The great key

It is colder than the thermometer claims

as we near the end of the season

the season of dying

the fall

felt all the more keenly for fasting

hunger leaving open a space for faith.

The gate lies open

and the inscription above it bids me enter.

Music comes from within

although no service is in train

and standing here on the threshold

only ancient oak separates me from God

but the door stays closed to me

the great key was turned from the other side.

(c) 2012 Andy Hickmott

Mindful Elvis

‘It’s now or never,’ Elvis sang
and he was right.
Just last night I’d planned to tell you

grievous truths
but instead took refuge in platitudes.
I must have lost sight

that no matter how often I put it off
when I finally tell you,
if it’s not never, it has to be now.

Messrs Smith & Maynard’s Allegorical Circus

The day they banned the animals

affirmed that jaded mother's saw

which states, no surer lure is known

than basic needs proscribed by law.

At first they tried to get inside

the tent by legal means, the lions

petitioning the mayor, the dancing bear

performing, and showing bold defiance

one and all by queuing up

at a sign which read no critters here.

The Ringmaster was forced to appear

if not contrite at least sincere;

the edict, he said, wasn’t his to repeal,

and did the animals really think

he’d the means to pay more acrobats?

The big top teeters on the brink

of collapse now those who once were free

to exploit are free to roam. At this

the tattooed snake recoiled and slipped

past the master of ceremonies,

deftly weaving between his feet,

and tacked full throttle for the skirt

of canvas twenty feet beyond

etching zigzags in the dirt.

The lion tamer lunged with a chair

and missed, the clowns fell over it

while aiming ink from daffodils

at the fast-advancing invertebrate.

At last none but the giantess

impeded the python’s way, and she

his dancing partner throughout his career,

Tweedledum to his Tweedledee,

beguiled his heart with her swaying hips

then ran him through with her eight inch heel.

The elephant let out a trump

at the sudden stain of cochineal.

The tattooed snake lay still, his eyes

milk pearls, his tongue a bookmark in

his finished autobiography.

Thus do all revolts begin:

the chimpanzees grinned fiercely and

threw excrement; the seals applauded

wildly, barking their disdain;

the Bengal tiger snarled, and so did

the bear; the prancing ponies minced

in ever narrowing circles; while

the lion, unnoticed, mounted a bale

of straw to hail the rank and file.

‘Comrade beasts in exile,’ he roared,

‘mourn not the martyr’s skewering,

for has his selfless death not set

us free? Now, let us choose our king...’

(c) 2012 Slush Poet / Poetrivia

Some Haiku

Espresso

Empty coffee cup

Curtains drawn, unopened mail

Day begins afresh

Late

On the stairs she lay

Still as three a.m., at rest

Silver stains her cheek

Rush hour

Rise, St Pancras rise!

The dawn unfurls, transmuting

Red brick into gold

(c) 2012 Poetrivia

Subterranean

for Jean Charles de Menezes

You insist upon truth,
you insist upon proof,
for the piece of silver baked in your pudding;
well, here’s a sixpeth to add to your stewing thoughts

(eat with open eyes and care you don’t choke;

it wouldn’t be wise to die today):

there was snow on the ground,
all around, tramped and sheet,
when I pursued inbound the trail I’d found

left without by its fiery feet.

And those imprints weren’t only dry,
dry as old bones discarded and gnawed

— but scorched!

scorched, I swear, as sward a dragon’s lair,

but who now believes in dragons?

and who by the end of the day?

So, you’ve never seen a dragon fly

over south west nine, nor snow in July? —

please stop shining that light in my eyes —

try this new metaphor on for size...

I’ll go on as I should have began
with once upon a wonderland;

are you sitting comfortably?

Then what’s this we see? a hole in the ground:
turn it around and around and around
on twenty-four hour sight and sound,

and cry for strangers and cry for morning

until you spy an off-white rabbit
scurrying by with a hump on its spine
and a voice behind yells, somebody grab it!
and a voice within says, this one’s mine!

So I ran in through the burning door

that severed the head from the body of men,

and there, inside that fiery den, I saw
a chasm through the come-and-goes,

as if the demon had cleaved a wake

the commuters knew would be a mistake to close;
pale faces, bodies felled

as if by an air-burst Big Boy wrecker,

turned to me as though I were Mecca; and I held
my cold gun, trigger finger keyed,

prepared to hound my quarry’s trail

and take down Mister Cottontail, but he’d
passed that gate of no return

that’s barred by the jaws of an Oyster shell,

with cold intent to evil impelled, taciturn,
a chip on each shoulder, that hump on his back,

down Charon’s waterfall and into the lair

of Erebus, mouthing a prayer, to attack!

The balance tipped,my feet slipped; thrown
from illusion, not from mission,

 freed

of delusion; that one fixed

point

in

     space

from where Archimedes thought he could

move

the

       world

became the pillory where I was

forced

to

      watch

the world falling,

falling,

    gravity

      asserting.

