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Malachi Smyth


HIDE AND SEEK

This love thing's
One big game of hide and seek.
Whose turn now
To crawl beneath the stairs
Or slide behind the coats?
Eyes tight and count to ten
'Ready or not, here I come'.

But whereas once
We hid impatiently
In eager and ill-suppressed
Expectation of discovery,
Now, it seems,
The game's for keeps -
­One hides for good
The other never seeks.

PLAN DE GUERRE (Diary of an Aspiring Author)

Year Zero;
Came to town
A putative superhero
Poet-emperor-would-be-Nero
Come to burn
Down Rome
With blazing enjamb­-
ments and fiery rhymes.
Quoth I:
'Take me to your leader,
I'll soon behead the bleeder,
Bludgeon all derisions
With my armoured stanza divisions.'
Alas
Supplies
Of secret gas
Succumbed to spies
Disguised as fans
And blew all plans
Sky high.

Year One;
Fired words
As from a gun
Scatter-shot
Shot the lot
And my bolt
Just for fun.
Impressed
No one.
Year Two;
Dug deep
And blew
A case
Of high explosive metaphors
In the centre of a crowded room.
BOOM.
But all for whom?
The blast
Passed
Over the heads
Of every guest.

Year Three;
Tried archery
Launched
Flaming arrows
Of verbosity
From hand-whittled bows
At the circled wagons
Of literary London.
Missed.
And no one took
The blindest
Bit of notice.

Year Four;
Locked the door
And me within
Bolted
Barred
And well secured
With stores
And manuals
Downloaded from the net
Detailing construction of
At home
A baby atom
-bomb
And set to work.
(the parts are readily available­ -
no need these days
for awkward reads
like shakespeare, yeats
dostoevsky -
No, any fool could put this
Diabolical device
together
in a trice:
it's one part post-modern tease
to two parts sleaze)
When complete
Just set timer
And retreat
Somewhere remote
Perhaps Belize?
Move fast
Try not to miss the boat
Only a retard
Is hoist
With their own petard.
Success at last:
I knock 'em all out
With the fallout
Which leaves just me
In my jungle -
A giant tree
Falling silently.

In the end was the word ­-
Unheard.

PARIS ADIEU

The dernier cri
for le tout paris
outdoor heaters
at cafes
for smokers
in the rue vieille du temple
here where
waiters hear
just what they please
and contempt flows
like wine
from parisian carafes

Where do poets go
in paris now?
not to the rue vieille du temple
anyhow
not to the bourgeois-boheme marais
quartier juif and quartier gai
(there’s a venn diagram worth a gander)
didn’t camus
used to come here?
or some gitane-toting philosopher
an a-la-carte sartre
in polo-neck and beret
master of all he surveyed.

The intellectual is dead
of a big head
now tourists sit
in his stead
eyeing each the next one over
wondering 'is that a noted author?
or some other?'
don’t they know?-
the intellectual is dead
long live the euro
the eunifier
which achieved
what napoleon never could
and leveller
like robespierre
ne’er dreamt
we’re all shoppers now
pigs at the trough
maxed out
and proud
measured in debt
of which there’s never quite enough

Closing time
on the rue de bretagne
red wicker chairs
and marble topped tables
are all that remain
of parisian dreams
or do I mean fables?
closing time
on the boulevard ancien
des illusions

TIC TOC

My heart's a pendulum
That hangs by arteries
Within its cavernous surrounds.

Place your head upon my chest
And you may hear it tick.

Or could it be
That the proximity
Of your magnetic personality
Might make it stop.

Claire Crowther


GRANDMOTHER

In our old age, the grand other
is still one letter short of me.

His house still gleas with onstrous china,
his irrors reflect eery ouths.

Though hard to say, each word jupy, epty,
I still pronounce accurately the text that hangs

above our bed. Late in the evening
perhaps a new accent will slip

its quaint socking
inside his ercerised vest.

SACRED DRAMA

Femage, homage…

though I stand here, hands cupped to the ceiling, a bunch of dried sage tied in purple string, lit at noon to waft smoke through the hall, I can't worship the new goddess,

Nolava.

Across the floor a hundred goddess banners:

Rhiannon, Isis, Athena, Cybele, Morgan.
Sophia births with upstretched arms between leopards.
The undines hold the space with slapped stone.
A swollen wicker belly bags the dollied corn.
Glittery altars are braided with loose wheat ears.

The old statues, more thighs and stomach than hands and head – my goddess altar is all theirs.

Perhaps it's the presence of three stones from a man's garden and a lefthand fingerless woollen glove I wore when I last held my lover's hand – that deflect a shock of recognition on first hearing Avalon backwards.

Worse - heights frighten the men here
– hey!
Melisso – you are called to climb the scaffolding. Pull
her straight. He refuses to hear.

Such a scared little white wing pinches my ankle
among the feathers, sheaves, pebbles, bowls of water.

Goddess,
                                       welcome
whoever is spelt by, if it works, your name.

THE FICKLE IMMORTALITY OF NAMES

Since he died, I call anyone Joe.
It isn't his name that's dead.

             When a life is sliced in a section, you see the filigree of timings, a school of pause.

By choosing the mad marquee of storm
that suddenly rushes towards a walker,
strangling him in guy ropes,

             Joe may not have erred any more than my refusing local honey (it glows on another table) in the café that's always for sale.

Sun fires the glass to warm
the visiting dead. A soul
for each round of bread!

             Joe, hi, it's me.

Mick Imlah


ELECTRIC BLANKET

(1966)

Oh, that’s not in the script!

It’s true, the whole of our street was rooting for Germany – West
      Germany – even my Dad.

