10,000 POEMS – Posted freshly most days
Creased net curtains
with stocking details –
old man’s smoked glass –
a soiled two-way mirror
His fag-stubbed ashtray
brims high with butts
Half-read thrillers
sit sliced by bookmarks
Yesterday’s puzzle –
cold clues unsolved
Ink stains his skin –
a love deeply carved
She remains in him –
his beloved strife
He is now alone –
a Brighton still life
Two crows in black robes
ghost into my untrusting
edge of sight –
that miscalculated corner
of slights – of misinformation
A pair of hooded monks
float across this field
angled south
of Golden Cross –
a hectare of grass pasture
We take a triangulation
of boot-dashed footpaths
Here
a temporary centre
of a loosened ruin of bales
We follow b2 from a2
towards millennial years
of old adding ups
before
Pythagoras came to c2
A crop of prime turf
is to my back
My thin brick perch digs in
to my lowered leg aches
after a blind walk from Ripe’s
church across three fields –
now sat stiffly in Chalvington
Here they face me –
Picknell’s dead family
Engraved stones staring out
at an unmarked boundary –
was it laid in my eye just now –
was it suggested by Robert
Who Departed This Life
February 7th 1869
A slab is sunk tightly
between three yews
It bears equal surnames –
set to unequal end dates –
to be kept In Loving Memory
More of his
relatives crushed
in their compressed beds
Then a blackbird’s repeated
yack-yack of late insistences
lifts me from that moment –
away from Robert’s ghost –
to have me rise
from that low wall
and to leave them all
well alone – for now
and to walk back across
that even outfield –
around his unmarked boundary
Shortly after closing time
outside my unknown church –
feeling a stone’s frore
off dead men and women
upright as chiselled recalls
and staring – all – in disbelief
at that zealous parish priest
who dolls up as a spectre
A welcome departure
from his-biking leathers?
Do you fancy a whole Sunday
of such wanton dressing-up?
But – note – none of that
purely Anglicised-God-stuff
No vertical iron pressings
No M&S slacks in ageing beige
I am not of that creamy dotage
marked heaven-ready
My dark walk is guided on
by each clack-clack-clack
of my tapped black stick –
no more standing as a stone
Satan will catch me
if I stay too long
Do not tarry for too many minutes
below Chanctonbury’s decimated
circle of silvered-skin beech trees
They were planted without regard
for any long-term fixing agreement
set fast to grow by a man’s measures
of water on their fragile root balls
There on disturbed nights
that dark copse is circled
by foul-mouthed flying guides
Above you in the weighted boughs
are stirrings of banshees and phantoms
as you tremble under battery lanterns
Too many whitened deep roots
screw through long-buried
druid bones and other scatterings
of now-forgotten Roman emperors
The trees endlessly finger through soils
disturbing turned souls with their tubers
once lost and unequal in life and death
but finding a rare settling of parity
under levels of pressed Sussex chalk
and now haunting your visit
Up at five with the ghost
who is an hour ahead –
not one for the clock’s
change – she lets light in//
She leaves her stew of scent
on my stiff right fingers –
as if marking out extents
upon me// She squats
upon my vice-set thighs –
her other working of me//
See – this sheet is stained
and pocked by blood
once a month – it is she//
The tin top cottages
should be haunted – but there is no ghost –
no made-pail Hoogstraten –
A man ripped the roof
off his own propped home and so next door
was left for him – alone –
Now stand those twins
with no tiles or grace – rotting near Hoogstraten –
and his resting place
This bar’s serving hatch is always left agape –
tonight I see it is a varnished picture frame
holding unfair perspectives of the pirouettes
of the not-Degas barmaids in uniform black
In this pub’s cellar are floating phantasma –
I am often told – here under my pint-fixed feet –
below the boards – Orbital corner-of-the-eye
lights are known to cross the cold stones
They are – the old boys also claim –
fixed by the presence of the town’s tunnels –
those mislaid smugglers’ rat runs now
bricked up within the dead-end arches
Other spectres are regulars in the saloon –
they bother the rushed staff and punters
from their precarious stools – a feat in old age –
added up they would predate electricity –
and then they shuffle off – with chains of change –
shifting between the bogs and their tall thrones –
always back on their seat to summon spirits –
from the optics – but not with their pensions
Believe in your child’s ghost –
but then let her spectre run
from the road-kill shock –
from the flare of the
body-struck headlights –
those halogen matches
will ignite her terrified flight
into the woods –
But don’t eye that place
where she first learns to haunt
in the permanent night
of tightly weaved birches –
where Nan Tuck flies afeard
of her burning death throws –
where the recently
spilt spirit runs
from the quick-kill road –
Who let the trees take the young
from our arms?
The wounding country lanes
kill our flightless birds
with too much winding speed –
She will be cold tonight
We dropped over Falmer
and sped past a man in white
who was bent-double
among the weighted hedges
The descent past the stadium
was a collision of thoughts –
it then offered a roundabout
and we doubled back to offer
I rehearsed my approach
reminding myself of the place
and how I would have to slow
with hazards
with a wound window
But there was no man in white
in the place
only the waving of branches
under the charge of turbulence
No one on the untrod grass
They say that there is a ghost
in every old house
That frigorific forms will rise
to meet with warm blood
and damp bones
an attraction
almost a magnetism
It is beyond any control
Love is a heavy haunting
which we meet unexpectedly
in bars and dark bedrooms
The ghost I knew was cold
which I did not tell the kids
She troubled the shadows
of our chattering family home
Late in the night I would run
three flights of stairs
Yes
me
the adult
fucking scared
We are sat drinking
‘Old Speckled Hen’,
out of cooled tins
in the summer’s cold rain,
we talk of the last house,
a ghost we recalled,
when we each met
the ghost in the hall.
On that sprung branch,
she was lifted to my height
an easier examination,
I greeted my ghost,
I then figured her shape
with my touch, formed, real,
she offered me a scent
her sex, her appeal:
but my old man attentions
could scare her off –
my lightest of hauntings –
I must stay light myself.
Risen, our ghost,
on this landing,
her, embalmed,
our prior owner,
wishing to leave,
without asking,
M. reduced
by a buried composure,
slighted under
daylight’s exposure.
Our eldest child
met her in his room,
dark, spectred,
unexpected there:
he slumped back
to sleep’s deep rheum,
in doing so she slipped,
rent back to air:
our review made her
his dreamt-slept affair.
For CB & Flint
The briefest of expeditions –
gloam-reduced on unmarked
rough paths below Uckfield –
in frost’s shade – a steep
cut-back – a scuff of lost road
on our tugged walk along
the dip of a redundant drove
Sussex verges are now myths
of ribbons – tied-to mournings –
of days-limped bunched flowers –
of candles – air-pinched – below
roadside oaks – elms or beech –
there her young life leaked
after a deceleration – a kid
cut out by the steel saw and car
Our return home is assured
under our slow-stepped walk
on a lost-name route
on the lingering histories –
yet to be found – laid under tarmac –
only touched by the clod-split roots
of the oaks – elms or beech –
those tied-to fingerers of ghosts
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MIKE BELL | 10,000 Poems 