Was there a tremor felt in Feltham?

Is it still there or was it lost?

I’ve not been home, not seen home since...

like me, is Feltham lost?

I don’t know.

What I do know

— top of my class in the rules of riposte —
is my elbow from my arse,
a psycho from a bolting bunny,
a frolicking brook from a flushing dunny.

Down foaming white water without a canoe
pursued by the Devil’s tempestuous daughter,
the way strewn with boulders, snow-blind and bound,
tossed round and round,
falling down,

down

down.

Bleak getting bleaker

day begets night

the Devil is in sight...

Did that moment into eternity expand
or eternity into this moment condense?
— a pointless debate, my fate is at hand;
this is a rock I will have to roll.
Let us then stay in the present tense.

Upon the nether shore
phantasms crowd the quay
yet unshorn of earthly care,
plaintive stares, bewildered
at death’s uncanny kin
to life, their quotidian being
recurring and blurring
in what might be their closing act,
fading to the credits like Schrödinger’s cat.

That the demon tries (a silent prayer on his lips all the while)
to cloak with anonymity his guilt affirms his guile,
never a beggar more nonchalant beside the muttering rail —
its fateful rattle, its mournful wail —
the ghosts anticipate (while the demon’s prayers abate)
their imminent release (while the demon deftly eases
from his pocket a wired box with a plug in a socket)
and I yell,

drop it!

drop it!

for I know now only I can stop it.

With billowing and bellowing
the dragon enters the pit
—who now believes in dragons?
Like sunflowers to the dawn
all phantoms turn to it.

I stand facing Asphodel (from the Portuguese for ‘stock’ and ‘well’)
and it’s all aboard for Tartarus (which is ancient Greek for ‘go to hell’).

With the ferryman’s arrival
the undead arise once more
who by the end of the day
would alight not at Walthamstow
but on Elysium’s shore.

With the fate of a thousand souls on your head

the weight of a thousand souls is more

than the weight of a round of lead.

How that round now weighs on me,

the weight it rounds on me:

I allege double jeopardy.

(c) 2012 Poetrivia

Stranger on the platform, Stockwell station

Passengers rise
from their seats as though their names
have been called
and a few jolts later the night train rifles
into Stock-
well station. Outside full moon faces
whoosh past
on a conveyor belt and get caught in the field
generated by
the arriving train’s motion, agitated
and converging
on its doors, jostling towards its event
horizon.

A woman outside on the platform looking
in through curving
Plexiglas looks away quickly, but not quickly
enough. Her eyes
are momentarily entered, a ludicrously intimate
instant of
humanity that cannot so easily be
undone,
and though they dwell downwards they cannot
detach themselves
from this barbed line. The door stays closed.

She would
be considered attractive by many. She has
fine lines
around her eyes whose colourless upper lids are
spherical and taut,
as though weighed down by her lashes. Her high
cheeks darken
betraying an inner struggle, a conscious subduing
of an instinct-
ive openness. Her tilted brow reflects
the overhead
lights, her brow twitches
slightly.

The door stays closed.
Elsewhere, it is Wembley before God
Save the Queen,
or the stretched out Wimbledon second between
first ball toss
and crushing racquet thwack, or a High Court
judge’s swallow
before he delivers his verdict. But this,
this is Stockwell,
and the woman dares look up as a klaxon
screams
and the door opens for bodies
to flow.


(c) 2012 Poetrivia

Getting into your pantry

The following sonnet was written while attending a Faber Academy Workshop session facilitated by Jo Shapcott ("Of Mutability," Costa Book of the Year 2010) in London, England.

Getting into your pantry

I hold my breath and count to ten
to string the moment out; I get
only as far as six before
easing the door and slipping inside.
Each packet, jar and Tupperware pot
tingles at my touch and sings
through my fingers. The saffron sparkles
at the back of a dark jostling shelf.

The cardamoms, cloves and cinnamon sticks
spring from the jars, the basmati
rice shimmies to the shushing of breakers
fingering shingle on a Goan beach.
The ingredients line themselves up like a recipe
they know will induce you to stay the night.

(c) 2012 Poetrivia

In the mix

The following poem was written while attending a Faber Academy Workshop session facilitated by Jo Shapcott ("Of Mutability," Costa Book of the Year 2010) in London, England.

In the Mix

Crank the cold handle
and watch the silvered blades refract
halogen white and mixing-bowl blue
in their scalpel-clean steel.

Crank the cold handle
and the whispering gears prattle
as the blades slash and slither
up to the neck in batter.

Crank the cold handle
if only to feel at one
with a mechanical joy modernity
has consigned to the bottom drawer.

(c) 2012 Poetrivia

The Geordie Crossing

From just outside Jarrow
 there came an seafarer
 who set out to sea
in a rusting wheelbarrow;
leaving naught to chance,
 with his Michelin guide
 and a sextant in hand
he set sail for France.

