Coffee Morning
Jake Bayliss
Wait for lights at the window;
It’s coffee morning at mine.
Once all meander home
The remnants trace lines
In the leafy script-pages,
Digging, restless for replies.
Soon, a roaming carcass
Will be lit with news
Or laughter as a candle wilts
In some gloomy box room.
We live through sirens,
The hope that they pass,
Burst locks and spectral letters.
Defences
He spends the summer of ‘18 in Italy.
Returns with a tattoo of a cross,
cradled in the crook of his arm.
We argue about God until he cries.
Do you remember being
seven years old?
The boys in the field who called me a bitch?
You: this little bundle
of fury, headfirst into the fight.
They beat the shit out of you.
You didn’t regret it.
You laughed, as we walked back home:
‘It’s just a black eye, Giorgi,
some things are more important
than a bruise.’
I told my mother I hated you, that night.
And then I went to bed,
prayed I’d know you forever.
The Rock
Lawrence Gartshore
Oh rolling hills, oh grassy glens,
thy power and beauty know no ends.
Where men are bold and yet more wise;
a land ne’r ‘fraid to punch above its size
and repel foreign tyrants who e’er they may be,
from England, to Rome, those who plunder the sea.
A rock to those who know its love
and the promised land to those above
for God’s own land is not in the east,
but in Scotland does he make his peace.
Defences
Two shirtless
boxers face
themselves
before the fight,
eyes locked on
one another –
a measured
distance.
Tough-strong
gazes and crinkled
brows donned
for the audience
falter as one’s foot
stamps forward
shoulders pressed back
leading chest puffed
I dare you, man,
I fucking dare you
his forehead softened
with a kiss.
Homing
Jake Roberts
Steam breaks the illusory seal
Of calm, leaking from room to room,
Touching, as it goes, the seated ghosts
Who laughed, drank and mused
In this workshop of innocence,
This Russian-doll chamber where treaties
Or whispers fused, mingled and died.
Rising through the open window to taste
The conversations of a thousand
Nights before, when new faces
Clasped each other in delight
And giggled with tipsy camaraderie.
Quiet cigarette butts sit distant in-kind,
Soliloquies lost in each smoking tide.
Rising to the meeting place up the stairs:
Chapel for tired souls who outlast
The bullish revelry. Here in daylight
We seek the same salvation;
Our enclave’s knitted hearth
Is company, a collage of people-past
Watch the scene from the gallery.
Through the mist, dinner for two or three,
We pilgrims, magi, who dine on talk
Await the plating of news we heard
Last week but need confirmed
And eat until our jaws ache.
The slippage of time, the wander back
Lit brighter than before our mass.
Like homing pigeons, we loop to return.
Not to conclude, nor speak
A final truth, but to nurse
The warmth, the beginning,
The Great Moving Upwards;
Nurse our joys, our untruths,
Our temporary selves.
Built to grow out of, loved in embryo,
deserving of youth;
The end looms, we love faster.
Crusader Crusader
Anonymous
I found you racing in the desert driving a work of art
And pulsing through your veins with the blood of the Lion Heart
My friend it’s later than you think and the light’s about to fade
And if we don’t start to hurry
We will miss out on the crusade
They will take psychedelic drugs and drink to the faithful departed
And sleep with a woman who has no name and leave her broken hearted
Crusader, crusader, it is you who they despise
Child of the invader cursed with foreign blue eyes
My friend they will never understand
For they have never seen
How the desert turned to water and
The ocean turned to sand
Matador matador hear the crowd as it roars
And they do not know what death is
For they have never been alive
Father why should I care
If a thousand dead men die?
Motif for an Unnamed Forty-Year-Old DJ
Liz Marney
Who are you to make demands
three girls
two grams
too old to die young
You tell me you can be alone
you can drink alone
you can think alone
but you think you want to take me with you
You think you walk around
with morbid finesse
decisive decadent
not morbidly obsessed
Greying hair glinting against
psychedelic lights
fingers creeping away
from the decks
towards unsuspecting thighs
You tell me you can be alone
you can drink alone
you can think alone
but you think you want to take me with you
Turning up half-cut to the school run
are you feeling proud
saying who’s your daddy now
to the wrong baby girl
are you feeling proud?
You tell me you can be alone
you can be alone
you can be alone
but you think you want to
take me
with you.
Blue Star
Lizzie Walsh
They sink into blue
Sweet remembered hue
Wet salt of our eyes
Cannot say our goodbyes.
Cascading downwards
There are stars in the sand, winking
There are lives in the sand, dazzling
Watery constellations
Beloved ones stolen
Can I say chosen?
Don’t fight it, accept
The lost close-kept
My sun in blue stars
Are not these lives- ours?
Process
Liz Marney
In the old back garden
the apple tree is still in springtime
she forgets that autumn exists
now that she is only a memory –
old blood coursing through new veins.
Cinder-flesh charred, bonfire, phoenix,
ready to be more than grief.
We meet where salted earth
is rolled with rosary.
Unfurl like a babies fist
like a sigh of relief
a yawn, a prayer.
We give and we pour,
old as worshipped idol
caught in a throe of life
see both the sunrise
and the sunset,
nestle our heads
into mundane’s lap.
Time becomes serrated
she grates against our skin
she teaches us to slow
to breathe deep and full
when we feel good air.
Sleep comes like sanctuary
and waking tastes like hope.
The worship doesn’t always
stick to these bones but
absolution always comes.
An Ode to My Beloved Stranger
Eve Messervy
Dear friend, you found me once again.
You feel like an embrace
A heavy coating on my being, you taste
So familiar
I wrap my arms around you dear friend,
You burn and flicker everything in my very essence
You linger, and find me, you know me
Oh you know me so well
The contours of my neck,
Every cell
And my eyes, you always loved my eyes
Where we’d meet every time;
Where I’d plead you leave me be
Lose me.
You had me swimming through glue
Oh dear friend,
If you love me, become a stranger,
A beloved stranger.
Paint for me, fill my pages, lace me into you
Let us bleed.
And that’s when you smirked at me,
Wiped my cheeks,
“They only go hand in hand my dear”
Until we meet again.
