Cloudy cordial – it was too soot
for my tongue – inbred-sweet &
all sugar-buzz – Grandma’s own
& she is an amazing woman [no
proof given] None ‘fess that she
should add in a splash of bitter-
truths/ I’d tie her up – then off to
a rest home near Kent [she was
born from French blood – Boton –
& would feel at ease in sight of
Calais] Aye – Grandma – fuck off
Tag: AGING
Blood Spots
All cells come from cells
& other facts rub at me/
Our place is layer-thin &
ready to cleave [cut out
such thoughts] while we
carry this bag of bones/
Quick-ish siestas muffle
pain’s deviations – those
bruise-lows/ Blemishes
itch with ingrowing hair/
At fifty-six my fun seems
to have run to summer’s
stained trough – rust ires
& cannot be rubbed off/
Spots of blood – imprints
sat in my back catalogue
have faded into that red –
they will never be erased
Stops
Another thirty-ish minutes of life
lost to indecisions
By my lethargy
By her rough mis-reckonings
of tightly wound watches
and bare clock faces
You will never get it back
Did I ever want it thrust upon me?
Did I ask for that rum half an hour?
You have no choice in time’s ways
That furled-up woman was also held –
stilled – by a sudden summer downpour –
without coats – they were anchored
as rainwater oozed into a tidal rush
down Crowborough’s shined tarmac
The butcher called out to them –
I’m taking the canopy down! A joke
I won’t buy pies from Him again
Under library clocks her heart stopped
for a few seconds – even her pulse –
and no breathing – nothing was working
But it was a mistake – merely a pause
Another thirty minutes of unaccounted
being alive will be inexpertly multiplied
becoming a whole day – a whole year
of slumbered nothingness
and then turned to sleep
once time is tamed by her old age
Closing Times
Now – be forever consigned
to coughed-up-banter nights
at your threadbare old boys’ club –
propped behind spewed pints
of pump-drawn gut-brown beer
Your bent still good arm lifts
three quids worth of bowel-stripper
Last orders
and so a knocking back of pints
from unequal paid down rounds
And then that hundred-yard stagger
off to your desolate place –
a much less enticing thought
than just one more pour of best
A background outdoor chat
leaves you stood stock still
Now shuffle once more
with your pocket of shrapnel –
to be put in that jar in your hall
A Thankless Task
Here fifty-six lichen-dipped
granite bodies sunbathe –
some lean – some almost swoon
in April’s upset of unexpected weather
Here clippings
and rolled stripes of grass
mark long-sunk slopes
under headstones
A cartographer
had taken up mowing
and looked back
upon his day’s work
as a map folded open –
to be figured out
For him
that thought was wasted
There are no travellers here –
all trips are done
Quarter bells
serve no purpose
except to drown out
tinkling-bloody-wind-chimes
and
always ignored car alarms –
no one moves far
from these landmarks –
we are all within earshot
of cuttings of blades and spades
between those engravings
dead endings expose our half-thoughts
about stuff like
Crematorium or lawn cemetery?
Field Studies
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 to hold
from my low water-trod
vantage point – I’m not cold –
and what a fabulous sight
Your butt-naked curves
Not mine to touch – to cup
Only when you have agreed
was my tugged at adage
But your own quick greed
countered my willyard ways
A few days later we rolled –
feeling almost drunk enough
and readied to break out
in an untouched pasture
of crackling dry grasses –
as our bare backs arched
But then we left untouched
What came next could not –
not then – it wasn’t in our reach
Not until older years of beers
and then hard sex on sofas
The Riverside Cafe – Lewes
That water-spinning hum
in The Riverside Cafe –
of draining dishwashers
and coffee machines –
is a prized white noise
needed by me to settle –
along with the welcomed
departure of a too-loud family
of urgent asks – of walking plans –
to wear their little monsters
down – nice and early
before unscrewing the wine
Counting clouds passes time
My children are left behind
and all my responsibilities
are dropped – as sticks off a bridge
Like letting go of wobbled bikes
Of not having to have an answer
Perhaps this areads my ageing
among us beige men of Waitrose
Perhaps this is my highest point –
aged fifty-five – twice divorced –
waiting at cafe tables to be served
by staff worth much more than me
My stick is impossible to store
in such places – a hook is needed
to hang my support – to stop it tripping
up those young bucks in aprons
Or I may lay it out at a reasoned angle
to trip those smug fuckers up
Words Burn
VLADIMIR: You should have been a poet.
ESTRAGON: I was. [Gesture towards his rags.]
Isn’t that obvious. [Silence.]