Upon reaching land
 the mayor of Dunkirk
 turned out to greet him
with a military band
and I’ve heard it said
 he was held shoulder high
 and hailed as a hero
despite being dead.

Now I feel inclined
 to attest for the record
 that there’s none so stout
as men raised by the Tyne
for when it occurred
 that the sea took it’s toll
 he expired in silence
not saying a word.

(c) 2012 Poetrivia

Your Instruments and Calculations

Your instruments and calculations

do not fix the start of time
   before storytellers had tales to tell;

nor upon cosmic scales assay
   the universe’s weight in bushels of wheat,

or sound its depth in fathoms
   like a hand-fed knotted line;

those dotted ink-blot images should not be mistaken
   for the weft and warp this day is woven from;

and the night sky’s colour says more about
   stirrings of new life than death of all existence.

Your instruments and calculations,
   your infinite extrapolations.

Isn’t it more likely
   that if the mass of our ignorance

and its unknown
   but nonetheless definite location and momentum

were fed into your finest
   instruments and calculations,

we would be aliens in the world they revealed to us?

(c) 2012 Poetrivia

After the fifth day

After the fifth day of days
God in man's image put on
the kettle and rested a while,

for inspiration;

he must have shut his eyes
and nodded off, for when
he woke his tea had cooled

and his creation,

still unfinished, too
had cooled and set rock hard.
'It's spoiled! It's spoiled!'

the Lord told Satan.

'And what's it meant to be?'
Satan asked, smirking,
‘Is looks too unstable to rest

your feet on.’

Then Beelzebub raised the globe
and span it on one finger
wherefore God drew forth

baring his teeth.

‘Hey, put that down!’ he snarled,
‘Or wash your hands at least.’
The Devil wiped it with his

handkerchief.

‘Oh I give up with you,’
God said. ‘Be you banished
to a fiery realm, and call me

when supper’s done.’

And he tossed the tainted globe
carelessly out in the yard
ninety-three million miles from

the closest sun.

The Devil served liver for tea
as a placating treat for the Lord,
but God just pushed it around

his plate with a fork,

and while God sulked the Devil’s
grimy smudges and spittle
spread over the earth and multiplied;

in short,

they discovered evolution.
Then on the seventh day
one assemblage of slime spoke

the first word.

And that word was our beginning:
history at last could evolve,
and soon stories of monsters

and heroes were told.

© 2012 Poetrivia

In the woods

Though forty years may muddle and confuse
I still recall that day, far from our grey estate
roaming mottled lanes through hushing woods
which screened the ringing sun and wrung it on
the ground like salt upon a cabbage patch.

We'd ventured far that summer’s day, crept
down nettley paths past caravans of charcoal
burners whom we fantasized were gypsy
witches, scrumped our lunch in orchards, scaled
rubbish tips for pram-wheels to build carts.

The man stood astride in a roadside glade,
his fisted hands on his hips, as naked as the hidden
sky was blue, and those who saw this spectre
ran to tell the others down the lane,
but when we came again the man had gone.

(c) 2012 Poetrivia

Republica

Tread lightly through this pitted field dear friend
do not pretend ambivalence to beauty
its preservation is your only duty
as you march towards your worthy godless end

Do not pretend ambivalence to beauty
when holy covenants lie in scattered shards
and idols fuel the bonfires of the communards
its preservation is your only duty

When holy covenants lie in scattered shards
shall we dance beneath the stars in burned out kirks
while cardinals wait in line to see their works
and idols fuel the bonfires of the communards?
Tread lightly through this pitted field dear friend
you march towards a worthy godless end

(c) 2012 Poetrivia

For Valour

The Victoria Cross was, for valour, bestowed
and it’s true not all would have done what was done,
but his sacrifice was for no honourable code
save the licence to brandish and fire a gun.

In an earlier time when the streets were ablaze
our hero, seduced by the twittering spawn,
ran amok with the worst till at death of the day
he skulked home and waited for jack-boots at dawn.

Had that rap to crack open his shell but come
his mother would now be awaiting, at the gate
of Wormwood Scrubs prison, a broken son
and not, on an airfield, a flag-adorned crate.

Turn about

Many thanks to my friends Wendy Dyer, Steve Boorman and Chris Hardy of Wendy's South London Stanza group (A Stanza is a local group of Poetry Society members, like what we are) for their priceless help with this poem last night. I think this is a big improvement on the dross I turned up with...

Turn about

Turn about
this life of days and weather;
contemplate another season,
oldly written, growing younger,
the astounding sight of a cataract ascending,
where words play
together,

holding hands and folding
pristine patterns of intricate motion,
joining, joining,
growing in knowing,
against the creaking lament of abandoned hulks,
spiked upon rocks
on the loss of their absentee captains,

whose widows standing on tide-worn shores
rewind the voyage with inward eyes,
and, claiming no part in tomorrow,
turn about,
for eternity trails behind.

(c) 2012 Poetrivia