DUST TO DUST
With a practised tap the quarryman
splits asunder
half a billion years of nature’s work -
- atom thin layers
of superheated sedimentary dust
compressed in the cataclysm
layer after layer after layer until:
slate.
His grandfather’s generation
learned to write
on slate;
slate killed them, and
their grandfathers, too,
with its dust:
their slate headstones
row upon row, silhouetted
above the quarry like sentries.
He taps with a skill inborn,
absorbed from fathers and grandfathers;
and with an instinctive, measured thwack
cleaves the slate:
each thin sheet of Earth’s history
is snicked and nipped to shape and size
to tile the roofs
of colliery hovels;
council back-to-backs;
and Betjeman’s suburbia.
In civilized Health and Safety
land the dust is compacted
into patio slabs, and pungent
barbecue odours contaminate
hot carwashing summer Sundays.
ONE WORD CHALLENGE [quarry]
_________________________________
Tankas
-------------Comfortableness
has topography, contours,
crevices between
syllables to wriggle bum
and shoulders into snugly.
--------------------------------------
Benign electron
etching halo undisturbed
intrigued curious men.
Neutron blitzing enlightened
philistines: Hiroshima.
--------------------------------------------------
Conker embryo
rocks in zephyr’s gentle breath;
spiky womb ripens;
drops at Fall, waxy eye gleams
from husk caesarean split.
---------------------------------------------
Blink - shells compacting
to marble - new riveted
painted ships, trippers
waving, to-ing and fro-ing
and then rusting to hulks - blink.
---------------------------------------------------
Unforgettable
aromas and sounds reside
in my memory;
crooner gate, latch key tinkle, .
signalled your fragrant presence
------------------------------------------------
Tick - Earth half illume-d
in pin-drop nightmare blackness
hurtles twenty miles
tugged by fatal attraction
voyaging round a star - tock.
__________________________
Another blank document
Cursed
with a need
to write.
To let escape agonies,
moments of insight
that will never
return.
A need
to tap the sap
and bleed the white
heat of thought.
Sometimes,
punctuation marks,
soldiers of law
and order, mutiny
when I cannot write.
I wobble ~
and baulk/
/at barriers
- the dash
distorts - attenuates
lucid architectural
concepts and the cunning
comma, curvy
tell tail-ed, is the beginning
of rapid
exponential
descent
into the black
hole. The full
stop is the real
McCoy, sucking
in the creative
juice from the nib,
pencil point,
from the inky tube,
slowing the scribing
stroke to faltering
stuttering
surrender.
ONE WORD CHALLENGE [blank]
__________________________________
BOUNCE
Moon yellow tennis ball bounces
around the empty
room randomly changing
its portion of occupied space.
Our ball spins as it soars
in shafts of light
flickering movie-like
in the silver blades;
for a moment a half moon
then gibbous, now full, now crescent.
Random events will determine a kind of death,
a ripping apart of its molecular structure.
An amateur spin bowler or
a Nike footed Beckham dreamer
will change its form,
freeing the imprisoned atoms
to occupy their own portion
of the galaxy. Every atom has imprisoned
electrons swirling, orbiting endlessly.
Our ball, like a small planet
is spinning on its journey,
gravity dooming it to rest
on this bigger planet which is spinning
in calamitous orbit
like all its brothers and sisters
racing as if to escape mother sun
as electrons in the molecular configuration
that is our galaxy which whirls and swirls with all the others…
and others…and others…and others…
It bounces quicker now
and lower,
quicker lower quicker lower
the triumph of gravity deceptively
gradual but rapid and final.
It sticks to the floor for a moment
rolls…rests…
waiting to be bashed
by boot or bat,
a miniature galaxy
in a random portion of the cosmos.
ONE WORD CHALLENGE [bounce]
Published in One Word Anthology isbn9781490396828
___________________________________________________
ORANGES
The day the Oranges
came was drab. Drifting
snowflakes settled
like confetti
- as if to celebrate
the coming of oranges -
on caps and head scarves
queuing.
Children shivered
in short trousers,
women in pinnies
muttered about butter
ration
- “down half an ounce this week” -
and whispered fearfully of Diphtheria,
The Hun, and U- Boats.
When the oranges arrived
at Mr Wilson’s shop
a sigh rippled through
the patient queue.
He opened the boxes
on the snowy pavement
“One each,” he said,“Free!”
Coupons, tinned eggs,
blue bags of sugar,
cod liver oil.
Yesterday bread and dip and
half an egg for breakfast.
Today an orange !
Space had been found
among the tanks,
the bully beef, ammunition and
machine parts, for Oranges
- a treat for those at home who wait.
The oranges
Technicolor bright,
symbols of hope,
a safe Atlantic,
of war being won.
ONE WORD CHALLENGE [orange]
_______________________________________
On the blade of the scythe
-Tock. In that moment on the Sun
four million tons of hydrogen
furnaced.
Tick- in this moment Earth
half illume-d and moon-like
hurtles twenty miles
through pin-drop
black in calamitous
attraction round the violent star
while embryo plants burst
out of pods searching
for white heat light
and chicks tap-tapping break
out of prison shells
still in this same breath
in the beebuzzing shade
of willow’s weep
Jack-the-Lad spurts
and millions of seeds
spitspatter splash burgle
the would-be-woo-ed
maiden and in a millionth of this mo
single pixels of light glimmer
on specks of plundered
pollen from yellowblack bee’s back
- seeming motionless but -
c a s c a d i n g
with butterflies’ talcumy
dust and just perhaps
in a quillionthofamillionth
of this whit
if we could snatch Time
hold it aloft in our hands
and slow it slow it till
almost still
we might behold
the Electron that awesome
energy in ceaseless orbit
gracefully etching a halo - Tock
Another revised version
A different version published in Cumbria University magazine The Third Side of the Coin
Originally a ONE WORD CHALLENGE [time]
________________________________________________
Horizon
Whatever happened to…
Dogger Fisher…
no not German Bight,
the other one -
thingy?
