Still life on the shelf.
Terrible in its emptiness and beauty.
Born untouched
and untouchable until death.
Karl Koweski © 2009
Rose Kelleher
Talking to the Machine
They were closer to the machine back then,
the old programmers.
You hear them grumbling over sandwiches,
brushing crumbs from diagrams
drawn up by callow system architects
whose goal, it seems, is infinite abstraction:
a box for man, a box for the machine,
an endless chain of boxes in between.
How they used to love their work! Long hours
in solitary, silent contemplation,
writing in a language that few knew;
sometimes tested by a bug, tormented
almost to madness, giving up, and then
behold! the burning bush of inspiration.
Things are different now,
with programs writing programs, APIs
to APIs; nobody pokes core
directly anymore. Sometimes in secret,
at work, or even after they retire,
they practice, like ascetics on retreat
who forage for wild blueberries and grubs
and rub two sticks together to make fire.
©
Hello World
/* sonnet.cpp */
#include <iostream.h>
int main() {
char *title = “Hello World”;
char *lines[14] = {
“Cubicle-bound, he’s outwardly unmoving”,
“except his fingers pecking at the keys”,
“and scrolling. Hard at work, he never sees”,
“the sunset caught in winter’s interweaving.\n”,
“What can he know of wanderlust or loving,”,
“this \”Man With the Hoe\” in chinos? What can these”,
“weak eyes divine between parentheses”,
“that’s hidden, or believe in that’s past proving?\n”,
“He knows no more than shipwrights do, who build”,
“boats in which fishermen may earn a living;”,
“the curvatures, the angles, fore and aft,\n”,
“that must be true, if nets are to be filled”,
“and children fed; who see their labor leaving”,
“the harbor in a craft within a craft.”
};
cout << title << endl << endl;
for (int i = 0; i < 14; i++)
cout << lines[i] << endl;
return 0;
}
©
Bane
Loathsome creature, crawling from its burrow
to scavenge in the gutter.
Sneaky, snaggle-toothed, slavering, slimy, slothful,
belly down in the filth it loves, it slides
like shit from a sphincter,
lapping at puddles with its hateful tongue.
Dreaded creature, frightening innocent children,
the sight of it dragging itself along the roadside
–always at night, the coward–
enough to make our white-haired mothers cry.
Look at its toadlike skin, covered with pustules
that burst when we pelt it with stones,
leaving behind a trail of blood and fetor
which will draw horseflies later — its parting shot
at us. Us, of all people! We who have been kinder
than anyone else would be to such a thing.
We who have suffered so much.
Laura Kayne
A Theory of Touch
You tell me I’m amazing,
as if it’s a theory you prove
with equations written on skin
by the tips of fingers or touch of lips.
I want to know what you see,
how different it is to what I see in the mirror:
normal, ordinary, constant,
fact already stated.
Your touch is fluid,
whispering over skin,
a secret shared by the two of us,
floating and malleable
in the small space between us.
This touch is soft enough to break me,
bend me to your equations,
to prove your theory,
reform me to your vision
and make me someone else.
Laura Kayne © 2008
Tom Kelly
from Geordie
Geordie is a working class voice often talked about but rarely heard. This poem looks through his eyes as we see the changing face of the north-east. Geordie has worked over forty years in engineering, witnessed highs, lows, redundancy and their impact upon him, his family and community.
Geordie’s been at the works for twenty years,
it’s closing, going to China.
He packed the factory away,
wooden crates, machinery coffins.
The young ones started getting other jobs,
he was the skeleton staff.
Production stopped:
silence hummed day and night shifts.
He found a cubby-hole,
got his head down,
nobody bothered him.
The Foreman asked him if he fancied China?
He cherished his tools,
measuring everything to a thousandth.
Dreamed about getting it right,
woke sweating,
fell asleep in front of the telly.
Broke his heart seeing tools rattling in skips,
throwing your life away,
eyes glinting with precise memories.
The Management said,
‘Finish when ye like,’
he didn’t like,
stayed another month.
He was going to leave Friday,
but lost heart.
The Security Man
didn’t know him
walking out the gate on Tuesday,
severance money and pension
in the post.
The Foreman said,
‘Aa’ve known ye years.’
Geordie had a better way of saying it,
hate would have featured.
Never said,
‘Aa’ve been a good worker’,
‘kept this place going’,
‘lost only two days work in years’,
‘been here when you were dying.’
Just said,
‘leave when ya finished’.
He left with lead weights
in his head.
He told his wife,
she cried
for what the Foreman didn’t say.
He wonders where it’s gone,
strong beer helps regret.
Not bothered about eating,
long as he gets a few pints
over the dozen.
He finds excuses to go to the bar,
somebody said,
‘See aa god about aa man.’
‘What happened?’
Failing light
on golden moments
he hoped for.
Tom Kelly © 2007
David Kessel
Rain and Earth
Tears falling like rain
on the mean streets of London
red as workers’ blood.
Falling on the market street
on a labourer’s fierce decency
irrigating Oriental fruit and veg.
A city of degrading caricatures
and angry poverty in small back rooms.
Footfall of a troubled Bengali girl;
has to make her way to likely bondage
shattered on all fronts.
A cipher in a suit is the circus clown
blinded by illusion, the silence of blindness.
Miscegenation: tears of the cosmos.
A dosser waters the ground with schizophrenia.
The pain of the pavements and the wonder of the sky.
David Kessel © 2007
David Kessel
Arnhem
In memory of my father, Lippy, a battlefront surgeon at Arnhem
Tommy dropped and copped the lot; Hitler, Churchill, Stalin.
