He could see two swear words standing out,
magnified fat as fists punching his eyes. The boy on the school bus with behaviour problems who can ignore the whole world’s pleas for calm, now as gentle as an angel, reading swear words out loud. I tell him with mock sincerity: I don’t want to read that page of my poetry book. Grown ups shouldn’t use bad words. I make some theatre out of turning the page, tutting, tutting, naughty, naughty, no thanks. This seems acceptable to him. He doesn’t mention it again and we start a game of tic-tac-toe as if nothing has happened.
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Don’t be fooled
by the languid kink of its wings, This is no freeloading scavenger; she makes her own kill. Her eye is as sharp as a beak. Watch her. Watch. Watch and see the wings suddenly wobble, buffeted by waving hunger, the sprinkle of scales underwater – the cutlass thrust is coming. The W’d wings fold back, a collapsing car bonnet crunching up into clumsy plunge. The giant raptor is gobbled up by the Columbia river’s Ice Age appetite. Gone. Seconds pass. And the Columbia gurgles victory. Too soon. She emerges, a dripping phoenix, miraculously able to fly, hauling back up into the W, uncollapsing - this was no accident. A flapping scaly forearm in its claw. The prize for risking the river. The human fisherman nod, tip their rods to their teacher. Published in Envoi, 2014. The whole day is made of twilight and smoke.
The sky grimaces every shade of grey, jealous of colouring woodlands, stubbly fields, the misty hint of high hills, still farms. Through the sky starts waving smiles and frowns of geese, v’ing from winter, shifting leader as they shuffle the deck. A sudden swirl of wind and yellow leaves vortex the air, yellow leaves everywhere until the wind dies, they fall. The geese gone and the grey remains. Published in Dawntreader, 2016. The Buddha Laughs
My childhood laughing back at me on a restaurant menu in Yuxhei Park, Guangzhou. Bidai, Xiào Fó, the Laughing Buddha, rolling around the menu with his cloth sack full of sudden memories: my mother’s tiny Chinese Buddha that now lives in the garden, silting with slug juice, ice crystals and calcification but still laughing. I remember wondering why he’s so fat and yet found everything funny. Fat Buddha, Pàng Fó, this future Buddha whispering destiny to me in my parents’ back-garden in the England of my past, now laughing at our recognition through smoggy air. The Luck of Waves To hold in your huge Ape hand a perfectly evolved little reptile baby flippers clapping with excitement, wanting to be released into gulping. To place it down backwards in the sand and watch it instinctively turn, spurn the sand in tiny flipper spadesful and surge with minuscule muscles into the Java surf, into its chances. To watch the one my wife was cheering on, turn suddenly right, head straight for where we saw a huge monitor lizard lolloping into the water. No amount of screams can turn it away, just the luck of waves and random currents. These poems were published in June, 2016 in Eastlit. 6 Days in Yangshuo 1. April 6 The yellowing bones of a two hundred million year old seabird thrust up into countless karst shafts by India’s ancient desire for Asia; sighing down seashell-sharpened rock faces to coral reef hearts, until us voyeurs are just fossils of a faintly disgraced past. The rest of the above sequence was published in Eastlit in October 2016. More poems published by Eastlit in 2016 can be found here: In an Ibis hotel in Semarang, Indonesia
flung as far from home as I have ever been. Relief in a jar of supermarket pickled onions, a prize worthy of Argonauts. I crunch into the first pale bulb, the tang of vinegar peels back the memories of childhood reminding me of my Dad's advice – eat them from top to bottom, not sideways, the centre might shoot out and stick in your throat and choke you to death. I gorge on the onions, on memories of the dinner table and Dad salivating over the sharpest ones. We eyed out the biggest but he always forked them, claiming Fatherhood Rights, a manly mouth. I could wrestle the medium sized ones out of his grip with a Herculean effort, until, a teenager, I claimed onion equality and we took turns, like grown-ups Now I take the biggest ones from the jar and miss having Dad to offer it to, his decline a sign of full maturity. These imports are pathetically small, soft, not worthy of any debate. I am still grateful to peel back layers and find Dad at the centre with a warning and a wink. Sentinel Quarterly, 2016. "They don't teach English," she declares
