Poem – Stefanie Moore

Continuum

There will be movements in a garden,

Birds at low unforeseen angles

Your heart will quicken,

Frogs.

Try to look at the pale light

The naming which warms

The glow of the lines making emerald

the green which for once is not submerged in cold

Yes leaves are grey and slip easily into unconscious hiding places for small mammals which I believe to have nefarious motives although I know this to be beyond their intellectual abilities, heartfelt desires and physical capacity.

Let’s not pathologise, Doctor.

In Victorian Times,

Adorn me with a velvet bow

Wheel me out after dinner

Else

Let me drift shrunken boned down stone corridors in white.

Chill rising like steam,

Laudanam and vapours, words forming auras around me but not of me; for

I am thinking of small mammals and their nefarious motives.

I draw to this like any image,

My mind a cut-out doll

A velvet bow

In white

In three striped pants.

sometimes I reach, no I reach back to salute you.

Will futures see me the same?

On a Man, Very Cross to Find that Prestwich Library is Closed Despite Being Advertised as Open on the Website

Huntsman, past Budget Saver, faster than my eyes blink

Hands not aloft, but grasping,

Clasping the smooth white of ‘documentation’

An impossible authority of forms –

His coat is unstitched, the quilting leaks from patch to patch

Like a field bereft of harvest.

Pramhanded, I thrill when I sense his directionandintentionandmomentum

Towards me, in front of the library’s sealed lips.

I want the moment of a shared disappointment

I have the power of saying ‘It’s shut. It didn’t say it would be on the website but it is’.

Sidelong still, the man tries the door.

Shadethrower. Prick, just trust me.

‘But I needed to – bugger them – they’ll moan when they’re late

But I won’t bother then’.

He’s off now, because it’s half past ten and nothing tastes as good as a Tetley’s in the Orange Tree in the certainty that your forms will be late and it isn’t your fault.

I am Pam Ayres

I want to make this site more productive – fact! Since no-one reads anything else on here, I’m going to use it as a creative space, an online Shoreditch if you will (though not as wanky) and put up bits of writing I have been working on which you, dear readers, can respect, ridicule or merely respond to. And with this in mind (and to show that I am not proud) here’s a poem that I wrote at 2.30 in the morning when someone walking past my window woke me up:

listened out for company
Or some muffled conversation
But ker tink ker tink is all I heard,
Your heels in isolation.

According to the PM,
East London is the new Wild West,
Your stiletto heels should be okay
If paired with a bulletproof vest.

They left on your own, didn’t they?
God, men are shit.
He could have been a she, of course.
In which case, she’s a tit.

You could be a man in Cuban heels,
Like Prince or Sarkozy,
They would make the same ker tink ker tink
Or am I merely dozy?

You should have kept your bus fare back
Or a fiver for emergencies
Especially in the case of
Any crappy date ressurgencies.
(I’m assuming it was a date, because friends wouldn’t leave you on your own, would they?)

A contrast in our contexts,

You cold, me in my den

I’d feel terrible if tomorrow’s news reads

‘High heeled murder in E10.’

Your footsteps fade from earshot,

My eyes roll back in their sockets

Instead of vexxing on your ker tink ker tink

I start to dream of

rockets kung fu karate chops tiny caravans

cress growing on the back of my hand black and white telly hippo and car parts.

There you go. A bit of night writing for you. I never said it was polished (or even good). I’m practising abundance right now. Feed back what you want.