Barry Tebb Short Poems
Famous Short Barry Tebb Poems. Short poetry by famous poet Barry Tebb. A collection of the all-time best Barry Tebb short poems
by
Barry Tebb
Too much gone wrong –
No Muse, no song.
by
Barry Tebb
How I loathe this land of my exile,
Concrete upon concrete,
Steel upon steel,
Glass upon glass
In massed battalions
And no way back.
My mind moves to a far-off place
To a hill-top where the wind is my succour,
Its blow and howl and rage
Over the springing turf and heather
Calms as the song of a mother
And the last light’s glimmer.
by
Barry Tebb
I thought of my ‘faculty of poetry’
As of the eye
The bream or white-bait showed
In its hysterical dance of death
When the receding tide
Left it asleep
In a shallow pool on the shore.
Why did I fail to take it?
Was I strangely compassionate
Or merely afraid to touch
The jerking spasm of flesh
With the still eye?
Or was it I on the shore
In the shallow pool, left by the tide,
Engaged in that mystic dance of death,
Twenty years before?
by
Barry Tebb
Sorry, I almost forgot, but I don't think
Its worth the effort to become a Carcanet poet
With my mug-shot on art gloss paper
In your catalogue as big as Mont Blanc
Easier to imagine, as Benjamin Peret did,
A wind that would unscrew the mountain
Or stars like apricot tarts strolling
Aimlessly along the Boulevard of Broken Dreams.
by
Barry Tebb
for Brenda
Both had come with no gardener but the soul;
I had myself expressed them in weariness,
Like the last drop of milk from your tired breast.
The red rose was no rose for me.
My black rose shone in a silver dawn
In the throat of the wind.
On the tongue of the wind
I taste your spirit;
I will bear you on my toes
To the roof of the world.
by
Barry Tebb
I sit inside the train of tears
The station mellow in shade
Unoriginal phrases air-brush the canvas.
Puzzling minds I wonder
If all are like my own
Closed to stillness.
From girders hang the acrobats of gone
Pearl grey Whistlers.
We sat on
A train like this once, you and I,
Face to face but travelling
In opposite directions-
Or was it you alone I watched depart,
Stood on the platform edge, anxious and alert?
by
Barry Tebb
I could bend and kiss them, everyone,
Strong and securing
As cunts are soft and beckoning.
by
Barry Tebb
Go seek Prince Charming in another place,
His is one face I shall not wear again
You would not have the stars for diadem.
by
Barry Tebb
I am waiting for the sky to flower
Like poems in a winter mind:
And yet they come, maybe trailing along
An urchin gang, sobbing and snotty-nosed.
by
Barry Tebb
Through the windows the sun’s light
Turns to amber, the moon’s to jade;
All night long I lie awake, wondering
How much your stunned heart can take.
That moment’s ‘sudden interminable splendour’,
Our love kept up through the years of stress,
Strange dark-haired creature, the light over the water
Burns and beckons through our emptiness.
by
Barry Tebb
I drowse and dream in this sleeping house
Fynbos the cat purring by the curtain
Suriya the sun god sharing the garden
Where joss sticks burn and my nostrils quiver
At the echo of Japanese songs, long ago.
In the breaking day I kiss your lips
And taste the tongue of your waking shadow.
by
Barry Tebb
Even the charity shops boast of the surveillance
Mr Average is caught on camera a hundred times a day
To provide unending footage for reality TV
But in a decade where will we all be?
Big Brother’s eye will see our every step,
The blink of every eye, the tears we cry.
by
Barry Tebb
Yellow rapeseed
Fields of vision
Whiter than
A shade of pale.
by
Barry Tebb
Wires toss in the wind, shrubs flap
And the tap on windows wakes us
To March’s mistral madness:
I see white crocuses amid the rain.
by
Barry Tebb
Your voice on the telephone
Hushes the storm in my heart
Lightning strikes twice
In the same place.
I cannot picture your face
No photograph, no keepsake,
No letters scented with your smile,
No ring or marriage bed.
Your kisses were the best
I ever had, my first,
My only valentine.
by
Barry Tebb
Two nights I have dreamed of you
Once as an adolescent, evanescent
Yet tangible still to the spirit’s touch,
Then as a ten year old in the shared
Secret garden of our imagination.
by
Barry Tebb
Sorry, Writer in Residence on the Great North Run
The last thing I’d ever do is listen to your spin
“You risk losing potential allies in your war
against the philistines,
Astley, Armitage, Duffy, Sansom, unashamedly provincial,
Defiantly Un-Oxbridge, not the enemy!”
Sorry, Andy, arse-licking's not to my taste.
I always thought it wasn’t yours, my mistake!
by
Barry Tebb
for Brenda
Your blue dressing-gown
Lying on the chair back
Like a tired arm.
by
Barry Tebb
I sat on a low stone wall
Watching the blue blood of the azaleas
Spatter on Haworth’s cobbles.
A seamless transparency of rain
Lowering over the turning trees
My thoughts drifting to Claudel’s
‘Five Great Odes’, to the stone marker
To the swathes of heather.
I stood on the moor top
Where the tracks cross
The fellside green
The fellside ochre,
Shifting reflections
Of C?zanne’s last winter.
by
Barry Tebb
In sleep I dream the gratitude I know I cannot say
Now you are in a latitude where palm trees hold the sway
There are always things between us that keep getting in the way
And stop me from expressing the things I mean to say
In a night of wind and weathers love will not go away.
by
Barry Tebb
‘Leeds welcomes you’ in flowers
Garlanding the white stuccoed tower
Of City Station: red on green
As poetry’s demon seizes me,
Upending all ordures of order.
‘Haworth Moor, Haworth Moor’
Echoes and re-echoes under the Dark Arches
Where the Aire gurgles and swirls
In eddies of Jack the Ripper, cloud-hopping
Jumping Jack Flash but Jack’s the lad I’m not
My adolescent timidity gelding
My desire for the welcoming heavy breasts
And garlanded yielding vaginas.
by
Barry Tebb
Runs to no compass point
But starts within the human heart
Where travellers in twos may go
As for a while it winds beside
A man-made road then veers aside
We met at a cross-roads once and journeyed
Together for a while across a moor
And then on horseback sadly you waved adieu.