hovering above the glass cabinet like an unheard exclamation mark. "They teach literature but not how to read or speak. Grammar." She lectures openly to the mumbling masses in the exhibition in the British Library about the Magna Carta, the Great Charter. "I mean the good schools. Not low class. Good. They can't read it. They can't!" The it is the Declaration of Independence, the Jefferson copy, there to show influences through the centuries. "Uhuh," mutter two fellow American tourists in go-away embarrassed agreement, heads down, trying to read. "They come to America, those immigrants. Can't speak any English! So how can they read this?!" The ageing punctuation speaks louder, talking over her own history: immigrant ancestors spilt from Europe's overflowing cup, older voices, a thousand befores, stepping back together to an Africa origin. Her trapped students laugh a little, hoping for the bell to ring. "If it was up to me - handwriting and grammar. Just like this." She stabs full stops on the glass with the urgency of King John's barons. Her views a mild poison in our ears. Earlier she had regaled the beauties of Pennsylvania, apologised for obstructing the view (but not moving). Now she finishes with a few mumbles, shuffling out of the Library, into London, that soup of stirred languages and evolving English, her footsteps leaving no fossils. The Brasilia Review, 2015. So now I understand
why my wife talks to strangers, scooping out secret life stories from soul shells in tiny bites of time. In a microwave-size elevator of an Ibis hotel in Hong Kong a small man smiles, greets me, asks if I am going to breakfast. I nod, gulp and make my wife proud. Are you? Two words to prize the shell open. As the lift slowly counts down, he offers his pearls: an engineering intern visiting for three weeks today invited by friends to play football, so no, no breakfast for him. A minute later we part as warmly as found friends. But I am an amateur at this game. I don't dig out the most easily mined jewels: his name, the country he is from. I am embarrassed to just say 'Africa'. But I have panned enough nuggets to keep me at the riverside. Asian Cha: A Literary Journal, Hong Kong, 2015. The bus back from Nuremburg
stops at Chemnitz, industrial city of East Germany – once Karl Max Stadt in the years of walls, ears, Stasi fears. The bus spews out the smokers: a cross-section of East Germany, from teen to oma, all standing stuck on spots, cigarettes hurriedly sucked, no words spoken, no eye contact, no secrets exchanged in the smoke, the heavily-kneaded clay of every face chewing over thick, quiet thoughts. Driver says five minute break over. Every cigarette correctly deposited, the bin steams in rank approval. The bus rocks as the smokers board and we leave, silence lingering. The Journal, 2016 For just a few seconds
but I can still see her dancing alone, arms held stiff, high, holding her invisible lead. A departed husband, an imaginary partner. She dances, turns, arms still held high amongst the other ballroom dancers, circling a statue of a grey-green couple arm-in arm in an outdoor oval dance hall, roofless, under Dongxiao Road Bridge. The dancers follow the music, the lapping, watery music; old-age partners, some just friends; everyone forgetting their concrete coffins, unaware of onlookers, overhead traffic, anything else. Just dancing. In Of Nepalese Clay, 2015. Assembling outside the Hofkirche,
becoming part of the baroque skyline that Canaletto loved to paint, the wedding party with balloons, a hundred or so lime-green wishes of everlasting love for the couple. On command they release the balloons which float up in a bulbous flock, confusing the resident hawk in the spire of the Horkirche; slowly line up to the outstretched hands of saints and philosophers struck dumb in blackened stone on the church roof; bob up above the Old Town into a blue-grey storm clouds to be blown beyond Dresden, join in almost everlasting toxic happiness with other plastic lovers. The Brasilia Review, 2016 |
Poetry Biography:I have had over 70 poems published in the following worldwide magazines and literary journals: A Handful of Stones, Acta Victoriana (Canada), All the Sins (UK), The Amethyst Review (USA), Amsterdam Quarterly (NL) The Blue Nib (Ireland), Bolts of Silk, Borderless Journal, The Brasilia Review (Brazil), Bushfire Literature & Arts Review (US), Cadenza, Cake Magazine, Carillon, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal (Hong Kong), DASH (USA), Clackamas Literary Review (USA), Cooch Behar Anthology, Dawntreader, Dreamcatcher, The Dillydoun Review, Earth Love, The Ear (US), Eastlit (East Asia), Erbacce, Envoi, Finger Dance Festival, Ginosko, Gloom Cupboard, Hidden Channel, Inlandia Journal, IS&T (Ink, Sweat & Tears), Into the Void (Canada), The Journal, The Lakeview Journal (India), Lothlorien Poetry Journal, Lunch Ticket (USA) The New Writer, One Hand Clapping, Orbis, Oregon English Journal (USA), The Passage Between, Prole, Sentinel Literary Quarterly, Sonic Boom (India), Third Wednesday (USA), Of Nepalese Clay (Nepal), New Contrast (South Africa), One Hand Clapping, Opportunity Publishing, The Oregon English Journal (USA) Origami Poems Project (USA), The Paddock Review (USA), Panoplyzine (USA), Paper Swan Press, The Passage Between, The Peacock Journal (USA), Pens on Fire, Poetry Salzburg (Austria), Potomac Review, (USA) Prole, Pulsar Poetry, Rear View Poetry, Queen Mob's Teahouse, Qutub Minar Review (India), Red Ink, Shiela-Na-Gig (USA), South Bank Poetry Magazine, Stand, Waterford Teachers Centre, (Ireland) We Are a Website New Literary Journal (Singapore), Weber - The Contemporary West Review (USA), Windfall (USA), Writing Magazine, Words for the Wild and Verbal Art (India). Archives
March 2024
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