‘No use’ he thought, his inalienable Anglian guts lying across his sten;
Uncanny how he felt no pain in his dying guts, only an
unbearable pain in his heart for his Suffolk Daisy.
‘No use Tommy’ the Dutch nurse said calmly, passionately
carressing his fingers.
‘Uncanny’ the crow thought, as it watched the fourth battalion being mown down
north of the railway line,
‘How the best of humanity are murdered for nothing’.
At the fatal bridge a dying corporal asked for a butt
‘You’ll be lucky’ the Sergeant said, ‘Fatal command structure’.
In the Cauldron the independent company fought with lonely arable courage
Down to twenty and like Lilburne won’t be beaten.
Whilst over the river Jerzy* copped it in the chest
A thousand miles from the hell of Poland to the hell of Arnhem.
*Polish name for John
For Drummond Allison
The rain is falling within, bitter rain.
Bitterness is our food, rusted iron,
And the savage cries of geese over a grey river.
The bullet that stopped you turned your rusted words
Into crying songs for these icy dissonant years;
Heathland across our corrupt splintered cities.
The corruption of the flesh and the purity of a race
Long-since guilty of rape and double-dealing
In desperate high-streets and iron fields,
Lives of crass expectation and bloody illusions
In emblemed homes fenced against the planetary wind
And the sighing earth. The rain is falling
On chipshop and battlefield, and the estuary
Of your pain flows worldly into the gulled ocean.
David Kessel © 2006/08
from David Kessel’s O the Windows of the Books Shop Must Be Broken – Collected Poems 1970 – 2006
(Ed. Alan Morrison, Survivors’ Press, 2006)
David Kessel
Ruby Courage
Elegy for Patricia Walters and Tony O’Donnel –
Hackney schizophrenics who died 2007
Long before and after mankind
The wooded hillsides echo
With the call of the wood-pigeon at dusk.
Grey are the streets wherein my heart lies
And blacker the clouds heavy with rain.
(Earth-shank-hunger blocked in my backbone).
The sweet surge of heroin in a cold back room,
The smell of nuclear wind in the morning,
And the aftermath, alone as never before.
Addicted to life, all life, we may withstand.
Huge-hearted Pat Walters in a Hackney street,
Arguing and singing her black gospel,
Martyred by our indifference.
Wry humour of Turkish voices from an alleyway.
A trendy genocidal English gent in a fight with
ECT–racked O’Donnel with his ruby courage.
Being hard to survive,
Tender to live.
And Copernicus, who transposed his lust
Into such a wonder for a few naked years.
The pain of the pavements
And the wind across a fell.
David Kessel © 2008; revised © 2009
Lament for a Taliban Land
Rigor mortis of Brits’ demented empire
on hard famished plains.
Rain falling on the troubled streets of London
on Afghan iron fields, blood!
A Taliban lad, lead in his silver,
shot by a Surrey Para,
his sister taken to a GI brothel,
the devil knows why we’re there.
Beneath an apricot tree their mother weeps,
fallen, withered, apricots.
When this winter’s snows melt she will rise
like the eagle, over savage mountains, genocide,
and the fragrant flowering pomegranate
‘O the fatal loveliness of this land’.
[Note: last line is a quote from Dead Roots (1973) by Arthur Nortje (1942-70)].
Driven
If you truly love your girl you will clean her toilet
‘In Memoriam’ Cesar Vallejo
A poor Slav, thinking London paved with gold,
Dies on a Whitechapel Street.
Misanthropy doesn’t ride on the top of a bus
To the edge of chaos,
But in a flash BMW.
A can of Special, a badge of honour,
Legless by midday.
Londoners play at secret policemen,
A pimp in Merc the most respected.
A city fit for models and mercernaries.
Are all suits straights, straights Gods,
Gods with spiv gadgets, gimmicks and guns?
Insane through arrogance, the sirens of blindness.
Chelsea youth fucks like a machine gun,
Doesn’t know the girl exists.
Footfall of wondrous Bengali lass.
Has to make her way into likely bondage
Shattered on all fronts.
A passing bus driver with angina,
How then discuss experimental poetry?
Falangists disaffect with body and words,
Seduce, anger and spit outside my window,
Each one part cipher, part hyena.
And Peter Lilley’s pet hyena
Who makes a noise like a throat being cut.
Toff looks at his watch, thinks he’ll never die,
Mummy’s money, Daddy’s land;
Turning the oceanic against the poor
Breaks his own heart.
Dog eat dog market; time and again
Capitalist goes to the altar
To purge his rapacious incivility.
A lovely Radio 4 conversation
About genocide!
And MI5, a distant demented aunt,
With the intelligence of a hard boil egg.
A young Woody Guthrie with his guitar
And a can of White Lightning
Staggers into oblivion.
Prepossession, rubbish in an alleyway,
Wanton spunk in a young woman’s cunt.
Vodka and chips. Poetry and lies.
The most downtrodden Englishman
Smokes Mayfair Superkings.
‘Mummy, can we take a packed lunch on the outing
To Auschwitz?’
If black is the colour of death,
White is the colour of nothingness.
If black is the colour of earth,
White is the colour of rain.
All useful hate begins with self-hate
Pathetic to spit in the street,
Hatred and TB.
Manly to listen in a backyard
To a robin singing.
David Kessel © 2010
Peycho Kanev
the world lies down on its back
and waits
for me to penetrate it
butt I sniff at the stench and the rottenness of the centuries
and say to Her:
child, ah, you are only a child
and outside on the street the little girls
are playing, not yet turned into women
crazy enough to break down each man
me?
I am thinking about the paintings of Caravaggio
looking at the left hand
remaining silent to the right.
Peycho Kanev © 2009