The mantra
was never the same after that.
The words they changed
were my bread trail home;
I need to remember
so I can visit the past,
to find it where I left it.
Tyne Dogger Fisher…Thingy.
Failing to remember makes it seem
so far away
and I’m cut adrift,
the coastline out of sight.
Even the moonwalkers
could see mother Earth,
waiting for them
where they had left it.
Forth Tyne Dogger Fisher.
No, not Hilversum.
Tyne Dogger Fisher.
The words were pictures in my mind
- flares over stormy seas -
but now those mysterious names
are faint echoes -
faraway tallow candles
I cannot grasp.
Forth Tyne Dogger.
On a photograph
I would see,
under the crackled gloss,
who it was I couldn’t remember.
Dogger Fisher…
elusive…
tippytonguey …
sounds, feels African but isn’t,
something about an aeroplane…
Tyne Dogger Fisher - damn!
and then Humber.
Oh, what was it?
The birds have feasted
on the crumbs of my memories.
Forth Tyne Dogger Fisher…
whatever happened to…
Helgoland?
ONE WORD CHALLENGE [remember]
_____________________________________________________
VANITY
Narcissistic
painintheartistic
Fabian Beaumont-Fforbes
formerly known
as Sid Pratt
is a swine
of a swain
to his plain Jane
Elaine.
He cant pass
a looking-glass
without a preen,
carries a spare comb
and a spray of eau
de cologne
don’t you know.
Photos of fab
Fabian
adorn his bedroom
wall, and
Elaine admires
his abs and lats,
but wonders if this
urbane
bane of dames
has a brain.
ONE WORD CHALLENGE [vanity]
________________________________
WITNESS
I hang on the wall
exposed and flagrant,
listening to the echo
of culture vultures’
feet.
Some stroll quickly
by but have a sneaky
look:
art in an instant.
Others linger with
nervous coughs;
office girls giggle
and wiggle by
on precarious
shoes that clatter.
Monday to Friday lunchtime
lovers meet.
“…and that’s disgusting,”
she says,
“why cant we ever meet
by the Pre-Raphaelites?”
ONE WORD CHALLENGE [witness]
_______________________________________
PLAYING THE GAME
All he did was
just desert;
a boy barely
out of school;
proud;
promised
glory;
demented with fear
by wailing shells,
bodies
bobbing
on barbed wire;
bits
of friends
floating
in rain filled
shell holes.
Six comrades
in firing squad,
six scared
exhausted boys
in soldier costume
each convinced
his rifle has the blank.
“SQUAD!”
The shooters flinch:
their breath condenses
in the birdless
silence,
the boy too drunk
to know or care
tied to post
to keep him upright,
white target pinned
on rag doll chest.
The Army
say this
is his
just desert.
“FIRE!”
ONE WORD CHALLENGE [desert]
Published in PENDLE WAR POETRY COMPETITION 2014
____________________________________________
Dylan at…Nottinghill Gate…
In the deoderized
aftershavedcoffeebeaned
cigarettesmoking
wetpeoplesmelling
air
the first batch of
commercial fodder
come
in their measured rush
to the mouth
of the tube;
no-good nabobs,
burley bankers,
secretlover secretaries;
opulent
- once pinstriped now jeans and t-shirted -
city operators;
bugling buskers,
maudlin’ models,
salacious salesmen;
musicians
with their gun carrying cases,
a wiggleandgiggle of shop girls,
an office girl,
Nokia and breakfast toast
in one hand
- newspaper open at
‘accommodation’ -
in the other
in her bumhugging
thighrevealing
ogle-me skirt.
All of them down
the deep dark treads,
down the gullet
of the station,
into to the rumblingsqueaking
shuntingdoorslamming
start of another day.
______________________________________
ABANDONED
She could be difficult and
cause me to miss appointments.
Then one morning she’d gone.
Reported her missing.
One never feels the tension of a bond
till broken - till the pain of the ripping
ragged edges - till that floating away feeling.
I had begun the forgetting,
but today, dog walking, I found her in the undergrowth
beneath the tall, holier-than-thou pines.
Saw
her reproachful look;
the gleaming geometry
of the mouth
kicked broken;
jagged shards
of glass where eyes had
shone.
Her awkward posture reminded
of how I’d adored her
curves.
Such a head-turner she was -
had been.
In the waspy heat
guileless convolvulus
embraced her;
the white flowers as passing bells.
Her arms hang awkwardly broken;
beseeching.
Thick yellowy foam
vomits
from pillowy plush.
Winding binding weed
races rampant
over red cancerous
wounds of rust,
shackling my broken
beautiful
car to earth.
__________________________________________________
HUSK
In the crispy leaves a conker husk,
caesarean split, reminds me
of your difficult birth.
I should have let you go.
Medical blunders and my addiction
made you just a shell
without that golden gleam of hope.
In denial I have pushed you
in your locked in inexistence
in parks and lanes but you
never heard the ice crackle
beneath the wheels
or the distant bark of a dog or
the church bells
in the cold white air.
Your pretty head never turns
at the squeak of playground swings
and you will never see
May blossom or
cow parsley or
smell meadowsweet
on a summer day or
the scent of gardens
on the night air,
nor smell garden fires or
fresh turned soil.
You only stare.
You will never feel a lover’s breath.
I will write a note
for those who care
and join you
in your void.
ONE WORD CHALLENGE [void]
