That bore – by auger – into one’s own skull – known as trepanning – has never appealed until this too-long day of blindness and pain Such drilling to mirror by my resting tremor has hashtag fail typed quick-by-others to my sapped at selfie Best left to sicker men Mike Bell Poetry Mike Bell aims...
We swam before fish in that meandering gutter of long runoffs down from Kemble in our eel-shone skin – equal by breaststrokes and coloured cold white like a pair of split cod I waited for you to lift yourself from her wet veil – a single upper body heft in to warm air – mine...
Frank Ormsby rarely writes – only now by medicated spurs set quick to the side effects and his drugged obsessiveness which are my nowhere-near-equals to his northern placed verse No more lined up by his diluted voice Loud Frank left it at school He opens up his vowel larder of self-affirming stories His Rasagiline’s rattle...
Nobody knows how to garner – we do not leave one of the clutch to encourage more for sure provision Take everything is what we teach of gathering ways – we will decimate as if our suck on that last pulled bone of a flightless bird was an easy meal Our blinkered rapacity rolls through...
A rabbit bone found at Fishbourne brings that foreign creature here – along with an eastern religion back in one AD Mike Bell Poetry Mike Bell aims to write 10,000 poems, stick them up here one at a time, and then take a nap. By then he should be about 85 years old and have...
That water-spinning hum
in The Riverside Cafe -
of draining dishwashers
and coffee machines -
is a prized white noise
needed by me to settle .../
We washed in an avocado-coloured bath – we had never tasted that foreign fruit back in nineteen-seventy-two – or three – we were lucky to get to peel tangerines It was a plastic suite – uneasily creaking with our scales of weights of our pre-teen occasional visits – each darkly recorded by layered rings of...
They will spit forth foam-flecked hints of hate* to rattle old angry folk by distractions – to vote – it is as if Enoch Powell were no longer dead – as high-born cussing – upper-class meddlers – play the lack-Latin fools to the baying stalls and set off marchers to resurrect working-class empirical values of...
Is this her ultimate act of sadomasochism – his rest of days of pain? Is his reply allowed before her face down lies – taking it from behind which are – for others – kinks and well-hidden discomforts She pleads her case of cruelty when such cruelty was her cut and thrust by strangers’ cocks...
Under Glynde’s grey turbine I know I am irrelevant It is as if my chest’s creaks are now unsure ship timbers set grinding by lifts and turns of blown low pressures Her blades swoon over us in that signature revolution She asks of me a greater effort to stand for any time in her shadow...