This collection is from 2016 when I got into gothic! A few poems from it.
SUMMER OF DARKNESS
It’s so black in the afternoon
We have to light candles
To see anything in the gloom
As lightening hands turn door handles.
With windows shedding dark from outside
And branches dangling shadows
In their last throes,
Torrential rainwater, upturning stones, unearths traces of carbon dioxide.
THE DEHEARTED
I love songs ‘cause they remind me of people
and I love people ‘cause they remind me of songs
when coffins are laid with knives and forks and candles
and when romantic skeleton couples elegantly come down for dinner to gongs.
HOMESICK
I miss the crappy locks on paint peeling front doors
where bendy Fosbury flop envelopes letter-box land
on fraying 1969 carpet halls
to be picked up by a big Monty Python hand.
November 1st days with their frosty faces;
Shaky minute hands clockwise shivering;
Family members in chronological order on book cases
And blue mettle kettles whistling
Old tunes in the kitchen.
GRAY GRAVNEY
Who I never spoke to over there far away
who was near enough to be left astray
who had a ring on her finger
who had nothing that would linger
whose dress had a hem
who painted a chimney like an industrial stem
who had a hat on her head
who rolled out of bed
who ran and did not falter
even when there wasn’t an alter
who’s still there still
like a pigeon on my window sill.
BEDLAM
Mattresses levitate upwards to a bedroom ceiling
And break into two, falling.
Feather ‘n’ down paper weights feather down
Onto pillow fighters in their dressing gown.
Mouths with false teeth are put into glasses
And doctors get in with their certificates and passes.
4.44 a.m.
He woke up, there and then, and looked at the alarm clock with its big green numbers glaring back, luminously.
Like the other times; 5.55 or, stranger still (‘cause it wasn’t a time to wake up to), 3.33.
Daytime seemed to say you never stood a ghost of a chance of understanding what night meant.
So, having smoked a cigarette, he lay down and hoped to fall back to sleep before any dawn chorus came and went.
EMPIRE ISLAND
Modernists and bedrocks sink to the bottom of a wintry sea by an off-season seaside.
Patriotic lungs fill up and get washed away with the tide
as lively lifeless corpses on the crest of a wave
come home to a heroes’ welcome, floating on ale casks, towards their mass church-crawl grave.
FAWNY DROPPING
Dodgers who spill the beans well
tell The Police News which gets read to hell.
Years and years printed on front pages
get cut like minutes at a meeting about cuts on weekly wages.
Most are so rubbish that sleepy bin men are the only ones awake early enough to open their eyelids
while the lucky few snore, having dumped money on their blanket kids.
PORTRAIT PHOTO RUBBLE
She died the next day.
It changed him.
She would have been 26. The frame with dust on its rim
lay where it lay.
BACK TO MY ARROGANT IMMORTAL SELF
A bleak week of weakness
feeling dead and on my own
in pyjamas as my Sunday best
and wondering what will become of my flesh and bone
I’m back to my arrogant immortal self
where I open my lungs to the city’s sunny ray summer breeze grime
walk with David Jack the Lad Baudelaire stealth
and kick old leather 50s footballs back to where they came from; not my time.
MERE IMMORTALS
When they pass away
not everyone dies.
When it all adds up at the end of the day
not everyone has paid their dues.
The battle between extroverts and introverts
may well reach a loud implosion
with brain alarms and body alerts
being broadcast on hospital television.
TO BE USED FOR THE FINAL COLLECTION
Just been told not long to go.
Thanks to u all! I want you to know
I’m happy with how it went: Wow!
I’m treating what’s to come after as an adventure now.
I suppose (if it doesn’t turn out to be so) I could send
a letter of complaint but I never have, so why start at the end?
A Pretty Kettle of Poetry 