Georgie Porgy

Wall of home knocked down to get morbidly obese teenager to hospital

The Guardian, 25 May 2012

Little treasure, giftwrapped, handmade

taffeta dress (a bit on the wide side),

spotted-silk ribbon bowed in flaxen hair,

watching the bounty the children bear

Jenga up twixt fridge and bin,

understand when the children sing,

Georgia Davis, puddings and pies

built a prison with you inside,

when you're dead we'll hum this tune

and dig you out with a fork and spoon.

(c) 2012 Slush Poet

Egyptian democracy (3 Exodus)

Voting heats up in Cairo

The Jerusalem Post, 24 May 2012

Haven’t lived there for years,

been all this time in Midian where

took me a wife, laid low

from the long reach of Pharaoh.

Now word has come

from none other than the Big I Am,

an election’s underway

and the Israelites will all pray

the self same thing; they aren’t fussed

whether there’s just one box

to put their cross beside,

or as many as the names He goes by.

Lord knows they’re owed a break,

a deal’s a deal, so to speak,

so He scares away my in-law’s goats

by torching a clump of mountain gorse,

and turns my staff into a sand viper,

and poxes my eating hand,

then He empties out his sack

on the cracked and thirsty sand.

I’m standing waist deep in polling chits

rendered to the Lord by Israelites,

each one signed with a cross

but no candidate’s name in any box.

(c) 2012 Slush Poet

Unlikely premise for a thriller

Son dressed as dead mother in cash fraud

METRO, 23 May 2012

While the landlady rises early, breaks

her fast, her son sleeps in

on Sundays. A widower, she says,

dotes on the boy, and he on her,

says she sees her husband alive

in him, though I can't imagine where

he'd fit another likeness in.

Mistaking the one for the other,

the son for his mother from a distance,

I've caught her creeping from the bathroom

flagged in his flannel robe, a lather seeping

from a razor discarded on the basin.

As well as all the usual references,

they've asked for my collar and shoe sizes.

(c) 2012 Slush Poet

5, 4, 3, 2, 1...

Falcon 9 private rocket lifts off for International Space Station

The Independent, 22 May 2012

Thunderbirds are gone.

Those men whose thoughts stayed on the moon

when they felt the weight of our earth

in the night sky above them

brought it home to us

with cosmic rock.

Marooned, here

at the pinnacle of our ascent,

abandoned goats alone on a rooftop,

a vanishing atoll in a rising sea of floating limbs

and nine-tenths hidden bloated shapes,

we eat the thatch

from under ourselves,

shifting our feet to reach an unsoiled patch.

O, to once more split infinitives:

subspace communicators, lunar bases,

doors that go 'shhhhh'.

Shhhhh...

The spirit of free enterprise

has a date tonight with Thunderbird 5.

The Billy Goat and the Troll

Tributes pour in for Bee Gees legend Robin Gibb

Hello! Magazine, 21 May 2012

Chafing at the threshold

of a stone bridge over a ravine

a billy goat samples the headwind

hoping for essence of meadow

and tasting only cheese,

cheese topped with a sheep's pelt,

ancient brie reeking like the creases

in rotting skin, seeping from green stones,

the maggoty festering breath of a troll.

The goat looks left, looks right,

looks back at the denuded field

where he and his brothers once feasted

and fought; and standing apart from it

sees it anew in the troll's pebble eye,

a blessing for one to be staying alive.

(c) 2012 Slush Poet

Letting the cat out

Jobs joy as Ellesmere Port's Vauxhall plant is saved

Chester Chronicle, 17 May 2012

We scraped aside the mud

that the intervening month

had made of all the turned earth

we had piled on the mound.

Before disinterring

the box, we stopped and listened

for scratching, for mewing,

for any kind of sound.

Two of us straddled the pit

with a fingertip grip on the rim

of the lid, and heaved the box out

with a slurping birthing squelch.

Expecting a stench we rubbed oil of cloves

under our noses and let the cat out.

(c) 2012 Slush poet

Morning's song

Man sets himself on fire at Breivik trial

The Canberra Times, 16 May 2012

That day it sure dawned on us

how powerful morning TV would be.

The previous day’s action on the pitch

might have been nothing without the pictures,

we’d just have had Eamonn Holmes’s commentary.

I dropped my razor and ran downstairs

half-shaved, half-dressed;

a mug had shattered on the tiled hearth

and a cry had risen from some deep place,

Fire! Fire!

Downstairs her face sank into my wet chest hair,

the searing image already impressed

indelibly on her life of an old man ambling across

a football pitch, seemingly unaware

that from his trouser cuffs to his old cloth cap

he was a biblical pillar of fire.

