Our gold mine tour of shifts
& tales in [bellowing] Welsh
tones – chopsing – blown by
dynamite’s effect [& all that
glitters – etcs] & that rugged
bugger dug at fools’ stories
under his tourist-flowing pit
of cuttings & blastings – our
jump rod conducted us to a
pitch-black – lit-black [dense
once turned off] & someone
touched me up – afterwards
she said she was scared/ A
kid was less than a candle’s
expense [no more – now we
have tidy days & Hue lights]/
But Jones is furloughed by a
Tory chancer & slumps – dull
hours without his scripts for
ears – he recites them up top
in a double-glazed bungalow
for none to hear – lechyd da!
Tag: language
Bank Holiday – 1912 by William Strang
Watch his eyebrow rise
See its thick arc
He affects such
when reading French
[Monsieur est un crétin]
He will take longer
to delay our waiter
it is his petit way
of being quite superior
[Ma vie est trop courte]
But – I agree with my dog –
My life is too short
for such bullshit
Please order – now
The Duchess
There are kinds of poets who give poets
a bad name – not me guv’nor
Perhaps bejewelled ones in headscarves –
those hosts of salons or saloons –
Sorry – my attention suddenly dimmed
Those who do nothing for our honest lies
in verse – with Mr. and Mrs. Thesaurus –
knocking off – and out – in parked cars
No grandiloquent words for us plebs
Picking Fruit
There must be a word
for that gritty-ish crackling
of a blackberry’s uncomfortable
remnant – unground – jammed –
bloody unsuckable
from your pitted left molar –
stuck among soot succulences
and odd-chanced bitternesses
Seasonal pickers had a word
for every moment of pleasure –
and one for inequal measures –
such piques are now called love
Reading Circles
Concentric – a new whirlpool-word
found in my father’s
handed down encyclopedia –
when images of Stonehenge –
in line-drawn illustrations –
caught my crawled attention
When an unknown word
required my whole body to shift
and find another heavy book –
an Oxford English Dictionary
to finger flick through to trace
between com and cop to find con
and to be infected
by our endless language
Do not leave me alone with Roget
Words for Mud
We trampled under re-tugged hoods
across even wetter exposed ground
like low-eyed parlour-set cattle
both of us making that slab slurp
as we pulled our sucked heels
from immeasurable puddles
Stoach – was it uttered as mud
and air and boots glued? – stoach
and slab – discarded once-words
now rarely spoken – only by smeery
glazes – by worn pathways
There Wealden clay will complain
as hill-walked hours wear it away
Time will eventually reverse to tell
what truly lies beneath our feet
Then all our losses will be obvious –
no flights – no travel – no sinking islands
on TV – we are making errors here
Lost For Words
A conqueror’s high esteem
of varied Pevensey shellfish
is marked up – still to this day –
when out catching pandles
Sussex’s fathoming in
Latin’s infectiousness – off pandalus
But reducing – a word in decline
in this part of the country
Something to do with grammar
schools and formal education?
There is no local voice
or old inflection –
no dialect in
our National Curriculum –
surelye
Migrants – 4th July
That Americanism
of Autumn to Fall
came with Sussex
men and women
who landed on a slip
of their new world
Now another conceit
rewritten as Americana
but stolen old English
Their cast wide seeds
were sent to feed
future revolutionaries
and land thieves
Blame Sussex for such
misappropriation
War Poets
Paul Verlaine’s Chanson d’automne
was coded – still popular poetry –
to give notice –
his long sobs of French-sung violins
declared an Allied invasion
to those listening
Whilst she never understood speeches
of love – and our common
mistakes –
I would rarely read to her – she rarely read
my mutterings – my weight-pared
compositions
She never understood what was being said
She found poetry too difficult
Her own résistance
E080919
Such Dug Up Stuff
I could bite on Mr Heaney’s
lust-sight of her
of lost flesh
of navvy-dug amber nipples
under hard-weighed stones
over her cracked oak-bones
which are not
my spoken words
Language is not my tight weave
of Sussex-ness
no fluttergrub’s spade
to turn my empty laine of chalkland
His words are kissed intimacies
in his Castledawson rooting –
in peat-dug dampness
of vowel-soundings
If only we could speak such –
with such – reverence and blind love
of a long-buried bog-stickiness –
then this would be my
other language –
one not yet fully known
14th February 2019
Held by a red signal in south London –
in a balloon of wifi – of library silence –
this being a price-hiked compartment –
a restricted remnant of empire days
still served up by rail franchisees
as our ticket collector mis-quotes WS –
Juliet’s soft words as cuffed banter
towards serving staff –
parting is a sweetest sorrow –
and he then regrets these modern times
of –
changes to language – to luv cld b not bad –
Then a roll forward like a sneaking suitor –
an incline takes us without that rumble
from diesel complaints – this carriage sways
over switched points – under lopped trees –
those leaf-spill hazards
alongside a thousand-thousand
other prunings met behind drawn curtains –
those many lovers’ shop-cut flowers
presented in cellophane in south London
on this Saint Valentine’s Day
EDITED 170219
The Word of the Year
So there it is –
single-use –
the Word of the Year –
almost invisible
if not asked
what it means –
its weight
in the mouth –
on the lips –
a negligible act
but what a
colossus of burden
out of that place –
screwing the planet
I, the Draughtsman
‘The Irish have the greatest command
of the English language’ Discuss
Some West Indian poets may disagree
as would others from further ports
of our whore-explored tongue
This waking moment lets me wander
in a drunken reverie the words of Wallcott
but I haven’t dropped a touch in a week
apart from that sip of gin and tonic
which I was asked to consider for taste
In the house children clunk on floorboards
and the eager dog patters and follows them
My eyelids measure the paucity of my sleep
Later today my fatigue will make a grand entrance
just as I need to be alive to connect the lines
MIKE BELL | 10,000 Poems 