Tag: work

Show Calls

~ mikebellwrites ~ Leave a comment

Gather those remnants of your strength – we will stand longer than any others –
more than those who may expect less of us – & bring back – again – to yourself –
stolen powers that others frame as broken

This is a call to you – those robbed – to recover each fragment [ours were quickly lost]

Pull in to your own – families & friends – that latent energy in these long days/
You are surrounded by equals in reduction – you are lifted by sisters & brothers –
of this frail – but ever-extending – family/

This is a call to you – those beaten – our lives demand to now be sweetened/

Please find in this inconvenience a greater sense – on every level –
which is there – I tell you – it is enough to lift each one of us
above our rage of thoughts

This is a call to you – those pained – your dignity can be reclaimed/

I may be too loud in my ineloquent verse – but I wish for you – too – such a place of words –
to revel in that delight of your voice – removed from speech? We are still here to rejoice –
in any format that connects/

This is a call to you – those ignored – I’ll not meet again such people who I’ll always applaud/

Salt

~ mikebellwrites ~ Leave a comment

It is possible to pause & think too much –
that much I know – having considered it
too many times / My craft is assembling
piles of undertakings & to inspect them /
Do you find your mind in such bunkers of
indifference? If so join me in my refuge –
below one last high tide / Hide your face
as our space fills with brine & our escape
is no longer probable / Swallow & depart
through that other passage – we can hide!

Also on Medium

Labouring Under

~ mikebellwrites ~ Leave a comment

There are no greater spurs to human indecency
than cheap shortcuts to wealth

be they lotteries or lies – they are muted calls
to hard work – to tilth

Plough blades rub to blunt – our ground is dry –
our blacksmith has gone

No more steady blows – that loss of his honest hammer
has left his anvil to ring with rust

Old fixed courses of love are smudged in your soft hands
on your quick-to-hold screen

where you advertise yourself to an online world of touches –
you’d resist them if in public

As if everything is circumvented by launches and innovations
as if every previous minute

of humanity is evenly compressed – every way is left to be forgotten
Everyone just wants to be rich

Rental

~ mikebellwrites ~ Leave a comment

Hear them – those
too-near rushes
of combustion over tyre-rubbering

There – beyond my fence
I am just fifteen yards
from others’ entered destinations

This is a hermit life
but one with too much –
too much man-made stuff – such is soon useless

My sleep has re-aligned
as it did thirty-odd years earlier
to that of shift workers – once more an hour earner

I am a slow returnee
to my hollow house
of paid-for slept protection before one more day

This Bank Holiday Monday
sucks on my date-fixed time
as I lie bared-as-born on my artificial lawn

I must plant
some lavender in pots
My garden is not an insects’ paradise

My skin will blemish
under our turned-to sun
as my spread chemical vest of UV block – of factor fifty

unlocks and rolls off
under man-made laws
God wasn’t always for burning our butt-naked torsos

Ashpan Texas

~ mikebellwrites ~ Leave a comment

Your waking place
is a hollow-man’s town
with vacant homes
close to falling down

and solar-curled paint
peeling inside out
No drapes to draw –
now shadowed shrouds

That un-slept place
is your reading room –
all indexed resources
were wordlessly removed

There’s spines – there’s covers –
but no truth in sight
A baying Governor
set writ words alight

They say work’s returning
although don’t know what
They’ll be whispering lies
’til you thumb your vote

Your feared sun sits low
but still left life all peeled –
stealing a gloss layer
from that you had sealed –

taking your hours’ labours
of eye-cut brushes –
torching your hand of care
Your town’s burning up

E041119

Paperboy 1st April 1977

~ mikebellwrites ~ Leave a comment

Here in this alarm-met half-lit hour
things still bide from other April Fools’ days

Do not forget failing spaghetti trees
on foolish reportage loops

Again those soft nudges on slow senses
of soote aromas off flowering bulbs
there drilled – then paraded by retirees

My sucking lungs hauled their scents
and cool air’s apparent emptiness
on my delivery round’s steep ascents
with a bag weighted by broadsheets

Even worse on Thursdays

Another run of The Surrey Herald
Thick – but relevant – before the internet

Impossible to fold in these gloves

Here at this tall window
slid up an inch or two
my increase in rigidity
dictates today’s route

Those sash counterweights
are strung through my arms

Still close – my childhood
of heaves and pumps of pedals
in that slog across Chertsey’s
seven low hills every morning

No more kneaded by a canvas strap
but instead rubbed by an illness
as I deliver my night-laid lines

Here at this window –
on this hill – in my hand
is my latest paper round
of rhyme-sour edits
with old ascents still considered

Our Slack Dog Sleeps

~ mikebellwrites ~ Leave a comment

Our slack dog sleeps – again –
under backlit performing particles –
those flecks – peeled and rubbed –
bare floating remnants of us

in ramped tilts of warming beams –
up there – fine speckles cavort against
our sureness of earth’s old ways –
under ageing theories of gravity –

That free carnival of melancholia
almost pulls me down alongside
her – laid out on our made-up bed –
matching breath-for-breath –

to wonder under our lost stars –
This is my routine – my vie with time –
now – on common weekdays
after the exodus of kids – to try

to find flow from my inertia –
drugged by my hate of
my paid-by-the-hour ego-building
for lank corporate schemers –

those dullard committees
of amateur designers
desiring temporary cathedrals
built in the air out of dust –

by me – wearing the same jeans
for three weeks – no one sees
me bent to my desk with malaise’s
dirty weight of false deadlines –

No one sees me dipping my eye
to find brief relief in my word chapels –
small wonders – crafted from
their commissioned remnants

 

 