I memorized his name, spoke it like a mantra

often over the coming days

and it pains me that I can’t remember it today.

All I remember is how his suffering —

for he must have suffered in his stripped down

animal heart —

tore apart my certainties;

could a crucified Jesus

really have forgiven us?

I have carried the old man’s cross

just as mankind has its own disgrace,

the loss of my faith

just the first and not the cruelest privation

of witnessing that innocent’s immolation.

Now self-destruction is becoming

the weapon of choice, the nuclear option

for the sufferer denied a voice.

Outside a court in Oslo

a man takes careful aim. He lights a taper

and expects his target’s faith to be shaken.

(c) 2012 Slush Poet

Disarming the smile

China unhappy at Cameron's meeting with Dalai Lama

The Guardian, 15 May 2012

This I have heard, that the Dalai Lama

is the reincarnation of Gautama,

the Buddha, who in his original life

claimed nothing survives the miracle of its birth

but dies in becoming the very next moment,

and in any case was anatta, soulless,

inessential, pure process, a stream

of consciousness tumbling down a mountain.

So if I were David Cameron

I'd ask the grinning Tibetan who he thinks he is,

once when he comes in and again when he leaves,

and if his replies are both times the same

in more than just name,

and he says he's the Buddha or stakes a claim

to the sangha, recite him the dharma

then send him packing to China.

(c) 2012 Andy Hickmott

David and Nick

Obama’s support energizes gay activists worldwide

Seattle Post, 10 May 2012

“You’ll have heard about Baz?”

More an accusation than a question.

“Why mention him now?

It’s not like we’re close.

Just met him the once or twice,

and anyway he’s got a wife.”

“He wouldn’t be the first,”

(pausing to fold one of Dave’s shirts).

“Listen,  Nick, don’t spoil our day.

Queenie’s coming out later

and it’ll all look better then, vows renewed,

the parties put behind us.”

“Those parties,” Nick sighed, “aren’t for queers.”

He’d seen Dave change among his peers.

(c) 2012 Slush Poet

In the absence of power

Legoland closes due to power failure

Slough Observer, 6 May 2012

The governments of Greece and France have fallen,

their peoples’ power finally failing them,

the aftershocks are felt far away.

In rural Berkshire, loosened foundations

send flurries of PVC masonry tumbling

from scaled-down totems of national grandeur.

A lame Eiffel Tower leans over like Pisa,

the grinning Acropolis requires a dentist.

But the malls of Paris are already braced

for an upsurge in spending, while Athens

squats and strains over Europe’s face.

Who says turkeys don’t vote for thanksgiving?

(c) 2012 Slush Poet

The Green Boy

Body of baby boy found at recycling warehouse

Yorkshire Post, 3 May 2012

The temperature has fallen, a chill

in the air, in there, in the shed.

A relief to be spared a while the pulsing

abdominal heat radiating in from its corrugated skin,

its girded roof for once higher than the stench

of decaying organic matter that clings to everything,

from probiotic yogurt pots to unrinsed TV dinner trays,

distended cartons of pineapple juice

primed to explode, to go off, to go bang,

in the crusher, in the furnace, in the long

malodorous, monotonous night.

Let the fireworks begin. Stick to the matter

that matters, the four-poster cats, the inside-out turkeys,

the needles and nappies and insanitary towels.

Keep the green belt rolling but fish out anything alien,

anything like that — what is that?

It looks like a sausage, a big one, a knack or a bratwurst,

a fat German waste of good porker.

There's no call for delicacy, no time for archeology,

but a sharp tug reveals that it's joined to a motherlode.

There’s nothing else for it then: grab hold.

Christ, it's as bloated as a floater

and won’t budge, stuck fast in the process

of its reincarnation. Dig with the one hand, heave with the other,

try not to see what you’re seeing, to look into unblinking eyes

through a skein of flies, or to hear from those bloated lips

a silent infant cry forever craving its mother’s breast.

(c) 2012 Slush Poet

The price of tea

Britain on renewed flood alert after wettest April on record

The Telegraph, 1 May 2012

This, my husband, I have heard, that over in England

they suffer too. Even their judiciary can be swept away

on a surge. I read in the Hindi Times of a judge

who was drowned when his Jaguar plunged

into a swollen Hampshire tributary, to be found

later dead as a log, clinging to his faithful hunting hound.

Such, my husband, are our blessings.

We who sailed on the roof of the Brahmaputra ferry

found no electric windows or central lockings

kaput and blocking our escape, and for the losses

of our livings have been promised two whole lakh!

So, husband, when I am fished from the flood,

and sorted from the flotsam, I shall be revealed

your surviving wife, clinging to your bloated hide.

(c) 2012 Slush Poet