It's okay to walk on the grass

Queen shakes the hand of former IRA chief Martin McGuinness

The Telegraph, 27 June 2012

Chance having brought us together

we'll wonder where we've met before

say tentative hellos, smile, then realize

we were married long ago; freeze,

unsure what it would be proper to feel,

watch for the bloated corpses

of sunken ghosts to rise to the surface

and when they don't, feel foolish.

Don’t you remember Heather as a toddler

in the park? We watched the fireworks

and she cried, because she was scared

to step on the grass, so I carried her over.

I hope it’s me steps first on the grass.

I hope it’s you steps first on the grass.

(c) 2012 Slush Poet

Escape velocity

How dealing with the stress of moving home could lead to Alzheimer’s

Daily Mail, 26 June 2012

Now that we’ve moved

across town, sunny side up,

joined a nouveau set,

well heeled our habitat,

we don’t speak of yuppies

in quite the same way.

A nagging insistence

I for one would sooner forget

wormholes the distance,

some accents harder

than others to shake,

some cause my jaw to ache.

Our old neighbourhood

reminds me not of itself

but of my first school,

too small in every sense.

It’s how we must appear

to those starting from here.

(c) 2012 Slush Poet

Lonesome George's membership is approved

Pinta Island tortoises extinct after death of Lonesome George

Perth Now, 25 June 2012

Of late the chatter among
the teetering cloth-skinned ones
has been about the Smithsonian

but I have long been pearling
a yearning to move to London.
I want to be closer to Darwin.

So reverse my living putrefaction
with injections of formaldehyde
set off with blown glass eyes

from Venice. I belong among
the mummies in the British Museum
inseparable from their carapaces,

a crystal enclosure in Kensington
my more likely destination
between the dodo and the mastodon.

I'm ready now for refined society
lists swelling like the Ganges
a queue ever at the turnstile.

I am more valuable extinct
than when I was merely unique,
like a stolen Picasso or Matisse.


(c) 2012 Slush Poet

A requiem in sepia

Weight jibes led girl, 14, to hang herself

METRO, 20 June 2012

for Fiona

Why, I wonder, the sepia tint

in a photograph

that can't have long been taken?

Could it be that it's slimming,

the coffee stain keeping

unsightly puppy fat out of the picture?

The smiling girl looks older now

than she ever will be,

older than her dress size, any way.

She's a pretty child too, an adjective

that's been devalued,

like laying plans, or being fourteen,

but someone cared to giftwrap her

in the best silk and schooling,

taking an educated punt on her chances.

Is her smile then one of gratitude,

or are her cheeks aching,

her complexion like raspberry ripple?

(c) 2012 Slush Poet

The other fatal rail incident

Train collision kills cricketer

Evening Standard, 18 June 2012

My train was delayed this morning

and so overcrowded — people all but hanging

from the doors — that the first class carriage

was opened up to all, and it seemed to me

that every person from every town

from Holyhead to Chester had climbed aboard

that train, except for one who was smeared

all along the track just outside Prestatyn.

Later on the six o’clock news I heard

that a famous cricketer had died under a train,

and although his name meant nothing to me

I turned my attention, which had been elsewhere,

ready to mop up the gory facts for earnest retelling,

and was miffed that it wasn’t him outside Prestatyn.

(c) 2012 Slush Poet

In medias res

21 Years Later, Aung San Suu Kyi Receives Her Nobel Prize

The New York Times, 16 June 2012

... then, with your return flight cancelled

and soldiers armed with silencers standing

on the street outside your house, you'd years

to contemplate other equally arresting views,

jungle-spined cities only machetes could subdue,

and meditate upon your innate nobility,

prise free your walnut panelled aspirations,

every nail screaming like a hanging pig,

and strip your dreams of misty Oxford spires...

... now, standing shoulder to shoulder

with kings and queens and preening rock'n'rollers,

their grains tightly ringed where yours is blank

like balsa, you've space in your heartwood

to write the closing act of Aung San Suu Kyi;

the story unfolds as it began, in medias res...

(c) 2012 Slush Poet

The running man

Liverpool shooting leaves one man dead

The Guardian, 14 June 2012

To commemorate the recent passing

of the Olympic flame

someone chalked on our pavement

the outline of a running man.

Rain has washed the chalk away now,

only his crimson heart remains

and that seems to be running away

if only down the drain.

(c) 2012 Slush Poet

Coke and crisps

PM left daughter aged 8 down pub

The Sun, 11 June 2012

Our old Hillman’s dumped on the grass

outside the Barley Mow

with us in the back, me and my brothers

and our flatulent mongrel dog.

The shadows of trees are sliding east

even before Mum returns

with Coke and crisps for three, the crown

tops already prised off.

This tithe passes in through the window,

one hand nicotine yellowed

pinches a lit cigarette in its crook,

there’s no water for the dog.

We let him out to drink from a ditch

and excitedly break salt over our crisps.

(c) 2012 Slush Poet

Legal lows

'Legal high' warning following RockNess Death

Inverness Courier, 10 June 2012

Once, when I respected my elders

a tobacconist was really someone

I could look up to.

Parting with my hair ruffled,

one fist clenched about my change,

a fragrant foil-wrapped block

or a sweet-smelling pouch

in my other hand, forfeiting

an Airfix kit for a duty performed.

Years passed, my gifts grew more

elaborate, English cigarettes

ferried home from France:

HM Customs let it pass,

their one concern, their failure,

that I smoke them myself.

Here, now a respirator breathes

through the dog end

of my still smouldering mother.

She speaks with egg-white eyes

and impermanent marks on a dry-wipe slate.

'I'm frightened,' she scratches out;

I know, I tell her, I know.

Her passing is unexceptional, though,

no clamour for public enquiry.

(c) 2012 Slush Poet

In webs of darkness

Internet troll faces arrest for threats to MP
METRO, 8 June 2012

A concealed geometry underlies
the best Parisian heels.

Beneath the laughable symmetries

of bonsoirs, aux revoirs

and their shadows thrown on wet stones,

a staccato precipitate drips

unseen in delicate counterpoint

to the scratching of tiny feet.

A gondolier plies these catacombs

equipped with only a lantern

and a wooden scraping tool,

and scurrying marks his passage

as surely as gulls’ cries

mark a homecoming trawler’s wake.

(c) 2012 Slush Poet

After one night with Venus

Earth to fall for Venus’s charms

Independent Online (South Africa), 5 June 2012

She sparkles like champagne in firelight, her crescent eyes

refracting the sunset as she beckons you in towards

the underside of indigo, beyond the silk sheet horizon

while vespers are spoken.

Her radiance is undimmed by heaven’s creeping blushes

and you know she will consume you if the morning fly-trap closes

before you can desert her, so you slip out wondering when

if ever you’ll see her again.

(c) 2012 Slush Poet

Η τριακόσιες (The three hundred)

Poor Greece look like a spent force

The Independent on Sunday, 3 June 2012

For years they have soft-soaped us

with their frothing currencies;

now they demand of us

the soil in which Leonidas still seethes

over the cull of Spartan fathers,

and the turquoise Aegean waters

into which, long after Xerxes fled,

the blood of Greece still seeps.

We will show their emissaries

all the traditional hospitalities,

the same ones the Persians met

from the vastly outnumbered Greeks:

a watery grave, a suit of clay,

a readiness to find honour in defeat.

(c) 2012 Slush Poet