Three Poems by Eddie Heaton

 

giving birth 

 

what has been recovered from those  

drab lands by the sea is not unlike a  

neatly quartered rendering of sterile  

blocks and flights and frosted by the  

look of it with smiles displaying teeth  

of crusted blue and sighs elusive  

fragments of a sleep where linings  

crack among the brook-side rushes  

and increase the paltry rain-affected  

airbursts lie about as silent and as  

death-like as a journey through a trip   

a visionary and yet invasive half-moon  

lists while thinning out tremendous  

deeds with warnings that the  

slot-machines have gone on strike  

for more persuasive flashing lights  

you stumble into dinner while  

discussing serious themes not likely  

though to trouble you or melt away  

or cease or squeeze between your  

shoulder blades while boring  

through your rash you pass the  

basket down a floor with breakages  

and bread and method and the  

custard creams that one old  

comrade commandeered while  

watching songs of praise again  

but this time without feeling sad  

and by extension clogged and  

costive like a preparation of  

your fingers and then backing  

over legs within the only disinfected  

place to be a negative director of the  

course who never found much reason  

in his sport but voiced support for all  

its actions nonetheless a real outpouring  

worried and unsure and otherwise  

engaged apart from wherewithal and  

after all it was the daily mail but one  

blonde bit of difference was at risk a  

legacy deflating pressure of the kind 

safeguarded by a counterpart 

unravelling instead he managed  

hardship blended with maternity  

and war outside the zone he  

dragged and lurched and crawled  

and was ashamed the melting of his  

actions in among those were  

expressed you speculate    

  

 

climate warriors arise 

 

the light scarred millions with its variable  

strobing and general inefficiency and  

then drew a line of potent strife through  

a valley of impermanence and i think I saw  

you in a diesel powered suv blaming  

everyone except yourself with a list of  

crude essentials and pain-pulled firsts  

in a reverie of gunge-filled eye sockets  

while the other participants shared a  

smile with their families on the  

mantelpiece and the uniform plunge  

was yellow-faced for rounding corners  

but even then you came in last with  

your dishonest lifestyle stubs and  

any-way-is-up persona that was at  

least tacked on to what we used to  

call our grief together with the sordid  

social interplay between corruption  

and your hard-on and the lake and  

sleaze between the planners and  

what wasn’t really there at all so  

make like a polar bear in a chamber  

of pure sound quite independent  

of the rule of law and god forbid but  

it’s turned out nice again for those  

discharged against their wishes in  

celebrity themed y-fronts and with  

thousands of percentile points to draw  

upon our new approach was reassigned  

and that means multitudes must be  

controlled and then reduced to  

sub-atomic dust life passed around  

the speechless in so much as how  

more difficult a thing might just  

turn out to be that drove you on  

to add the bribes onto the balance  

sheet alongside gilded artefacts  

the sudden agonising heat will have  

transformed the population into  

monolithic jellied eels so make  

like an eskimo and own the dark  

proceeds then spend your  

entitlement by debit card or  

electronic transfer with the  

harvest festival in mind

 

complacency personified 

 

panic squirted out from needles swearing  

testament to bilge in iron-coloured sparks  

enabled by extension and then finished off  

with sugar-coated caps and wind-stuffed  

sleeves on purple feathered artificial beings  

branded leeches caught colliding in an  

endless multi-level cosmic parish of the  

thorns an aspiration facing stiff resistance  

bears its siblings to the summit without  

even looking backwards then retreats to  

where some even cheaper types have  

surely seen you draw the line include  

the tools for being faced and spray  

internal fluids into care-free moneyed  

laps at sundown in the howling where  

the wretched are in tears and where  

the endless broken eardrums are as  

human snapping is to storms and  

reddish coats of topsoil cover  

composites of limbs in airtight barrels  

and the welcome stops its dripping  

while macho voices scream on out  

from leather coats with sorrow for  

the old black tattered flag the  

summer’s steeple-top cascades its  

barely touching bolts that sway  

flesh buckles for the hot as viewed  

through pristine windows in the  

afternoon the mostly swollen brains  

that flash repeat among a breeze then  

after all that orange duck you slide the  

keys across the table top to tempt a  

hapless savage from his swarming lies  

determined to place narrow sacrifice  

into a safe that’s graphite-lined yet  

light a structure that surrounds the  

evening as you speak with every spark  

that blows the languid earth will  

understand you more in every pain  

it’s what your own bereavement showed  

to those who were impacted by your sadly  

soulless stare and fat black rats sit tartly 

in their long-deserted shafts with  

diamond-studded once translucent hides  

as surely non-existent as apparent space  

and time

Eddie Heaton studied innovative and experimental poetry under the tutelage of post-modern poet and educator Keith Jebb, achieving a first-class honours degree. 

He also won the 2021 Carcanet Award for Creative Writing