To A Bookshop That Doesn’t Stock My Books

Countless books by celebrities (1)
Untold numbers of political memoirs (2)
Nothing, save the paper they are written on
That could generate heat and light:
Sad if someone were to firebomb you in the night (3)

1. So they haven’t run out of shelf-space.
2. So they can’t have any objection to immoral content.
3. Just saying.

Michael Kelly

Lady Death

lady death comes in different shapes
and forms
she sits in the back of your favourite restaurant
tracking your next order
sees you as a condemned man eating
his last meal

she loiters in school yards
like a child molester with a candy bar
she passes through your dreams
like a faceless chorus girl dropping
black-laced invitations in the
back of your memory bank

her eyes a runaway freight train
speeding through a deserted
railway station where old engineers
walk in circles serenading ageing
conductors drowning in tears

A. D. Winans

A Man Alone

I hated breaking up and I hated
Being left, finding myself in an apartment
With an extra set of silverware and a ghost,
Impatient to be gone. Then to summon up
Who I was before the bed was full with woman.
To shift the street-mind from getting to
To slowing down and window shop. In the bar down the street,
To let my eyes simplify again, and make no judgments,
And breathe in the smoke that drifts
Through one body then another,
And find myself close enough
To whisper into a woman’s just-washed hair
And inhale that ten thousand year old scent.
To memorize a phone number.
To learn to say goodnight at her door.
To keep my hands in my pockets, like a boy.
To open the heart, only a little at a time.

Stephen Orlen

My Best

I’ll do my best for god,
My best for the children,
My best for the animals,
And all the United Kingdom!

I’ll do my best in war,
And my best in love,
My best to everyone,
Not to push and shove.

I’ll do my best in politics,
My best with food,
My best with manners,
And not be rude!

It’s not a contest or rage,
To curse,
Which I write,
This verse.

The only thing I hope for,
Is the future,
It will be a test,
That’s why I’ll just have to do my best!

Lisa Tokely

The train

I’m tired of being involved.
The other night train master came
and nearly took me.
I hang in healthily.
Two years and he ditched me.

He came looking flushed
apology on his lips.
“I’m in love.”
I realised what everything meant.
He had breakfast and looked amused.

Yes everything has a beginning a middle
and an end. But not modern stories
they seem to go on forever like me.
Self rules the world. His self importance
is tearing me apart.
I gaze out of the carriage petrified of the journey.

Will it stop now? Will my life be over
will the man come?

My father thinks mum
is poisoning him.
I think I have to go.
But mum doesn’t want to be alone with an old man.

I worked hard yet
I’m nothing.
My cats are fighting.
The kitten with the cat over
territory I wonder why not I?

He said, he said he loved me.
We must be courting for seventeen years now.
I know some and he knows that I’m being
taken for granted. Like some never make it.
And blondes are never taken for
granted especially if they wear their silicones well.

Jealousy will it be still.
I am a discarded tampon
stop tormenting me.
I’m always on the train and the journey
begins to jet lag me, then there is a break.
Something is wrong.
I climb the rails and it’s encouraged.
I want to speak but I’m tongue tied.

I imagine the trees and the shadows.
Years slip and I’m an infant and I’m swinging
in the orange groves of Cyprus and my
world is filled with fruits and candy and
I’m happy.

Everything is all right everything is fine
says my mum as I fall and graze my knee.
And I’m in my lover’s arms and he says
Everything will be all right.

Then the train hurtles into space
and I no longer have control.

Fatma Durmush

A ghost of myself…

Underground train -
in the dark window a ghost
of myself

Winter breakfast
tasting sun in summer’s jam -
last spoonful

heap of white feathers
blowing on the forest path -
silence

Martha Street

Winter Economy

The horse turns its tail
into the flailing wind.

The labouring crow
is pitched over the oak
and heaves to on a fence post.

Under the hissing trees,
the lank cattle,
their coats greased with wet,
roll the night’s hay
in cud through their molars,
chewing over a week of thunder in June.

Roger Garfitt

Ghosts

The house is empty now,
Depersonalised.
Nothing left that bears your name -
Only household ghosts remain,
Allowing us to feel in touch.
Footprints of furniture
Mark out the space of daily life;
Shadows left by picture frames
And shading, like the faintest bruise,
Where fingers searched for switch and light,
Are all that’s left to mark your stay.
But outside, where your flowers bloom,
The planting brings you back to life:
A shadow toiling in the shade,
A smiled “goodbye” in fading light.

Patrick Osada

Titling Shadows

The church is on the other side
of the estuary being beautiful
may not save it.

I went there once
with the children
the day full of sun and chat

though something happened.
Gone now, the man’s dead,
anyway I never knew him.

Today the mud is bared,
the sea out
the boats tied and tilting

as if they might sink at high tide
instead of rising as they did yesterday
and Thursday and the day before.

The season’s done and the inevitability
of winter is honed in the fresh winds,
the late sun.

Inside the tidy school – quiet.
Our children safe?

Nowhere is -
not the estuary mud or the fields
by the church, even the lanes
are haunted

and each day we wait breathless
for the rattle of the gate, the child’s shout,
‘I’m home! I’m home!’.

Burnishing

Blunt stones half hearted in elements of water yet are something of it as the river runs them over sulks and dribbles along the curled lip of the bank leaves smell dank and brood in places the sun never sees here, moss is the shades sodden carpet the stones are dormant now later they chatter in flood whisper old stories of the mountains have prophecies and forebodings of the ocean and just as the lift of the butterfly’s wing on the tip of a boulder can whip up wind to a storm out at sea so too do the stones overcome water and make the boundaries of the sea