Breasted burden

Mother admits killing her two babies at their family home

The Sun, 31 October 2012

Slung about her weathered neck

knotted in the flesh of nape,

a dead weight she declines to settle,

two clotted sacks, one on each breast

searing afresh the prison bars

of her chest. Come to her aid,

she draws the clattering bone-filled sacks

to her weeping bosom and protests

some burdens can’t be set down

once borne without giving up

being human, others weigh more

the slighter they grow to a grieving woman.

(c) 2012 Slush Poet

The ashes of England

Imports of ash trees to be banned - but is it too late?

The Telegraph, 25 October 2012

Our native ash stands vigilant,

within its moat of deadened earth

its demi-shadow seeps like damp,

as dappled and long over moor

as when spilled into forest glade;

and while English children

gather up acorns and conkers

and gardeners cotyledons

from regal oaks, horse chestnuts,

sycamores, strong men succumb

beneath the ubiquitous ash without

ever knowing its common name,

and are buried in coffins of elm

cut long before gatecrashers razed

English elm to a state of fine ash.

(c) 2012 Slush Poet

Night labours of the Buddha

Night shift raises cancer risk in men

The New Zealand Herald, 23 October 2012

That true love can only be made
in the searching light of day

I hold as axiomatic. Those cold
dark nights that cloak untold

sins and betrayals of faith,
so damning to mental health

and a man’s repute, are wholly
unwholesome. So crawl to me

in the flecked patchwork quilt
of light filtering through the nets

across this rucked eiderdown
and, mindful of my suspicions,

steel your gaze on me, leave
no dark recess for the memories

of lovers past to feed on my sex.
We bare all our senses to test

the flesh, yet aren’t our hearts
always kept a little in the dark

and even the brightest sunlit days
cloak the night some other place?

(c) 2012 Slush Poet

Summer's demise witnessed from the safety of a coffee shop

Car parts and human skulls - art of Haiti on show

The Guardian, 22 October 2012

Mocking the old tree's thinning

leaves of browning green

and tangerine, artifacts of crimson

and violet, cotton and scarlet,

aquamarine, honey and bone.

Coffee and cream. Stars, spangles

and woven flowers helix round

and skelter down its wizened spine,

wind chimes shining, dream

catchers snatching from its limbs,

strung like dew on spiders’ silk.

The city kids are learning

about the harvest. A tin man

hangs, soup can arms held wide

like Christ, his head, once filled

with coffee beans, now hollow,

no heart beats in his bucket

chest. Like the Wicker Man

he exists only to be filled, his void

reminiscent of a missing child.

(c) 2012 Slush Poet

The Weather Man

Italian scientists convicted over earthquake warning

The Telegraph, 22 October 2012

Not a day passes without a storm warning

though often there's not a cloud in the sky.

Those clear blue days are the longest.

Michael identifies clouds as they file

past the unbarred window of his prison cell.

Bars would only signify, beg to be read

like entrails. No jailer could be that cruel.

Once he was a star on TV, an oracle,

his fall as meteoric as it was total.

Now he fails to foresee hurricanes,

wild fires, monsoons, rising sea levels.

A tsunami triggered a loss of remission.

But now when he’s watching TV he sees

where he went wrong. However clement

there is always the threat of a storm.

(c) 2012 Slush Poet

Convocation of the unseen

Human trafficking to UK is rising

The Guardian, 18 October 2012

Two scenes into the screening he gets it already

this isn’t the kind of picture he likes to give up

his free time to. There are no chase sequences,

no shoot-em-ups, passionate couplings or partings.

In place of depictions of a decadent idealistic

western lifestyle (that after all he’s been through

is the myth he aspires to) a documentary charting

Bristol’s wax and wane as an axis for slavery.

A shilling on the guinea for livestock from Africa

or cotton from the colonies, it pays to diversify,

the overseer notching up pickings on a ledger

of leathery sun-blackened hide. He empathizes

more with the slaver than the negro slacker,

our deluded movie theatre dreamer who craves

inclusion more than liberty, a lighter skin-shade

for upward mobility, the same shoes and tie

as the neighbours. Like in the Truman Show.

After the titles the lights come up and everyone

makes for the shadows they came from, the men

the women, Romanians, Chinese, Slovaks, Nigerians,

Vietnamese, indentured workers who don’t exist.

(c) 2012 Slush Poet

Revulsion / revolution

500,000 disabled worse off under Universal Credit changes

London Evening Standard, 17 October 1012

Disabled people are revolting

standing up for equal rights

getting on their bikes and marching

to table demands, loudly, clearly,

carrying motions with overwhelming

shows of hands, every one counting

none invalid, none prepared

to take injustice lying down.

Or at least they would if only

they were given a platform for protest

with a hearing loop and wheelchair access

if their benefits stretched beyond necessity

if media coverage wasn’t debasing

if disabled people weren’t revolting.

