Saved by verse?
Words are my enemy,
Sentences my friend,
Paragraphs my addiction
That I have to try and,
End.
I argue with my enjambments,
My cesura’s are slightly worried
As I lose control on my pentameters
And rum amok through my notebook.
The scrawls, and competing poetic
Forms scrap and fight. Clash and
smash their brutal path through
my imagination.
And the riot police cannot stop it.
And the pious cannot stop it.
And God cannot stop it.
Only me.
When I said,
You can live with us,
My agenda was set.
You were my AOB,
and although I was
still recounting the
minutes of my last
Life. I was thinking
About my next move.
Was it Low? Is it obvious?
That I wanted that thing
Below? Is it that plain?
the fact that we talked
In circles as you limbo’d
Around my subtle eyes,
clearly staring at your
Breasts. I now know
What low is, it’s you.
When the joy lifted,
The awkward silence moved in.
They all fell out and you
moved out. And I missed you.
And, although you found that
level of what low is, I still missed
You.
I have admitted it,
The title alone it stands out, reads
my conviction here in this court
of Poetic confessionals.
I have a top pocket in my shirt
and everytime I see a pen that
has no clear owner, it is gone.
There is no cure for this, pencils too
Are at my mercy. But I see myself
not as a captor, but as a liberator.
These pens
Can run free in my drawer
Until they die up.
Although not a preferer of particular shades,
I will steal black gel pens or pens
That give my writing a classic scrawl.
I don’t like biros as they carve
Your sentence in to the paper,
where the gel pens touch
The paper like a lovers tongue.
My tongue is stained black
My heart is dyed blue
And only an Inkoholics
Anonymous can save me now.
Ice stare followed by
Rage like a suns flare.
But still sunny like a smile
Your smile slightly squed by
Rage.
I like it when you pretend
Not to be at your wits end,
I don’t like winding you up
Too much, or the spring ruins.
Spewing my words like a
Wretched stain on my tongue.
They come out in an order that
is all wrong. But the song is sung.
Like a pill in a lonely dark box,
The Lodge sits. A hodge podge,
Black and white box, made from
local rocks and stuffing, cobbed
And Victorian. Faux tudor, eludes
Public gaze as it hides from the admiration
of unwanted stares.
Cut in to the cover,
Shaded from the open fields, friends
In trees and leaves, protected.
It is islanded, lit by a saving light
Bright from the tales of mystics.
What was here before, now made
The house stand tall on a wooded
Foundation, mulch, twigs, make a
Sturded soil. Men that toiled to
Build this stoney lodge, hodge podge
In the cut cover of the woodland.
Haunted, these caliginous overhead
Rafters sway and eddy in the wind,
Spitting from the moors, breaths
Exhale through bark clad columns,
Standing like ancient brick work ,
Spotted across the floor of the forest.
Hunters hid from the cold and dark,
And here, gutted of gizzard and left
to hang, the hares and deer would peer
Through bulging dead eyes, hung by
hind leg on the door. But now a home,
Secluded as it eludes the unwated
Admiration of the public.
Walls are like a canvas, and somewhere
On the walls on Queen Street, is painted
Juniper Leaves.
Never wrote it, never thought about it
Until my muse and I walked past and he
Said, look at that.
“Juniper Leaves, where does Juniper go?”
He said. I said “he went to somewhere, where
He makes sense”.
Pale odours, tackle swings on the
Door as the ostler lurches and lulls
The stallions knee, as he rests it on his.
A union of beast and man, mutual benefit.
Horse is calm, as the ostler keys off
The old shoe, the tack slides
Out with the worn, thinned shell
Shining with wear, it falls to the floor
It’s melodic downfall resonates forever.
To you, brother, frere.
You never called me names,
We grew up divided by sentient
Being versus fiction.
I always won.
We played football with a ball that
Never existed and ran around a field
That exists, but not for you.
We dated girls that dated
Other men, but because of you
We dated them, all of them.
You had a son, by a girl that
had a son.
But not by you.
We played in snow that was never
disturbed apart from the feet of
birds.
We threw handfuls of sod,
That disintegrated mid air like muddy fireworks,
yet that sod is still
in the ground.
We found shells that
Never left the rock pools, and I cut
myself on a crab I imagined in a pool
When I was six.
You laughed but
It never hurt me.
We fought but never drew blood,
No flood of tears at each others
expense.
Just tears after stinging
nettles that stung me, but not you
even though you fell straight in to the middle.
To the brother that I never had,
I made a card for you.
I put it in
The envelope you never gave me,
And wrote that address that you never
Lived in, on it.
With a hand that never
Stops writing a name that never existed.
Brother.
Leaves, twigs, coated like a shag pile.
The dark canopy, chlostraphobic.
Shoots and shadows emaciated under
The roots.
Black soil, black paws stride across
Trailing behind a wet nose, trainers compress
And mulch the organic floor, cracking
Carpeted twigs as the lead chinks.
Shadows and sunlight duel for floorspace,
And in this light show of afternoon
A figure appears like a driver, a flogger
a beater. The trainers stop, the patter of
paws peater to a stop as the low rumble,
grumbles and growls. Eyes scowl as the
Darkness moves closer.
Barking like the gunfire
Of a shooting party, evil pheasants.
The air freezes, dry cold, death.
Isolated from sunlight,
The darkness moves across the mulch
No cracking twigs, just steel draft,
Displaces leaves as it moves.
Pace up, fast up.
Paws and trainers, spit in a run,
The shadow envelopes all.
Soon sunlight saviour to
The frightened, warming
It cuts through the darkness.
No dark beater, just a cravace
Of the mind.
I am gently humourous like a clown,
With an ingrowing toenail.
I am mildly amusing like small children,
Kicking a midget in the shin.
I am pleasantly funny like a pint of milk,
on top of a door.
I am comfortingly interesting like the noise
That sheep make when they’re happy,
I am happily entertaining like a poem
With a clever punchline.
I am jovially congenial like that smile
people make when they’re amused,
But I won’t make you poo yourself
With laughter.
chrisgower.co.uk Veget8
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