After the semi, Sir Alf had said – guarded, as if he were making
      a layman’s translation
of soldiering terms, and getting everything wrong but the sense –
      that his novel formation,
this 4-3-3, had “smothered the Portuguese play at source,
      like an E-lectric blanket – ”
which anyone knew, meant Stiles kicking the pants off the
      dark-skinned Eusebio.

But then I had visions of Martin Peters, the one who was always
      “ahead of his time”,
pale as a ghost at night, going through the doors and private rooms
      of an old people’s home
and striking softly, before their fingers could close on the “help”
      bulb or the bedside light;

or, I might wake in the wet at the thought of the Glasgow polis entering
      mine, a couple
of Roger Hunts in pursuit of a misprint – the boy in this very bed
      who was heard to be
warming his lions – as if he had three of them cubs stitched to the
      plaque of his Y-Fronts.




Simon Carnell


  SEVERAL OWLS

Not the one low wood note in barn or wood. The barn's gone
to conversion, where silver sportwagons replete with satnav

idle in their newly gravelled drives. Or the owls in their sanctuary,
their chicken-wire aviaries, the particular row we returned to

with its owl on the ground like a kennelled dog - stir-crazed
neurosis or instinct in its head-rolls and strange cries, its three r's

(repetition, repetition, repetition), imitated by our daughter for days.
It was intent on nothing, sounding the air for an answer,

history waiting to happen, a rustle in open field or leaflitter....
But the barn owl that was unwrapped from newspaper, having flown

headlong into the glass. Unmarked in death, with its boxer's
shoulders, packed face feathers, faceted god-like face.

OLD SODS

The old sods, they're looking forward to the time
when they'll be needing to ask their own way home.

To stopping someone with the question:
do you know where Mr So-and-So lives? -

and it's really them - short-term memory
intermittently and all but gone.

A recently appointed postman would do.
Though they don't figure to be receiving much mail

outside of hospital appointments, offers of credit,
other such junk. The kind that's dropping even now,

like the quality of mercy,
into an inch or so of burst-pipe water -

at the stage just before it begins to float and turn,
bleeding its bright yellows, pinks and blues.

GREAT INDOORS

Inside every pencil:
                            the neutron star

that's waiting to get out.
                                  To release it,
just draw a line.

*

Burnt paper in the cold grate

that feathers
                  to tail-feathers of ash.

*

From the fish-
                     glue on an envelope

that's opened
                    in a darkening room

a faint phosphorescence.

THE DEAD LETTER

The study as if someone has just left the room
and failed, for sixty-odd years, to return.
On its desk a last dead letter, faded ink
all but gone. A copy of Empire or Democracy?;

an igneous paperweight suffocating in its dust.
On the floor an antique, outsize Dictaphone;
a smell of desiccated newsprint and books;
two-volume Stalin, in several languages,

and be-suited Chinese visitors, conspicuous.
And the narrow, low, bullet-proof doors
of the blossoming bouganvillea-draped house
seem small as an entrance to a tomb:

rusted home-made and riveted like those
on a prototype tank, time-lock or submarine -
fitted after Siqueiros's (brief crazed and failed)
left-handed foray into homicide. The earth-

floored guardhouse is a converted garden shed
next the chicken coops; its guard's toy-like
Remington with red-painted stock
is kept in the lobby with the photographs:

Trotsky with head in a big bandage,
'moments before death'. Detectives in hats,
grouped around exhibit A, the ice-pick.
Trotsky with nurses and medics, 'moments after'.

Brian Waltham (1925-2002) Four more unpublished late poems.


  TRUDY

To be dead fair, she did all she reasonably could:
Low heels, a shoulder stoop, a slightly bent knee,
Crimping her neck, watching carefully where she stood,
But, looking at it squarely: she was taller than me.
I too did my best with more than two-inch heels,
Standing uphill, straightening my back,
Think tall I thought, you’re as tall as it feels,
But what I needed was to be stretched on a rack.
We never said it, but eye-to-eye upright didn’t work,
She must, like me, have felt something of a clown,
Or that we shared a kind of long-and-short quirk.
For at least two reasons we were best lying down.
It had to end. Her cat said I was shorter than her,
That Iago of a cat who couldn’t even purr.

TREE SURGERY

Pulling ivy from an oak
Is High Court stuff, judging,
As you never can, the
Fault-lines in a marriage.

As they each plead their case
You need an armoured wig, proof
Against falling nests, mice-bones,
Enraged ants, sleepy spiders
And the pungent sticky mess
That has kept them together.

Which was husband? Which
Of them loved best in that
Sub-atomic world beyond
The best of your books of
Precedents?

UNTITLED DOGGEREL

So, my nearly gone
Out of this year,
Let it come, hands-on
John.

Wasn’t a bad year
Was it? Well anyway
Sod it, that’s what
I posit.

Both of us sighed
And mortally tried,
But neither of us
Actually died.

We both wrote
Quite a bit of verse
And - wait for it,
You can see the
Rhyme coming
From at least
Twenty miles -
It could have
Been worse.

And we share
(like Gods whose
Names for the
Moment escape me)
This unwelcome
Thing that we pass
Back and forth,
This mean, envious,
Bulbous living package,
Ungenerous, small,
Envious, nitpicking,
This unforgiving eye,
Which you quarrel with
And so do I,
But doesn’t lie.

TERMINAL

Act dead, master fear,
So the bushmen say,
Give off no smell of fear,
Keep eyes inward, never
Risk the merest flick
Of eye to eye.
Then, so the bushmen say,
It may come close enough
To probe you with touch,
But will soon back off
In search of other prey.

Here it is best to act
Dead-alive, crazily to
Face outwards, to stare
Down what seems to
Be its face, daring it to
Show its eye, to show itself
As huge and bare,
And then, drenched in the
Smell of fear, to find
Nothing there and knowing
It is there to stay and will not
Leave you in search of other prey.

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