Tag: decay

I know every bench in Uckfield

~ mikebellwrites ~ Leave a comment

I know every bench in Uckfield
& its rigid offerings [too honest
in framing my sittings] but I’m
a blank study to sell as they put
latest prices on my head [Hey!
Have you heard? & other bets –

He is colour-by-numbers – He is
dot-to-dot – He is easily tricked
& Sudoku-fooled]/ Cruel prices
re-layer – homemade-caked – a
thick piling-up [of sharp psycho
stuff] – brown sugar [sweet-ish]

Do not pay for any hand-made
bakes – unwrapped & delicate –
until tasted – in each bite took –
wait – wait – for poison’s hooks
[I’m on every bench in Uckfield
& await one cook’s cut by knife]

Chefs in white smocks gather to
carry off starters/ Chef – yes – &
Yes Chef – too many – they spoil
stuff/ Three is a crowd – soured/
Throw brown sugar to quell – to
sweeten & stiffen resting places

where varnish is treacled across
giving timbers – my bench – here
I’ll sit – on sugar-wood [screwed
& washered to aid my recovery]
They rape ancient woodlands – a
seat is axed & my ill-rest is stolen

Where my stick is angled to prop
[& not fall] – for studies I have sat
to watch birds walk [a bare cook
at work – that rook with her gloss
of feathers] – our greedy gatherer
of sugared ingredients at my feet

& still we cannot speak of truths –
as if my self-portrait is too untrue
between my charcoal sweeps – in
each digging-at I spoke of snaps –
break of burnt stuff [of cooked art
& too much time given to studies]

All this is mine [my view – my type
of words – my phrase-pots]/ Don’t
[do not] try to know my hauls/ You
thick-set fools who’ll look too hard
for gold in barren seams/ Sit back
& wait – wait for fuller explanation

of meaning [of verse]/ Word-soup
is one view/ I will watch cars piss
up Brown’s Lane – speeding – fast
to homes – quick to conflict/ Here
remembrance for long-gone-dead
& others rested on empty benches

Perfect Skin

~ mikebellwrites ~ Leave a comment

This skin on my foot
is turning to cratered scales –

like that of F’s
re-homed grandpa –

with his octogenarian husk
flaking from
his bared feet and shins

as if he had been set adrift
on the sea and salt-burnt

That old combatant held court
in his Surrey nursing home

thirty five years ago
His layers of recalls and of dust –

his remnants in a rented room –
have long been hoovered up

Perfect –
perhaps there is hope for me yet

Into Candles and Soap

~ mikebellwrites ~ Leave a comment

Inhale those odours within
la Ville Lumière – of corpse wax

found among her exhumed
Draw on le cimetière des Innocents

An old miasma off rotting flesh
lingers in time’s stillness

above French Empires of Death
atop her levelling grounds

Citizens sought
salubrious solutions

as well as judicial balance
by opening wide old books

by breaking cracking spines
glued by their learned dead writers

Thinkers took routes dug through
others – now equal – as bones

Inert citizens will never stop
troubling the living of Paris

Utter

~ mikebellwrites ~ Leave a comment

I have always suffered
a mild clumsiness –
just now – trying to read
that line back – aloud –
it got rooted in my mouth –
not stuck in my throat –
not in my swallowing –
that feared future loss –

but in the lip-and-tongue
place of speeches –
I now have to think
the form of the word
to make the shape
of its known weight –
to make it heard –
this is no deal I wish
as part of my illness –

I hear the precision
of the speech therapist –
his repeat of the exercises
which I had forsaken
until now – late in the day
as my words stick
like soft toffees and cake
among my loose teeth

 

Inside My Lover

~ mikebellwrites ~ Leave a comment

I am entertained inside her lento lungs –
travelling alone and partly dusk-blind –
within her low suck of cooling breath –

I inhale her exhale of purest oxygen
and with it comes an unwinding –
an expansion of my otiose senses –

an awareness of this as existing –
of living things set around – but
obscured by the falling of the hour –

Now the manic chp-chp-chp-chp-chp
of panicked blackbirds to one side –
joined by the rude crows overhead –

that tuneless duet of birdsong is overlaid
on itself by others’ alarms and queries
which set off – concentric – around me –

As I tread – as I compact the leafy mucus –
which she absorbs into her membrane –
the fallen are re-sown by the plough
of my steps on this weaved footpath –

Her cold stew of re-use – of rotting down –
is nature’s re-design – it is not random –
be it the branched capillary urge
of saplings – or the fork of tipped boughs –

or the patterning of her cast off leaves –
already thick enough to hide the paths –
Now on cinders I miss the give of the mulch –
the weighted compress and its last sound

This Parish

~ mikebellwrites ~ Leave a comment

We stick to the leaf-kicked route –
a parting of the dry sea of leaves
cleared by dog-following boots –

We tack down its meandered drop
to the time-softened abyss –
plugged not by God – but drains –

where a watercourse once hollowed
the hillside into this shallow dean –
before the slugs of tarmac upstream –

Here the irregular plots of silver birches
ignore the fallen old lady in lime green –
this is the parish of ineffectual giants –

these natives – a copse within the woods –
are a finger-daubed fearful tribe in white –
chary – waiting – as if standing ready –

listening for the infected invaders
from other places – for intruders
who will bring other such followers

to spread the canker and pestilence –
which was not the way things changed –
not until we changed the weather

Repose

~ mikebellwrites ~ Leave a comment

The granite markers have tipped forward –
angled over the settling of in-filled earth
where the boxes and bones collapsed –
the stones remain whilst other things fall –

The once beloved’s burial is long forgotten –
but not the slab’s patience over centuries
of bearing – the carved words mumble
a worn-down remembrance of years lived –

The mason’s refined font is rubbing thin –
almost erased by the wear of the world
which has re-touched the carved surface –
even death cannot claim shelter from time

Self Portrait

~ mikebellwrites ~ Leave a comment

My naked body would look worse
only if crucified on Bacon’s canvas –

Because I conspire with my reflection
to blank out the sags and stretches
which later ageing has brush-dragged

so that my dark-haired belly bloats
with the crap and oil I cannot avoid –

I then wash it down with just one more –
and the wine glass is half an egg timer
of emptiness – rouged red and framed

The Fly

~ mikebellwrites ~ Leave a comment

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.