There is no wedding party. Just the car parked up on the side of the road, wearing its ribbons a little uncomfortably. At nine thirty this morning it was feeling prouder as it was bedecked in bows. Anticipation hummed under its warming bonnet. Waiting outside the church while the ceremony took place, the grille glowed with excitement. It shone when the photographer bounced his flash up its flanks and the lady of the hour stepped in. But now the engine is cold and silent. The car hugs the kerb, ducking, as other cars, cars without ribbons, stream past, with somewhere more important to be.
Your strong final stanzas of deluge and Waiting Room, were much appriciated, as well as the entirety of Partir and Breakfast in Bed. You continue to shine, with the luster of a black pearl.
i love reading your poetry. just wanted to say that even if i don't comment much or at all on any of these poems, it doesn't mean i'm not reading and enjoying them
I didn't write for ages, then got busy, still didn't write.... am around, every so often. love you all xxx
The air’s a vice. We’re sat and itchy. Blank, Waiting for the big bang, the buzz the bucking bronco. The weather’s bananas. We’re half-baked, poaching in a hot flush boiling, in this interminable grey. Storm clouds wrap around each corner so low, so lethargic. They sprawl on window ledges, loll along the pavement, Teasing us, fat, and boring and relentlessly unenthusiastic. Come on! Be angry! Quell this frustration, Bring me some passion! We’re stifled, soporific, two muddled, muggy minds sat seeking inspiration in every passing stranger but finding only passive, empty eyes. No indolence, no expression no riot. The tempest’s heart beats far too far away.
That summer the sun hung with a mean yellow glow. Your garden hazed with mustard gas, tepid, rank and waterlogged. You said dead dogs were buried under your rusty slide and I believed you. You dared me to roll around under there and I did, crushing martian moss and beetles. We marked our victory over the dead hounds with a lolly-stick cross and discarded Panda Pops. We gathered snails that summer. An army of munching, slimy beasts were imprisoned in the rabbit hutch, and we, the great oppressors would run naked, whooping, through the unkempt borders, building briar traps and snaring shins on bark and bramble, pissing in the wilderness and chasing cats.
Whiplash junkie, drive too fast pierce my shoulders. Your blade too deep, beats a glockenspiel chime of passing hours. Busy infestation creeps this concrete, round mud, skirting. Sit and watch. This breeze is spiked. I am Moscow. Feel so lost though. Whirl the warming rays of day, closing down the hillside - trapped me. They're miraculous, bouncing, sudden. Glare my eyes bright. This stone wall, it's moths and mosses my old bailey windswept, whistled. Caught out stand up hands up found out. Happy.
This is Marlboro county newly discovered by the ad execs and the entrepreneurs having conversations in dusty doorways with young bloods whose families are old as the hills. This is a land born into the information age too sudden. Swept up in a furore of regeneration while the older generations stay adamantly bemused. Popart pillbox - there's amusement gleefully it mocks the road. It's misery is once more hidden, trapped in gaudy photographs, the promise from a lick of paint calls out to former foes. This is the new riviera foetal frames of whitewashed marvel spring up and congregate the hillsides a wedding party for east meets west. An audience for coaches, trailing though the dust to view the old ways, so long hidden. Now the lifestyle's in a zoo.
We were so close all week and then when I found the end of the rainbow, you weren't there. Were you proud of me, filled with every colour as I was? All week we breathed each other all that smoke and office-stale tongues, lager lips, and moisture balm. Tea tree cheeks. I tasted you on the heel of my palm, we'd collided, drunk and cocky pounded the world on each other's clavicles. The ache was there till Wednesday. We were on the same pillow. I could have touched your nose with the tip of my tongue while sleeping. We were taking stairs two at a time same rhythm, only I lead with the left. And then I found the end of the rainbow alone. I spun to tell you touch you thank you show you and found only the ghosts of your predecessors. I was colourful, but stuck in a monochrome home with a monochrome TV and a monochrome and silent phone. Tonight we'll share the moment, but it's a lost moment. The rainbow went away when night came and this morning October sun came through my sheets like nothing ever happened.
You smelt eiderdown on the wind. I was hunkered down in my own ballast, veteran of this man-girl epic, all absorbed in misplaced time and circumstance. You crept up honest. Your bombastic overtures lured me out with great aplomb, and now I'm only ducking duvets, chores and bureaucracy, not great hives of lies and games by proxy. Your truth storm saturates despair.
Annie Taylor Rode a dun gelding with spirit. One morning last easter, our gel Came a cropper In a ditch dug by druids Over Old Sarum way. Undone was the pony, to see her laid out so; heartstopped, he Still haunts there, saddle and all.