Waiting for Godot. Samuel Beckett
A whole ninety-eight cents
have recently been credited
to my low-tide bank account
from Yanks’ penny clicks
on my must-do-better lines
in newly-hewn sob stories
without no strummed blues
which now appear to appeal
to a slew of red neck readers
who enjoy my so inconstant
complaints – in blank verse –
about my current former wife
A true trailer park tale – he typed
We are all trash novel writers
Burkowski still raises a drink
to the 3-year-old’s who’ll never meet
because his words burn
like my continued condition
and we shall meet – Charles and me
downstage without direction
Valentine’s
I just took a taste of my waking breath –
it is no wonder then that we do not kiss –
The ugliness of my rum state
places bitter tilts upon our old arousals –
I lay whet by a glaze – an unwelcome stain
on this pushed back duvet of night sweats –
My chest gives birth to salty pearls – loosened
by gravity – set to roll down my bare sides
as trickles – as if wept from woundings –
like precious piercings – but not five holy jabs –
though I do feel pinned by a carried cross –
Do not glance at my nakedness – how I am fixed
by the invisible itches and riveted scars
on my legs – I draw up the bedding – my body bag –
and let my skin rest from your listless look –
instead – I shall watch you dress first – then
I will rise alone and not take in the looking glass
until I have washed off the vilde oozes of blood
which I have picked under the night’s disturbances –
those red fruits of my rough sleep’s self-harm
The Decision Makers
I’m lost – Danny Boy –
in this town of my birth –
I’m being pulled apart
by others’ decisions –
by the inflexible rulings
of fixed-people-in-jobs –
I could clip their pinned ears –
but it is not allowed –
due to time – human rights –
loom at my now left half-life
in these – so – disunited
flagging kingdoms –
of offset Scotland –
of partitioned Ireland –
of phlegmatic Wales –
of moribund England
Now – they say –
connect by the internet –
which eludes my grip –
not my old way of working
because that has been
swiped by the change –
under time’s circled stress
on my devolving thoughts
Rubber Soles
Paced – my set flat route
of pliable rubber yards –
of flashed-by-dashes
on my soon-endless run
on that springing path
of a conveyor belt –
then up an incline fixed
by my lightest touch –
but slowed by my death
in that sweated place –
My running times show –
but have yet to pass
an hour’s whole barrier –
so dragged down again
by my lack of breaths –
because all shared air
has been removed
by the greed of others’
sucks and thud-thud-thuds
alongside my rolled way –
their strides soon pair
my thumped heartbeats –
but any visible rage
from my pounding chest
is bagged in my t-shirt –
No pull of Lycra
across my male breasts –
Honest labour is lost
because this is not
cross-country running
E190219
Parousia
This second life was ordained
by a drawn-out judgement –
an almost-expected epithet
for the quickened reductions
under my ever-thickening skin –
on dragged heels and hands –
Add Old Age’s uneven stockpile
of his enfeebling irritations
and so my time was reset –
And in this slowing restate
I cannot make any mistakes –
I cannot afford to fall heavily –
do not expect me to pick myself up
as quickly as the still-blessed do –
as I did before this epiphaneia
Under the Sun
Come and watch us pick at
our scabs of bloody ignorance –
they will – one day – partly heal
to a red roughness of scarring
set to itch – a hint of melanoma’s
blasting shadow across our skin
We will not seek relief from shade
to offset such canker or cancer –
instead – we will strip and microwave
on those platters of plastic sunbeds
to a ready meal heat – whilst being oiled
and rubbed into a slept submission –
then into that unimaginable cul-de-sac
of pottering and beige waiting rooms –
where we will find mirrors far too honest –
set with our reflections of bare errors –
then to count the rings of under-eye skin
and we will know our burnt old age
Holding
The act of opening has to be
quite deliberate –
from the holding of the tin
of polish –
in your poor hand
to then apply the finger-end twist
to the blind key –
just enough contact and pressure
to turn to prise the lid
But over time the art bends away
and becomes less effective –
The mechanics do not last long enough –
not as long as the polish
Blunt
These day-in day-out mis-typings
of small tap-tap-tap screen pokes –
which I commit as my bad habit –
weightless stabs in this landscape
to stall that mental keel
warned of by my desk-set consultant –
My thoughts are in a dark waiting room
without a fixed appointment for entry –
sat for a last hurrah
before the freeze
I greeted her breezy – How are you?
with an unfair response –
I use this screen – my handheld shield –
for honest words – about everything –
I’ll always dig for verse
in this spade-blunting field
In the Eye
Women slip from winsome
under their senescent faces –
their hands steal the looks
off youth’s eyed-embraces –
They pleasure in pastimes
of tease-tricks and flirts –
they command your heart –
their hard rules will subvert
I want to reach out
and trace your lined beauty –
of furrows and laugh lines
worn freely at forty
I will kiss your eyelids
of stitch-tightened skin –
because here is your beauty –
it is still within
The Fly
The fly hummed her old song of death
as she jacked in the room’s still air
in a quickened patrol overhead
of absurd dashes and acrobatics
I considered my chances of a kill
but her own sense of time saw me
in slow motion – a sweated animal
of missed flails and wrong swats
Then she was gone from my space
because death was not here – not yet
But she will endure and then retrace
her plotted flight to my last warm breath.
Weather Warning
This apprehension rumbles –
one only audible to me?
I fear the threat of loneliness
Of old age’s inherent adage
being forced by the separation
which is executed under my hand
but has been otherwise decreed
I fear finding that all time has gone
and is then a compression to death
and then the flatline without recovery
I fear for the future of my children
because we have stolen their hope
I fear someone finding me frozen
in a bed
or chair
without them knowing me well
MIKE BELL | 10,000 Poems 