Monday 10 December 2012

Mr Writer



Mr Writer, I have watched you with your blank inch of cigarette
blowing blue air at the moon, one fluttering streetlamp
lighting you in your crowd of smoking-girls, their slim legs
bending like lilies. You shrug in your coat, suck in nicotine,
tender veins quiet with chemicals.
Streetlamps hum between laughter.
The girls light their umpteenth cigarette, dying for a rhyme
and a kiss, thinking you a wordsmith, the unbitten man, uninterested.
I drain my glass and cradle it like a small skull.
Drunk enough, I could ask it a question
about you or the meaning of Life.
How the alcohol reds cling on and on 
like the night wrapped around a blue rooftop,
the girls open-mouthed with laughter, or you being lyrical,
breathing smoke to a huddle of stars.

Saturday 27 October 2012

Craig Y Nos



You were eight when you got the infection.
All day long, that terrible racket hacked
through the bleached sanatorium
where day after day
mucus slapped the roof of your mouth,
sliding salt-green down the ridge
where your furred tongue was huge
and parched for weeks, barely able
to hiss the word dwr.
Your native language sucked away
through a hypodermic needle.

The last time you saw Aileen Morgan,
she was all sore angles beside her bed.
Stripped from the sheets with the fever,
shuddering in her nightdress,
you remarked softly on her pretty red scarf
twisting like blood through the bars.
It was years before you got over the sight
of her drug-shattered face on the pillow,
torso shapeless and white.
The nurses let loose her cold fingers
and tucked the scarf into a box.

You were wheeled on your beds to the balcony.
In hushed voices, they said
the cool Welsh winds worked miracles
if they did not kill you off. One morning Hywel
raised a sick arm of chicken-flesh, tinder-bone:
please Nurse, I’m cold in a  little voice.
She slapped his face with a gloveless hand.
Every morning before sunrise, she proofed herself
against tuberculosis in folds of starch and cotton,
scrubbed her hands by candlelight.
Scissors in their conical sheath grinned
from her breast-pocket.
Every day some child folded himself into a nautilus,
hacking his rags of lung softly into a pillow.
Turning your face to see children
rise up the wall through the ether,
your sternum became a birdcage; your glockenspiel
ribs drummed by mute little fingers.

It troubled you all those years later,
silver-haired in your bedroom. The shock
of a blotchy photograph slid out of a drawer.
The involuntary memory of accordion-lungs,
balcony talk. Aileen’s skeleton wrapped in a scarf.
Like a cough, the children of Craig-Y-Nos,
a thought you cannot shake.

Friday 4 May 2012

Short story website...

Gonna be working on this over summer. There's a couple on here to start:

http://www.clockssetbackwards.blogspot.co.uk/