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Paul Mortimer - 2


Baggage Check In

Do you have any sharp objects
in your luggage such as
scissors, a screwdriver,
a tongue not under control?

Do you have any toxic substances
such as organic peroxides,
corrosives, poison
in your veins and/or mind?

Do you have any ammunition
such as blasting caps,
flares or information
to harm friends who harmed you?

Do you have any items not
in transparent containers
such as liquids, contact lens solution,
a broken heart? 

Do you still want to fly from here?
​

Crows Weep a River

He was a piece of night,
broken off,
left behind.
A crow smudging daylight
and in his eye a star was trapped.
He wept it free on high moors
and it began to run
through
sphagnum moss,
round granite,
gathering up a thousand
crow-dropped stars.
It led them to a hollow,
there they pooled and waited.
Another day,
a cloud burst of crows,
a dam breaks,
a galaxy streams downhill,
sears through the valley.
​

Being Human

In mist-light the great white house
is blue-grey. Sucked into a
murk where borders fade.
Where the certainties of hedges,
fences, a double gate are suddenly
exposed as quicksand. Like
comfort
income
security
ambition.

From across the river I watch
the house slip in an out of view.
I wait for the sun
knowing it will come.

Like phases of the moon,
like the herb robert flower
on a roadside verge,
like the departure of
tree summer leaves,
like the cycle of life
I’m riding just now.
​

Picture
The poet and his mother, 1955

Memory Bank  ☊

The first time I had amnesia
was in Hong Kong.
I was five. I don’t remember.
The second was in Cyprus.
I was ten and found
wandering Limassol’s streets. So

I stand in awe of those who recall
childhood days, opening up a tap
in their hippocampus and pouring out
places, friends’ names, events
even conversations. My memories
are absent. They stand on the other side

of then and now, a canyon between
with no linking bridge. Not even ghosts
teetering on the far side’s edge.
The only triggers are mother’s photo albums,
the past caught in a zoetrope flicker
of black pages and her immaculate white writing.
​

My home town

It is a stranger to me.
I have no recall of

sunlight curling through the streets
where sparrows have a dust-up in hedges.

No sound of cathedral bell slicing
apart cold blue mornings.

No granite-washed, moss-scented air
blowing in from the Glyders.

No days bunking off school with mates
to fish on the Elwy and explore down river.

No joining a murmuring queue waiting
for the coast-bound Crosville bus.

Before my eyes could weld all this
into my memory banks

we had moved on
and moved on
and moved on.

Nomads gathering places,
a litany of other people’s home towns.

Comments?

Picture


​Go to page 1 of Paul Mortimer's poetry

Paul Mortimer Profile

To an Unknown Artist

Light is yours to command.
You will use this energy,
a magician
casting burning into shadows
where it scatters black into fearful places
leaving it to tread lightly across
mercurial paths. Opening furnace doors
you allow molten photons to pour
across canvas
shaping and reshaping into colours
that cling to your eyes. 

With brush and sight
you weave patterns
pulled from nebulae
that have been created
by a sorcery above thinking
until 

paint
and mind
and flames
and vision
flare
and die.

You sit spent in dark, head on chest
your name locked in the brush
that hangs limp in your hand.

Rage fuse

I pulled at the thread
in my hard-wired head.
Just a loose end but
a tug and a pluck sent it
all round the bend.

I’d broken a circuit and out
of my mind came
the rage and the fire.
Anger gushed out,
a withering spout and
then I laid waste to

drivers
computers
phones
and the news.

the rain
and the pain
and those
incompetent fools.

Then it was spent and I had to apply
the heat of the whiskey to solder

the thread back into my head.

Chasing the sunset

Two shotguns let go
and echo through woods.
A thunderclap of crows
explode from the trees,
flecks of soot
swirling on the breeze.
Gathering their wits
they flap slowly over fields,
drifting low as if flying
is not worth the energy.
and gradually this flock morphs

into dragon smoke.

It catches an air current, writhes
down river, chasing the day
to its flare-out point.
This sinuous darkening cloud,
breathing
stretching
reforming
as it smokes downstream.

Heat draws it on
to the setting sun.
As it reaches the estuary
a glow beats in its heart.
Turns into a flicker,
quickens.

Flames swallow smoke.
Dragon fire blazes,
scorches,
then flares apart.
And a flock of fire birds heads out to sea.

Dry Stone Wall Builder

This one particular stone
has its place.
Weighed in his hands,
turned over,
turned round.
His keen eyes scan surfaces for
notches,
ridges,
flat spots.
Seeking for a point
where it can interlock
with the wall that already
armadillos away
down to a gate.

The day is hostile, cold wind
slicing everything needle rain
hunting for anything.
Ragged moorland sheep,
constantly chewing nothing much,
hunker in the lee of the grey wall.
All the time he carefully adds stones

making sure 

compressional forces alone are binding.
He’s found his place.
Repairing an enclosure
that cannot contain an impulse
to extend the past into future.
​
                 ♢
​
Go to page 1 of Paul Mortimer's poetry

***

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