Protest against the fingerprinting of the Roma in Italy

…they came for the gypsies, and I said nothing, because I was not a gypsy.

Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak for me.

autumn

I will learn autumn like a harp,
forage it for soot swelled blackberries
and sweet chestnuts to caramelise;
I will sweep the death colours into sweetness, the reds,
the endless reds that rain past the throats of flowers
who wring their plain grief like widows
as frost tombs the sod, and the shadow hangs like crows.

And another exciting link for your perusal:

Find out what is going on here

Spam poetry anyone?

back from the ether

I am back, though I may be a mirage that only I can see. I have pinched myself and am still screaming.

endlessly

no time

I have twenty minutes to write to you all. It’s spitting rain (what ‘it’ is spitting? A sky chav?), that fine kind that wants to ease itself into mist and shrug off the doom of splashing on pavements. I have thirteen minutes left. Will McDonalds really give the money to charity? Everyone on these streets looks complete, but only at first glance;their faces are scribbled with shadowmaps, the whys of their wheres. She looks away from her friend on the top of the bus and recoils, so quick she does not see herself doing so. Seven minutes. Now six. I mix her dark hair with rain and make ink. ‘This’, she is saying. ‘This. What does it still want with me?’. Three minutes. Two minutes. Now I have the urge to count in seconds, like the individual bodies of raindrops.

Endlessly 

angel

It waits in the mirror
like a photograph you were cut from.
It is the dark plane behind your curls,
the blindness you unfurl to, tentative
as a boy by a cliff edge testing clouds
for firmness like fruit that poisons

once in a blue moon. It offers and you
feel barbs itch to root inside you
and lay bloodworm eggs, the opposite
of wings. Sometimes it takes shape,
when the shell teeters to crack and pour
or when you are stilled enough to hear
feathers wake like a rift in dukkha.

hurt

I crushed your fingertip in my door;
you were game then: let’s take a picture
of the bruise. Your dark shell
explodes into yellow, magenta. A mangle of friendly fire.

You kept the photo
like a warning. I would find it
in the drawer with the stamps,
under piles of your writing or
marking the heave of a page
in a heavy tome.

I notice you have no scars
wonder if you are an immortal,
a daydream, a modern Blodeuwydd
curved from polymers
themselves made from the petrol
that once fueled my howls for colour.

I stopped finding the picture,
and soon after that you stopped daring me
to steal us milk bottles at dawn, or
put my hand between your legs
on train journeys. You would observe me

as if I was a scab you once enjoyed picking.
The day you told me about him, I called you
all the names, breathed them slowly to you,
like bloody petals. You smiled,
sickeningly wise and said you must know
you can’t hurt me.

counter-revolutionary quote…

“the urge to concoct soundbites is almost always a false front for not having the energy to write poems today“

endlessly’s muse

competition

Aren’t depressing poems good for bad moods?

Clouds have shifted. The sun is back in its chandelier and the seven dwarves are singing, for no explicable reason, about raisons. Or was it rainbows? If anyone heard them, can you link me to the bootleg version?

I have sustained somewhere over a hundred and seventy hits today, silent love pats, it is true, but I am hoping for a little more gentle commitment (and less domestic violence). We should try a game now, but if you decide not to participate we shall say no more of it. I have no desire to beg, reason with or cajole you. I do not need you, and you will never cause me to surrender my dignity to you. Always remember this, or feel free draw your own conclusions.

I have a competition for you.

Post in this page’s comment box single paragraph musings on the theme of your choosing; they can be poems, prose, er… pictures drawn with letters and numbers? The choice has literally ended. Now here is the incredible part: (be careful not to spill your white lotus tonic on the kaftan, this may strike you as audacious)

I will remove all punctuation from your pieces. I will also steal some of the letters. Don’t worry, I won’t do away with them. I will keep them on display in the post directly above this post, so you can see that I haven’t sold them to Russian gangsters. After I have gathered a decent number of entries, and the slurry has slunk back into the ether, I will return the letters first to the winning entrant, and then to the rest of the combatants.

The winning entry will also get its own picture, and will stay here for as long as this blog and it’s 50mb capacity endure (meaning eventually I’ll runout of space and it’ll get archived in some orbiting mainframe).

I will be marking the pieces on the evidence of their possessing qualities discussed in topics we have recently covered:

33% of your marks will be awarded for moxie.

33% of your marks will be awarded for languid exoticism.

33% of your marks will be awarded for the cunning use of pseudo-phrases.

I realise I have set you a challenge worthy of disregarding, but remember that if you do not join me there will come a time, perhaps many years from now, you sat at home eating corndogs as mushrooms tower glowingly over your humble farmstead and the sky picks at its itches, when you will sigh darn it, I said darn it, I could have won those letters back. And those juicy full stops.