My Designs

~ mikebellwrites ~ Leave a comment

I am abraded by a faux light
for my immediate set of tasks –
I sit at my cluttered desk

before that eye-bleach of pixels
framed on a twistable mount –
that rarely wrestled wrist –

I slump before it – weighted by to-dos –
by deadlines for stage designs –
my fanciful constructs

in rented spaces for the business
of presentations – for buffed egos
and unfurled peacock feathers –

for fat chanticleers in sharp suits
and for ruffled hens in tottered heels
to preen at brand-gilded lecterns –

those podiums were once brushed –
leafed in beaten gold for unseen gods –
but I enwomb false altars in hewn MDF –

Set to stand – braced – for only one day
before a room of corporate disciples
who pray for the coming of closing remarks

#HustlePorn

~ mikebellwrites ~ Leave a comment

You are a part of hustle porn
having once taken the dark oath
in a silent swearing-in

You surrender to twenty-hour days
missing every sunset in the week

You are schlepping overnight – there
imbibed upon their dripped breasts –
be they Yahoo’s or Spotify’s squeeze
in their rule of the way to work

You are pressed against the deadlines
with your suckled infant face

You dreamt of electric sheep
grazing on forever-rain rooftops
because you fell asleep reading
a novel – because you cannot sleep

Because your eyes are glued wide
open – because
You suffer hustle porn

The Boat

~ mikebellwrites ~ Leave a comment

His boat had seen action in the East –
the reek of cooled sweat met him –
not yet mopped by long-damp cloths –
Never dried enough to work well

so that his first breath taken underwater
faltered – his onshore training failed him
making him cough like that last fag had
as he carried his black kit bag

He crouched to find the right height
at which he was to live and work –
now his skimming on the waves
were inked notes on his service record

This is how it started – it’ll make him –
those hours of constant perspiration –
a hundred nights of coffin dreams –
and still yet to learn Jack Speak

New Terms

~ mikebellwrites ~ Leave a comment

Whist you commuters
weary your lit ways
at ergonomic desks
and begging screens

I will walk out
to that richer idyll
that you can only visit
when allowed

You are locked down
by your WiFi streams –
even the commute
is more small displays

Those sealed views
from that fixed carriage
is the best you can do
on most weekdays

until the sullenness
of September dims
and the daily journeys
are seen as reflections

And the mid-term break
in October’s pointlessness
is the dark reminder
that holidays have been taken.

The Long View

~ mikebellwrites ~ Leave a comment

I’ve relocated my drawing desk –
we lugged it to the front room
where it hogs the bay window
with the intended long view

I now spot parents and fat kids
off to retail therapists with bags –
I watch them plod down the slope
to then return – to ascend slacked

My foreground is neatly fenced
by neighbouring OAP purgatory
where septuagenarians snooze
in the blind-fitted conservatory

There none visit the anchored few
who shimmy on wheels and frames
to and from their short destinations
of bed to table and then board games

My own rest home is a slow torture
of afternoon sunlight through glass
but it is my now my preferred option –
I have a better canvas – of sorts.

A Place to Sit

~ mikebellwrites ~ Leave a comment

His round carver’s mallet
rung out vibrations
and workbench chimes
as he forced his chisel
into the oak

Other redundant tools
hung
shelved
and sung with the whack and saw

We talked about art and ecology
and how they could combine
as he formed his perfect edges
against nature’s aged grain

He was crafting a bench
one commissioned to sit
in Alfriston’s book store

No plans or dimensions to hand
because this was true art

We compared the unwritten notes
of our marriage dissertations
and found that such study
provides no long term rewards

Waking

~ mikebellwrites ~ Leave a comment

This expected day is let in,
scratched at, half-awake,
as the mis-matched curtains
are tardily pulled apart,

to reveal, as pre-supposed,
an unwritten plaque of clouds:
Feet on boards and clicked doors
posit the quick-slow presence

of other family members
in this ritualised dance of risings:
As ever, I am unready for the day,
with no routine, as of now.

We

~ mikebellwrites ~ Leave a comment

We, the now-diagnosed,
may be the dead men walking,
slapped, strapped,
labelled as a bit too different
by the uncovered disconnects,
which, compounded by stress,
and our near normal efforts
to be the original self, to be us,
may reduce our ability to fly,
but that doesn’t stop us trying:
we will pull on our waxed wings,
lift from the cloying labyrinth,
and shake off the weight of hubris,
to take self-esteem back, yet again.

My Work

~ mikebellwrites ~ Leave a comment

My work, the drawn-up stuff,
takes me to chair-rattled halls
and outwardly fabulous hotels,
but these days I visit on-line
to inspect the not-right spaces,
to then conjure in the nothing
of their rent-echoed rooms
such ideas and extents of build
that will last hours, days
or weeks, but never much more:
My work, the drawn stuff,
does not last long, a soft recall,
like that of a night with an escort:
I let them fuck me with their ideas.

Drawing

~ mikebellwrites ~ Leave a comment
Another day of distances
at my complicated desk,
workings-out/drawings-up,
a world, yet to be seen,
here conjured, cuff-rolled
under my sleights of hand;
I am a whore for every hour
at this, my digital alchemy,
turning fixed ones and zeros
into other fools’ short gold:
And when their rush passes,
designs met, now unamended,
I can then draw out my words

across other complications.

Heat Exchange

~ mikebellwrites ~ Leave a comment

December bird song comes
through the slid-up sash,
cracked because of
the unbearable heat in here:

And I am advised
that I have too many layers,
which I am told to wear,
but ‘not now, my dear.’

I lie, a bed-bound choice,
under eyes so heavy they hurt,
as the house drains of voices;
I cool commensurately.

But I have work to do, as ever,
and I will recall reduced strengths:
I shall stand before my empty desk
to conjure, from nothing, creation.