God of the gaps

NASA telescope detects ‘bonanza’ of humungous black holes

The Christian Science Monitor, 29 August 2012

Science reveals the deep fish of mind,

catches synapses thinking thoughts

to which the thinker is blind,

lays claim to the magical night sky,

bottles it, labels its bright outer skin

the afterbirth of all within.

And just when the world was becoming

so like a clock set running

by a maker with better things to do

than watch its slow wind down,

we found out even God can only guess

what happens next, perhaps

placing his bets with the rest of us,

sometimes black, sometimes red,

too busy to fill in the gaps that he left.

(c) 2012 Slush Poet

A martian arrives home

Will.i.am’s new single premiering on Mars

Los Angeles Times, 28 August 2012

Arrived home safely whistling something

classical learned while on earth. I’d found

it hard to sleep, so it helped me speed

the time wasted lying awake in stasis.

New neighbours arrived. Must pop round,

soon as this places is tidied—it’s tail-deep

in postcards from Amis, Reid and Raine—

ask them to turn the bloody volume down.

(c) 2012 Slush Poet

The man on the moon

Neil Armstrong 1930-2012: modesty on the moon

The Guardian, 26 August 2012

It was one small step

and for several seconds yours

and yours alone.

Humanity froze

waiting for your postcards home,

yet you had moved on

and history itself marks time

in steps that can’t be undone:

the first flint struck,

a mark on a cave wall

that once read good hunting

at the waterhole

and now says boldly go.

Your footprints, still on the moon,

lead who knows where.

(c) 2012 Slush Poet

Dangerous cats

Woman left bloodied by moggy calls for ban on dangerous cats

METRO, 22 August 2012

Cats of every cast,
of every stripe, every shade, inbred, crossbred,
scratching livings on pigeons and rats.

Black ones are worst,
drawn to the wheelie bin backs of the takeaways,
flicking their claws, marking their turf.

It’s an unlucky turn
that strays you into their path and they circle you,
purring, sizing you up like cream

left on a window ledge.
On a dark still moonless city night, every cat
that isn’t white to you is black.

(c) 2012 Slush Poet

The antidote to everything

Aspirin may help in fight against depression

Daily Mail, 18 August 2012

I turn to aspirin, much as some
turn to religion. To prove
this virtuoso medicine’s
omnipotence, I once perused

Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason
through a fog of countless fills
of Stella Artois (five percent
in those days, understand) until,

crows pulling worms from my eyes,
cork borers trepanning my skull,
I quaffed the regulation two
pills and slept like virgin snow.

Blissful sleep, the gentle thief.
Eternal sleep, the antidote
to everything. I got me aspirin,
what’s to be depressed about?

(c) 2012 Slush Poet

Clearing

for Megan

It isn’t too late for clearing

The Telegraph, 17 August 2012

it's what sticks to your fingers
after the taxman has taken his lick
of your lolly, for banks
it's the magical transportation of money
at the speed of light,

elsewhere it's permission to land,
to re-enter the blue, blue sky
or step over a line on a map
between denied and granted,
it's the right stamp in your passport,
it's jumping high enough
to not be tripped by the hurdles,

it's an improvement in the weather,
a space to stand and see the trees
and a track leading out of the forest
unobstructed by snow or fallen leaves.

(c) 2012 Slush Poet

Sandcastles

As a child I didn’t build sandcastles.

It was as if any hope

they might be allowed to remain

seemed childish to me,

a degree of optimism

like sandcastles themselves

without foundation

in sandpits laid on by farmers

to amuse the labourers’ kids

and keep them from harm’s way,

well out of earshot

so the mothers wouldn’t be troubled

by grazed knees, bee stings

stomach cramps, hungry cries

guilty pangs piled high on guilty pangs.

I dug tunnels instead

as deep as the sandpit went

sometimes as long as my arm,

sometimes with two separate entrances

joining them unseen, under the sand.

It was something I did

that impressed the other kids,

it was somewhere I hid

the things I stole from them;

Mum used to say I was trying

to dig my way out, to escape,

making a joke of the fact

that she hadn’t the cash to buy

her son a bucket and spade.

Sandcastles has now been published in Volume 027 of Sarasvati

(c) 2012 Slush Poet

Homebird (No 6 of ¡Las Canciones Bravas!)

Thousands head for home as London 2012 signs off in spectacular fashion,

METRO, 13 August 2012

London survived the Games
the only casualty the cynic pained
to find no flaw to aggravate
into an ugly sore.

For the first time in my lifetime
of Spanish holidays I have yearned
to return to dour English streets,
a Londoner by choice.

(c) 2012 Slush Poet

Transferable Skills (No 5 of ¡Las Canciones Bravas!)

Veterans pursue anti-discrimination legislation

Daytona Beach News-Journal, 10 August 2012

We unravel in foreign fields
each travelling on a one-way ticket,
comforts, skins coiled on the floor
are buried where they fall.

At night we lay in hollow impressions
of those we followed out here to replace
and soon will become. One size fits many,
these so transferable skills.

(c) 2012 Slush Poet

Ricochet (No 4 of ¡Las Canciones Bravas!)

Fainting may run in families: study

The Telegraph, 8 August 2012

The echo that bounced inside my head
ricocheted off its cranial angles,
a tennis ball composed of pixels
at the lowest point of the eighties

encased now in a museum of urban
waste, still running for our amusement,
while a laser photon aligned to a disc
awaits its cue to sing.

(c) 2012 Slush Poet

Salmon's Leap (No 3 of ¡Las Canciones Bravas!)

Lord Coe calls for more compulsory schools sports to capitalise on Games

i, 7 August 2012

Finding the measure of Spanish light
I see hands reach up, out of the blue
to slap a two foot sac of breath
across a pontooned net,

youths more at home with PS2s
leap like salmon and, whooping, splash
back beneath the surface tension,
the space between sports and games.

(c) 2012 Slush Poet

Silverlight (No 2 of ¡Las Canciones Bravas!)

Mars rover Curiosity safely lands on the red planet

Independent, 6 August 2012

I surface to splashing and children's
shouting - the world washed out
in silverlight, dry-mouthed -
the sounds of waterplay,

like the morning after the night
a man on the moon really became
the man on the moon, and I came to
to the echo of my name.

(c) Slush Poet

Touchdown (No 1 of ¡Las Canciones Bravas!)

Murray mints himself a gold medal

Evening Standard, 5 August 2012

Tilting at our final descent
into Girona's dawn, we are cupped
like a candle's flame by the Pyrenees
ascending - a welcome of sorts -

setting us down upon burning seas
of ripening maize and sunflowers
bowed by seed. Our shadows scrape
across their gold-disc sun.

(c) 2012 Slush Poet