Contents
by A. O. Griffiths
by Pete Crowther
by Rosie Cartwright
Everything goes on outside my window;
All that is vile and all that is fine
In a pile of noises in the dark,
A creaking sign, a murmur from the park,
A sinister question posed in the rumble
Of a taken road;
A stark unanswered presence
That strode the glass one winter's night
And stayed.
Everything goes on, replayed through the glass,
Window talk as the dark frost sets.
Pass on, perpetual railway,
Walk in conversation with my bones,
A shoulder blade relaxing with the motor drones,
A rib inflated by the swelling klaxon
Of some distant incident.
(What can it be,
This climax of some misspent evening,
Loitering in my chair?
Who Knows?)
Everything goes on out there;
Outside
I catch a teardrop from the sea,
An expression of emotion,
I catch a teardrop from the sea,
The smallest part of the ocean,
Who's teardrop have I stolen today?
Who's expression of emotion?
Who's teardrop am I holding today?
Who's smallest part of the ocean?
Where was this teardrop heading to?
The Atlantic or the Red?
Where was this teardrop coming from?
The Pacific or the Dead?
I'm keeping this teardrop locked up safe.
Away from other emotions.
I'm keeping it hidden in a tightly sealed jar,
Away from my emotions.
There is a jungle out there;
In the box.
Digital growth, latent,
In locks electronic.
As a lost boy in school
I remember a plait-full of corridors
Playing the fool with my compass;
Ogrish masses of wall,
An in-bred alikeness
Teasing my orientation.
Raw was the eyeball
As out of a corner
A wonder appeared.
The by-the-door intrepidation
Would blind with sensation;
Conundrum of “What is behind?”
The jungle unfolds,
Risk and command,
Wills of the disk
Entrancing the fingers;
The challenge that lingers
In the dueling of man and machine.
There is a candle in a corner of a restaurant
That lends a golden mist
To the singer in her haunt.
The smoke, in tendrils whisked
About its rays,
Makes subtle glaze
Upon the dancing candle-flicker
Like a sleeve advancing,
Velvet nuance in the key,
Insistent flame in melody
And glancing
From the fingers of the wick.
Is this some trick?
Some wax-enhanced collision
On a table meant for two?
Precision, spent in irony,
And true to its deception,
Lets me woo you in the candlelight
And fake some succour from perception
In a flight of fancy.
Shall I discover something new?
A fresh origami fold,
A story of a princess and a toad
That has never been told before?
The city has the hue of something different,
The New Year calling
In the frosty traffic drone
Cast from the arteries.
Cut the frost
And there is blood so full of oxygen
That life unspent sings in an irony
Quite unrepeatable.
Swimming in its world of amber
The long-legged fly can still remember
The burning heat
Of the sun in the Eocene
From its golden sea, this fly has seen
The dance of continents, the rise and fall
Of all ten thousand things
Upon our planet.
In the many facets of its eyes
Seas have filled with water, deepened, dried,
Mountain ranges risen, crumbled.
This fly has seen the centaur and the unicorn
And the first Neanderthal.
Nations, empires passed before it,
Wave after wave in quick succession.
This fly was in its amber when
King Cheops built his pyramid
And Roman Caesar conquered Gaul .
Now with this ancient creature in my palm
I am become
The green flash of the setting sun