(c) 2012 Slush Poet

Seeding a storm

25 years after the Great Storm of 1987

Kent Messenger, 15 October 2012

The clatter of sycamore maple copters

scudding across our conservatory skylight

dredges afresh that Kentish night. Wakened

by slate scratching talon-like over slate

the suck of the storm wheezing through weatherboard

rattling casements, the cottage’s skeleton

creaking, the swaying groans of a scuppered ship.

Rising quickly in darkness risking the bends

to stab at the switch as if priming a pump

stoking, invoking or coaxing a current

into recalcitrant lifeless fittings.

Onto the landing and suddenly standing

in a shower of starlight pouring from a loft

its hatch long spirited into the night sky,

where the roof had been stared a hurricane’s eye.

(c) 2012 Slush Poet

War machine

Seven Royal Marines arrested on suspicion of murder in Afghanistan

The Telegraph, 12 October 2012

British soldiers are schooled in the slaughter

of sheep. It’s where they first learn

to look a fellow creature

in the eye and take away its life.

It’s where they learn to appreciate

the artistry of the kill

and lose their discomfort among the remains

of the slain. And if once being human

was synonymous with humane

the killer needs find something of death

lodged in his breast. There is nothing

new in drone warfare

if a man must be given an ROE card

to tell him when it is wrong to kill.

(c) Slush Poet

Pissing in the wind

Jimmy Savile family remove gravestone after scale of abuse exposed

The Times, 10 October 2012

By the time I found the plot

I was busting as a wine skin

and ready to pour out my feelings

all over his marble facade.

I unbuttoned my fly and dug deep

and into the darkness unleashed

a gushing pent-up torrent

of vitriol, silently arcing till,

like the pensioner who forgot

where the top stair was, splattering

onto the ground. And finding the dirt

already sodden, his death no less

a quagmire than his life, the grass

flat about that unmarked mound.

(c) 2012 Slush Poet

A potential piece of yellowism

Man who defaced Tate’s Rothko canvas claims he improved it

The Guardian, 8 October 2012

some fool once sat on a valuable art exhibit
which looked precisely like an lavatory seat

then had to leave with a painfully swollen bladder
having read somewhere a urinal signed was art

and I was inspired, by the way a crow (or was it a gull?)
skewered to a wall at the Tate drew a gullible crowd,

to stand before a framed blank fire-escape door
stroking my chin, waiting to see who'd do the same

but the joke was on me, the door potentially yellow
like many a canvas primed for a finishing coat

(c) 2012 Slush Poet

The Roswell incident

Going to the Edge of Space to Set a Skydiving Record

The Wall Street Journal, 8 October 2012

Ultimately, seen

from twenty-four miles high, from

outside its own eyes, the

uterine earth seems to him more

fragile than even that

other diaphanous womb, the balloon

uplifting his

foetal carapace to the outer edge

of inner space. The

umbral gauze shielding earth is but a

filmy dew, ephemeral as the skin enclosing a bubble

of soap.

Up and through the tropopause, with

frost threatening to shatter his hopes he cracks

open the eggshell

unleashing into the void his

fetid cargo of re-breathed

oxygen-depleted air, and

ushers in the vacuum which

fills the capsule as if with sadness.

Out on the launchpad he calls his

Uncle Joe: You out there, Joe? You

feeling what I’m feeling, Joe?

Or am I alone........???

The veterans of Roswell swear

what fell to earth that ‘47 night blew in

on a breath of extraterrestrial air

and couldn’t have been the shed silver skin

of a lifeless weather balloon.

(c) 2012 Slush Poet

Honey feeling blue

The French beekeepers and the mystery of the blue honey

The Independent, 5 October 2012

When bees feel blue

their honey is apt to spread

no, ooze

into the sadder end

of the spectrum

between winter-blue cyan

and indigo nights alone.

No bee would choose

the adulteration of honey

to articulate its gloom

but you ignored

the hive’s wiggle dance,

their insistent buzzing

pushed back in your mind.

(c) 2012 Slush Poet

Fish out of water

Dolphin stranded on Falmouth beach this morning put down

The Falmouth Packet, 3 October 2012

Out of his thick glass eye

he sees the ocean,

the whole ocean not just the shore.

The sun has set on North Carolina

since he last saw from the window

a cloudless sky down below.

He might have been sleeping

if that’s the right verb

for retreating a while

into a meditation on freefall.

Night will fall, too,

across Lake Michigan soon

and he will not watch the sunrise

again in Chicago, Illinois.

(c) 2012 Slush Poet

The unwell

British workers are the most depressed in Europe

Daily Mail, 1 October 2012

If you want to be able to see

the dark, go shine a light

down a well that’s fathoms-deep.

Cold sweat stones seep back

like creatures into the deep

but in the abyss there blinks

a light, unsurprising since it’s you

who dropped it in there yourself.

For a more satisfying glimpse

of a dark that refuses to be lit

by your flashlight, fathom instead

beneath this ice-crust of skin,

into the unwell where the pail

comes up dryer than it went in.

(c) 2012 Slush Poet