Worm 12

	~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ (the poetry) WORM ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 12 ___________________ _____________ ___________________ ___________________ _____________ ___________________ They… ---------- ….have tilted the world on its side so that the hill to and from her house is much steeper. …They have moved the zebra crossing a mile or two further along the main street. …They have replaced the bright warning lights with dimmed ones which blur through a perpetual haze …and removed entirely the once audible bleepers. They …have bred a new race of drivers who are not gifted with patience. They keep moving the loos …despite her wayward, insistent desire …to seek them more often. They have tilted the world on its side: she would like to tell them she used to be happier with the way it was. © Cara May ___________________ _____________ ___________________ Tampa ---------- A jai alai fronton is walking Down a dirt path by the curbstone Looking for a Laundromat. The concrete shoes sink into the earth, Leave deep foot tracks That will become hazards, Deep, empty pits. Often the fronton is followed By a dog track Who also wants to find a place To wash its dirty clothes. The dog track has ear plugs in its ears, So it won't hear the barking. The stadium never moves, But sits in the lotus position Under a Bo tree, eats rice from a bowl. © Duane Locke ___________________ _____________ ___________________ Watching the Swallows ------------------------------- I don't know when I became ………………aware watching the swallows kept me sane ……and then …………after they had their evening slot of flitting around the sky there was an intervening lull before the silent dart ……………of pipistrelles ……………on the cusp of night ……and the night itself ……much cooler …………more bearable than the heat of the day now past nothing malign in almost ………………darkness a stillness ………faint glow in the sky as this day distances itself from us and you can imagine even feel your life …………slip away until next day when to watch the swallows is that moment's eternity. © James Bell ___________________ _____________ ___________________ Homage to Panagia Nikous ------------------------------------- As the sun strugges free from an Aegean grasp, the coppered bells of Panagia ring Festival onto a waking Kithnos. At the harbour wall, Christos and Vassily hawk iridescent sardine and shining mullet from a bobbing hold. Papered parcels of fish, tattered drachmas and strong coffee mark time, whilst an egg-yolk sun drip-dries in a flood of sky. Summer shimmers endlessly above the pink and white mosaic quay. Vagabond dogs pant in doorways, slink beneath benches to sleep away the dry used mid-day. Christos snores in the shade of the bulkhead as Vassily slips into town to buy his wife a tiny glass Basilica, a peace offering for a day's lateness, a day spent in celebration of Panagia Nikous. Dusk falls mauve on the streets of Kithnos; men haul communal pots of tomatoed stew onto the cobbled walkways. Dark-eyed women wind bougainvillea through their hair, flirt and laugh in the day's dying light. At a table outside the store, a musician eyes the women and tunes his Bouzouki. In the courtyard, Christos joins the men and begins the dance, a tight circle weaving, undulating, encircling the flowered women, their sun-weathered wrists linked with bright hankerchiefs. They whirl and merge frenetic, a blur of silken hands and flashing, shining olive limbs. Against the backdrop of a fired sky and the aroma of pot roast and charred basil, to the jangle of tambourines, Vassily stands on the harbour wall, drinks Metaxa as he hoses rainbow scales from the hold of The Hora. ©. Bunny Goodjohn ___________________ _____________ ___________________ Haunting Myself ----------------------- It is not this place, this set of soulless rooms are not to blame, nor clumsy layout - no sympathetic flow or symmetry of form reflected here - this was just a shell I filled with leftovers, haphazard, random, juxtaposed to hide, disguise the gaps in who I am. But phantom shapes moved in with me, slept in the dust of corners seldom swept, hung thin with cobwebs, waiting for the busy clock to stop. I've glimpsed them shift - old sorrows stretching, wings like tattered crows, then shuffling back, content to bide their time. You've sensed them too, I've seen you turn and frown, then pull the covers close as though you knew it's only me, haunting myself - that shadow by the door brought with me from my last house and the one before. © Jean Harvey ___________________ _____________ ___________________ ___________________ _____________ ___________________ Melt (Three) ----------------- (Je suis comme le roi d'un pays pluvieux.) I'm like a lairdie in Lochaber, or somewhaur juist as wet: A tweedy rich impotentate, young yet past his sell-by date, Sneerin at the bou an scrape o factors, Bored wi his dugs an paycocks, pigs an tractors. Naethin can divert him, no huntin, fishin, falconry, No even tenants drappin deid aneath his balcony. His favourite gillie's cantrips, sangs an sports Are nae distraction sin he's taen the dorts. His rose-strewn bed's mair like a peat-bog o despond, An jet-set limmers, skeeled at makkin lairdies feel like Bond, Rin oot o sexy ploys an skimpy claes That uised tae raise a smile at least frae Greitin Face. The alchemist that kens hou gowd's procured Cudna howk the iron in him immured. Even a bathe in bluid, that the Romans thocht Cud refull ancient veins wi virr, wudna dae ocht Wi sic a stuffed auld stookie: I dout there's nae remeid When, whaur bluid shud rin, fylt water flows insteid. © James Robertson Publication details: Fae the Flouers o Evil: Baudelaire in Scots by James Robertson (ISBN 1 902944 12 7) Kettillonia. £2.50 including p&p within the UK. Full details of this and other poetry publications, plus how to order, are on Kettillonia's web site: http://www.sol.co.uk/k/kettillonia GLOSSARY melt: spleen lairdie: contemptuous term for a landowner factors: estate managers Lochaber: an area of heavy rainfall in the Scottish Highlands gillie: fishing or deerstalking sportsman's attendant cantrips: antics sin: since taen the dorts: gone in the sulks limmers: loose women skeeled: skilled claes: clothes Greitin Face: one who habitually looks miserable; a cry baby gowd: gold howk: dig out virr: energy ocht: anything stookie: a slow-wit, one who does not respond (from stucco) dout: should think remeid: remedy fylt: dirty, defiled ___________________ _____________ ___________________ ___________________ _____________ ___________________ Dress Sense ------------------ darling it's magnificent what a creation beautiful colours and so stylish I simply love it it's only when I look a little closer that a few small things make me wonder that seam threaded across the bust reminds me just a tiny bit of something I saw several seasons ago I think it perhaps a little too early to try to bring that back don't you agree? less classic than cliché really no? the back now just a tiny bit higher to offset the plunge of the front less filigree for the straps you don't see it? of course dear I understand lord knows through the years I've seen several successful variations yours may work oh the hem too lacy too many frills any elegance is lost in over-pretty patterns I really think it should go for the good of the creation you wouldn't want to spoil all the wonderful work you've put into it would you? well just give it a little more thought dear I'm sure it will be perfect such a clever girl if only she would listen © Frank Faust ___________________ _____________ ___________________ For A C Graham ----------------------- (in memoriam) The scented hollow in my hands once held the flower of a lotus. Grief in the sweep of green willow. The empty sickness; tasting iron in my saliva. Nine years have passed. Our tongues are severed. The moss of tree bark masks your direction. You cannot return with migrant geese. Your voice is in the oxide of a tangled ribbon blown as leaves through city veins. I touch your mind through your translations. Wei T'ai does not console me. How can I drink wine with Chuang-Tzu? © Christina Fletcher ___________________ _____________ ___________________ The Brass Teacher -------------------------- Maybe even then we sensed something broken: not so much in his stoop, or the rounded shoulders, or his hitching up his trousers as if he'd just lost weight; not the fag end see-sawing on thin lips; not the silver flask being tucked back in the pocket. Not even that his wife left each night with some-one else, or that once he put dinner in the bin and the package in the oven. Unbroken, he'd never have belonged to Wednesday nights, to the run down school with the ceiling that collapsed in the middle of the Rite of Spring, that caught fire and smelt for weeks like too much toffee. He could teach you how to hit the highest E without a split, how to trickle down scales without a fluff, how to double-tongue, triple-tongue, flutter tongue with flawless ease. But, what we got was the Song of Solvej in the side room with the hamster scrabbling in the background and the same routine boy or girl: "Picture your girlfriend you've bought her an ice-cream, the sun's on her hair, you look at her ..." Maybe even then we sensed it wasn't the girl or the ice-cream or the light, or even the tone of his voice. Simply that in his presence a child could breathe in fag smoke and whisky, sawdust and hamster, dirt and rot, falling plaster, and burnt varnish, place a small steel cup to pursed lips and breathe out something true. © Helen Clare ___________________ _____________ ___________________ Bradford ------------ Bradford a city of segregation, isolation and condemnations a fermentation of multi races, multi cultures and multi bloody negations a breeding pot of retardation, castrations and malformations Bradford a city of the self appointed, self elected and self inflated a parade of disapproving stares, twisted mouths and the wretched demented a fine collection of the outdated, constipated and dilapidated Bradford a city with blinkers on, zero on the outlook maxi on the propaganda a veil of intolerance, oppression, subjugation hang on it like a heavy chaadar* a good daughter, a good son underneath it all going madder. Bradford I have listened to you through the stethoscope and checked the horoscopes I have gazed under the microscopes and through the largest telescopes there is no hope in this city of tightropes © Anjum Malik * Chaadar ...a heavy shawl ( urdu) ___________________ _____________ ___________________ YOU: A Trilogy -------------------- I. it's all about you we're at our usual café you, at your table, sipping a latte, nicely foamed reading Heidigger-or is it Nietzsche? I'm at my table, imagining you gesture to a chair, smirk amused perhaps, by my obvious reluctance to be pursued even while I pursue thrilled by my daring (oh yes, and by several espressos) I consider joining you, then realize we can't rush the process or anticipate each other's moves instead, I try to write Haiku, perhaps-or is it a ballade? haunted by the hand resting along your thigh it's more than a coincidence this poem beginning before we do you're a muse of sorts-how convenient and oh yes, how heroically flawed and I? why, a Minotaurean sacrifice somewhat virginal an audience captured for your amusement an intellectual tidbit, nothing more I cannot help but wonder, so indulge me what will happen if I leave to get a refill? what will happen if I don't? II. It's still about you Here we are again. it's our usual café you're toying with a lemon peel reading Proust-or is it Sartre? troubled by the words upon the page I wait for you lift a Mahjong tile uncover a matching symbol then another wonder if this is a sign You yawn, stretch, reveal what's usually hidden follow my gaze with a knowing smile how long will it take me to realize gods and demons can take any form and that's not a good sign. III. This is the last of you There's this new café the other's a graveyard ash and scattered bones with that funereal scent of stale espresso Your toothbrush? A fitting Momento mori used to scrub grout from bathroom tiles while I listen to the dirge of "She's got issues" knowing they were yours The exorcism was less wake than Bahktinian spectacle science fiction and horror reruns- part camp, part genetic mutants (of passing human interest.) it was a necrophiliac's nightmare of blood-drained corpses not even fit for anorexic zombies where the blond dies the black-haired beauty lives on her powers immutably intact © Terrie Relf ___________________ _____________ ___________________ haiku -------- cloud peaks -- inch by inch the worm stretches its shadow © an'ya ___________________ _____________ ___________________ Compiling Editor: John Carley Associate Editors: Frank Faust, Margaret Griffiths Editorial Support: Simon Barraclough ___________________ _____________ ___________________ We gratefully acknowledge the support of: North West Arts Board & Mid Pennine Arts Celebrating Year of the Artist, 2000 ~ 2001 ___________________ _____________ ___________________