A few more waifs and strays

A few others dug out of the journal that don't, I think, have any real place in the world beyond the confines of this blog. It's a monstrously egotistical act posting them here, I suppose, but I find I'm increasingly intolerant of the whole hassle of the submission process, so unless I'm absolutely certain I'm onto a winner, the poems stay where no-one will see them, apart from me, and the odd person or three who still casts the occasional glance this way. Think of it as being part of an extremely secret society

Eyes down (9/10/12)

 

Faces on edges

Dancers precipitous

All the conventions of the dead

Order of corpses

Stacked most dead to least dead

In satellite rooms

Debating dead rights

The issues of rooms

Importance of order

Most roomy to least

Discussing dead policies

The skin being dressed

Pulled and lacquered

Plasticized, electrocuted for the cameras

A semblance of motion

Subsiding as eyes pass

A zero point plan

Some clipboards

Thickening

Not my best work but it’ll do (7/12/12)

 

For you, if I’m honest

I’m keeping my powder

Dry as dust so have

This, not the dross

As such, more a

Middle ranker, it’s

Quite good could get

Anthologised but not quite

Of my best I’m

Saving that for a bigger

Market, I thought one of

The better magazines

The bigger publishers well

An award. If I’m being

Honest with myself, the

Forward, no, the Eliot well

A Nobel, to be frank

The best stuff

Has the best words

Lyric for my brother on his 33^rd birthday (26/7/13)

 

Still cliffs

Three visitors

One missing signature

In the visitor’s book

Written here, instead

Happy birthday

(30/7/13)

 

I looked around his study; a print by Miro, some volumes of Donne, On the desk a chess-piece, a knight, and a deeply marbled pebble lay next to an open notebook.

“Yes” he said, noting my glance “it’s all a kind of lazy shorthand to say how complex I am”