We went long into distant family homes,
With a man who can write, but has no idea of prose,
He obtained stilted grammar, and spat it out on a page
Almost like English is a foreign tongue,
Even though he’s English born and bred,
We were almost never impressed –
Childish fiction, comic book in orientation
Writing in half-baked academic tones
Because for so long that’s all he had ever known.
Month: November 2011
Day Three Hundred and Thirty Three: This is the First Song for Your Mixtape
Day Three Hundred and Thirty Two: Failure
Something I submitted to a poetry competition but never won.
Another Morning
My heart swivels when you leave the room
to follow the faint scent of your perfume.
Creases on the pillows,
bedcovers tossed back like an arctic willow,
your wrinkled outline frozen to the sheets,
bitterly hinting at the sense of longing
that your morning departure will bring.
Two egged omelette and a slice of toast,
Sunday breakfast enjoyed in warm content silence.
But amongst the crumbs I can tell what you’re thinking,
the same thing as I; the night before.
Your hourglass figure melted, curved and contracted into mine
for a time,
followed by a snug slumber that could defy the ages.
Four lungs breathing in perfect harmony
playing together in a major key.
It is a beat that repeats over and over
but it never gets boring.
After a while it’s time to leave
and things cool off as you pack up your things;
icy blue bag zipped up tight,
escorted to your car in the crisp daylight
it is in that moment, mere inches from a cold car door,
that I’d give anything for you
just to stay for a little bit more.
Day Three Hundred and Thirty One: Mr Leonard
Wee bit of Tom Leonard for y’all today. A truly wonderful poet.
Poetry
by Tom Leonard
the pee as in pulchritude,
oh pronounced ough
as in bough
the ee rather poised
(pronounced ih as in wit)
then a languid high tea …
pause: then the coda –
ray pronounced rih
with the left eyebrow raised
– what a gracious bouquet!
Poetry.
Poughit. rih.
That was my education
– and nothing to do with me.
Day Three Hundred and Thirty: Mo Bro
Day Three Hundred and Twenty Nine: Sad Clown
A little bit of flash fiction that I’ve been playing around with of late. I’m not entirely sure how I feel about it.
Sad Clown
Across a busy road, shaking in front of a fifth floor window a man with his shoulders bobbing up and down. Is this silent mirth, or quiet melancholy? I look down at him from my seventh floor window. I look and I wonder. Sitting before his LCD screen, what is the man in the bank doing with his head in his hands? Framed by the window, shaking his head left and right and moving up and down, is he laughing?
Or is he crying? The tinted windows of this building make the sunniest of days look slate grey and even on a clear day such as this. Cars fly by in street below, en route to the city centre. People take off in buses; they bustle in and out of pubs and restaurants, and into the building where the man in the window sits shaking with his head in his hands. His pale blue shirt looks blunt as I spy him two floors down, quaking on his desk, elbows moving back and forth.
Through my headphones all I can hear is the radio, blocking out the office noise around me yet still this man sits in the window, shaking and quaking. Eventually he removes his hands from his face to reveal his face – painted like a clown. Only it’s smudged and smeared, with two lines down each cheek, wet from tears. He removes his navy blue tie and climbs onto his desk. He turns around and says something to the room behind him; the man sitting in the window to his left slowly rises from his chair and moves towards him. As he crawls towards the clown, he makes large gestures and sympathetic eyes however the sad clown moves backwards towards the window. He waves to the assembled office workers, all on their feet and staring in horror, before standing in the window frame and launching himself out of it. His descent is quick, like a seagull falling out of the air at sea. I don’t hear him hit the ground. No one in my offices notices, no one’s pay attention and in my ears, all I can hear is: “They’re asking us to die for something, while asking us to live for nothing.” resonating in my head.
Brain Echo 