Snow flurry
Furious hurry
Battering against my skin
It’s artificial
Shavings off something real
The cold would have been less cutting
Whirling soundless wind
I’m upside down
With no direction within grasp
Until I’m allowed to fall down again
Nobody to stop the descent
The settling never lasts long before
An invisible hand, cruel or indifferent,
Shakes and shakes and shakes
Upheaval
Nothing to cling to
Just swirling, purposeless
Three things to see, when I don’t focus on me:
Others caught in the cacophony
Beyond a veil of thick glass, lights twinkling dimly
In the dead centre of the violence, a baby.
Small, a fixed point in it all
Promises and secrets plainly hidden
Steady face, symbol held in place
Though naughty hands tried to break him
So let it snow!
Let it all go.
I am dancing
Knowing nothing
Discovering Everything
Receiving that which is never shaken
Come, dear forefront smile,
Snicker as I inherit the wind,
Watch my faith doodle for a while,
On your shifting sands of blatant sin.
Come, dear sidewinders of writ,
Let me with no choice, lies embrace,
Let beneficiaries taste false grit,
Our close hearts fooled by a social face.
Tantalize me with procrastination,
And hit me dead centre with living lies,
Let me watch power distance of no action,
And hypocrisy rise and truth murdered, dies.
Yet, the perfidy is predictable prophecy,
A reaping at mellow joy gets the purge,
All for that one discarded sagacity.
All for that fall into apathetic urge
An afterthought!
"Now is it not shameful to ask where power is?
When your feet are standing on it? "
The flaws,
The way that my shoulders are broader than they need to be,
So that the small, tight tops never fit right,
So that I look muscular,
“Like a man,” my mother says,
The way my nose is a little too big for my face,
And my thighs are bigger than they need to be,
Where my skin is darker in some places than others,
How the acne scars cover my back,
The way the discolored birthmark marked its place,
In the dead centre of my back,
Or how I have a small black mole on the bottom of my right foot,
And one on my right, ring finger to match it,
A mole so small,
That you could mistake it for the numerous pen smudges on my hands,
How my nails are uneven,
And have little white marks on them,
How the nails on my right hand are tinted yellow,
How my chin wrinkles when I smile,
And when I smile,
I display my misshapen teeth,
For the world to see,
These I call flaws,
The imperfections,
What makes me different from the rest of them,
No worries because,
No one can even see past that,
That’s what makes me different,
The flaws
GOOSEBERRIES AND SHARP CREASES
The plumpest, juiciest, hairiest gooseberries
My grandfather grew in a circular bed,
Dead centre of the immaculate lawn.
And blackcurrants under netting,
And a Victoria plum tree in the far corner.
He taught me to hitch up my trousers at the knee
When I sat down, to avoid spoiling the creases.
And to touch the peak of my cap
When I passed a lady in the street.
But he was a sick man;
Tuberculosis and diabetes that would send him
Into long, deep comas.
He would have taught me a whole lot more,
But for that final coma.
1st July 2020
In Loving Memory Poetry Contest
Sponsor - Regina Riddle
Relic of a raucous night's revel
In an empty shop doorway
Stands a solitary cider bottle sentinel
Bundles of bedding. Beneath
Huddles a barely visible body
Whom I have to skirt around
Shop windows blacked out and blinded
With nothing to offer but silence
No clink of cash registers here
Sprouting up in this desert
The cacti of fast food outlets and poundshops
Cheap takeaways and cheap goods at throwaway prices
Buskers booming out their ballads
Their desperate music fills the air
Echoing the city's despair
The reek of commercial cancer does abound
A city hub,soon to be the dead centre
With the tumbleweed of litter blowing all around
Don your hat, grab your cape and walk with me,
let's stalk the streets, take in the frosty air
on cobbled lanes, necromancing we see
confined people of shade suspended there.
They strain against the lock, peer through the rail
of shadow gate where fear and pain collide,
destined to seek the path of peace and fail,
eternal slumber forever denied.
PC Moss walking the beat on last patrol
footsteps in Lock-up yard in echoes sound
in concert with the chains of fettered soul
never to seek solace beneath the ground.
Matins at the Friary can still be heard,
the brotherhood who walk, missals in hand.
In moonlit armour, Roman legions stirred
on Chester Green they march by night's command.
Take heed now of the child's plaintive cry
hurled from Silk Mill tower in ages past
unanswered call to mother, years go by
languishing, no comfort to the last.
These fragile frames of ours will end their days,
we live in hope for immortality
We know not what 'twixt here and heaven lay
so don your hat and cape, and walk with me.
Derby: known to paranormal investigators as 'the dead centre of England'.
For contest- Midnight
Quietly
I glared at the full moon
For so long
It had me in a trance
Motionless
Now
If you look closely
At my beaming face
It has become
My third eye
Smack right between
My shapely brows
Dead centre
The power of it
Has me swaying
As if to music
Like the gentle
Ebb and flow
Of the ocean.
Lunar power
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