Brutal jacket
After ‘The Chair’ by Paul
Simonon
With the café in my teeth,
nostrils full of petrol.
Breeze
flung over my shoulder
until inertia – the
chiropractor
visits - beer belly, film over
photographs of street parades. Wheels
stuck
by the clock careening
over black ice on the Preston
Northern
Bypass. Now the leather’s
enshrined
in skeletal cracks, lucky
helmet,
eyes of moisture trapped in
finish
make this kitchen chair a
museum.
Bull in absence
After ‘Study of a Bull’ by
Francis Bacon
If we were to laze into the
absence unpainted
white that might be Heaven we'd draw death
out of the oil, dust. Madrid
would solidify
this view. The strength of
leaving, escape
without battle. Realism grips
its ugly arms
around the beast – surely the
dark is the pen?
Blood is about to spill no triumph;
execution awaits, even as the
stadium remains
unfinished. See the seating
barely penciled,
perspective unhappy to
assemble. Roaring
ghost crowd only lives in the
matted fur,
the bright horn caught in
light. One particle
burning on the sand,
a smear kicked up by a hoof.
Action
To hope is an action, less
passive
than we’d let on. Prayer needs
you
to dedicate time. Perhaps
knees, give
up your eyelids to creases.
Hope needs
your blood vessels to spider
the ivory
of an eyeball. The crack of
fingers held
together in a cross. Palms
imprinted
with beads or bark of the dead
apple tree
in the garden while dry leaves
bite
into your bare feet one
afternoon.
Your lungs fumigate with hope,
cells
toxify, you cough and hack and
hope.
Solstice Burial
For John
Art here is not megalithic –
declaration
that plague is hoax, cure is
the trace.
Patience holds our hours
glassy, a fever
of freedom a boot above a
sandcastle.
At Newgrange dawn struggles to
draw
its gold map to the day we
finish half
of another journey out of the
dark.
The silent stars go by – masks
of cloud
deaden their image.
Hold each other
in pixel-light – tombs are
for the dead, not the living.
Holy Island, North Bristol
Channel
Bones in Ogof-yr-Ychen remind
us there was Time
before the Middle of Time,
when knots made crosses
ever more complex. When the
Lord of the Cemais could
give his mother an island that
would soak in spirit.
Daughtered to Dogmael. The
jellyfish don’t measure
time here, where gods come and
go and robes have
always fluttered, salted in
the bay breeze. Older
Priory lasted until Henry VIII
demanded it didn’t but
the Abbey stands. Red tiles
and – what's a battlement
for places without battle?
Crenellation to crenellation
to constellation on a good
night, contemplation willed
here. Explore the mile by mile
and a half, Calvary
in reconstruction may find
you. The current unsilent order
brew fudge sweet and creamy as
the day remembered
after a birthday. Verse is not
enough – you must see
the Holy Island become two at
high tide.
George Sandifer-Smith is a Welsh writer. His poetry has appeared in various journals and magazines including Poetry Wales, Ayaskala Magazine, The Stockholm Review, New Welsh Review, Ink Sweat and Tears, and Wet Grain, as well as numerous anthologies including Poems from Pembrokeshire (Seren Books, 2019), Hit Points (Broken Sleep Books, 2021), and Dark Confessions (Black Bough, 2021). His debut collection Nights Travel At The Right Speed will be published in late 2021 by Infinity Books UK, with pamphlet Empty Trains – a response to the Covid-19 pandemic – following in 2022, published by Broken Sleep Books.
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