Poetry
Issue #1
Looking Ahead
She wore the morning
as if it was the sun on her back,
trailing her feet in the grass,
only to trip on a rock
and stumble, slightly breathless,
smiling.
A girl skips summer down a lane,
walking clumsily,then imagines she is a bird
running on tip toes,
wind soaring, open eyes,
blown out cheeks.
She was born at dawn, after an
autumn rainstorm,
standing inbetween the day
and its weather.
Her flighty instinct
met updrafts of upheaval,
Till she wore her skin like a thimble,
feeling small, peering out.
Her hands spilled over the edge
as she jumped for a better view.
Her head ever arching,
her world split by
sinew and sight.
She sat comatose on an idle river,
her brow clouded,
her line overcast and sagging.
She spun sun where there was darkness,
but it stood too tall,
and she missed its rising,
waking in a night as haunted as shadow.
Her vapourous gift
intoxicated sensory reflex
till it was as strange to her
as a foreign language spoken against the traffic
by huddled tourists in the rain.
She shrugged off the smell of the working city,
and found her truth in its leisure;
Imagining standing on a veranda
playing table tennis with lions.
What’s the harm in dreaming?
It, and hardship, are the carrot and the stick.
But she had no legs to stand on,
and now a message on her answerphone,
never knowing who it was from beep
I love you Beep.
Finally. Sleep.
Cityscape
PoetryI woke with the morning,
performed its ritual,
closed the door,
and stepped into an iron glove.
Its black fingers gripped me,
as it threw me across town,
cascading down its rushing tarmac slide.
The City never sleeps,
but it is always tired.
Most commute under an umbrella of closed eyelids
some pour across streets,
bathing in pavement.
Police cruise down-town looking for survivors,
find some half-mad,
driven crazy by neon sunrise,
the city heat stuck in their feet.
The Cityscape claims its children,
wraps them up in bows of concrete.
Cruel times make some men savage
and some savage men.
I watch accountants scalp ties
off their victims,
strutting through wine bars like adonis,
as if packing guns and a penis to match
instead of fantastic credit on plastic
and a sagging ass held up by elastic.
If only Lenin could meet them on the playground,
he’d kick in their knees and spit in their eyes,
and they are pigs and they are traitors
but those names never stuck,
they tailed their speaker
till he was death in ice,
cemented into an alternative
that died in his legacy.
Capitalism throws up kings of steel and glass,
air is cheaper than property in the cities
art in waiting rooms
is just a metaphor for currency.
Skyscrapers could be battlements,
especially if the people the profit margin
marginalised erupt angrily and
rise like the dawn.
I pass my day
and return home to sanity,
to the smell of cooking
and footsteps laced with laughter
exploding noisily down the stairs
all legs and heads,
knowing
it needed no explanation.