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Paul Sands


we chose hooks

remember
those nights
we placed hooks in our eyes?

waiting in our sleep
to catch the white tailed lies
that swam inside our bed

do you remember
those nights?

we should, instead, have walked
the chrome stacked streets
that rolled like silver eels
amongst stub ends sailing on tarry keels

in that vanishing space between
the night clubs gaudy hush
and a needful capital morning rush

before the coffee,
before the bread,
before the morning headlines

but we chose hooks

do you remember?

none so blind

I did not see you there

onion eyed panda
tight in the corner
with your full proof cohort
sucking on the empty vapour

I did not see you there

cold in crumpled sheets
counting the winning lies
harsh knee clenched pillow
lying in spinning divides

I did not see you there

mired in absinthian
spectred familial grief
reconditioning the same
hackneyed lost motif

I did not see you there
I did not see you
I did not see
because
I stopped looking

Blue Sky Drinking

Coltrane may be riding with me
but these blues are different
waves of linseed breathing
into the pastel edges and rising through
the cocaine lines scratched into
a deeper hue
and under this hullaballoo
I drive to the water past the
sanitised lies of tarmac and brick
until I can sit on the banks and
choke on a pig in a poke
as my roast crumbles and drowns
in the foam round but from then
three whole hours with no human
sound where I watch the fowl
ketch downstream with their
downy cargo pursued sometimes
by the spreading chevron of
an earlier brood that breaks
in two the single mirrored cloud
audience to the bovine
students of Constable’s bucolic
porn as slivered fry, like shards of ice,
roll in the shallows of this blissful
silence. I have no need for words
even for the carrion, mistaken from
far as  sofa or chair, a simple nod
will suffice while the damsels dance
and date and die the violaceous
thistle downed and crowned shouts
“gather round” to the birds and the bees
and I half expect to see a mole and
rat sculling with a hamper
astern and I check the arm of the yard
and discern never to early for a cold one
after all it’s only self preservation
but not before a bus flashes by
screeches and cries as the driver waves
and flagellates her empty
seats for it’s now a buzz
so full it is of wasps
and bees

ding-dong

they lined up
in their smart suits and executive hair
outside the foundation stone
of a nations ruin ready to eulogise,
to heap praise upon a legacy
of division
 
the traffic slowed
and the tempers frayed in a burg
where there is never enough
most had left by 8PM
save one expecting maybe
a ghost?
 
returning at the earliest light
most had moved into town
I popped my head inside a truck and said
"she's still dead you know"
one yet remains
awaiting the stone to roll back
 
my wife, the daughter of a miner,
council bread and margarine raised
nods, obligingly at the checkout
as she scans their custom and cloying praise
"its nice about the flowers isn’t it"
“yes” she replies “they look great on my             fireplace”
 
and then she reads people writing that
“the miners were greedy” and she spits
"tell that to those with emphysema,
white knuckle and crippled joints
go stand by the graves of the hundreds
that died
better still come here and say it to my face
"
 
(Note: I live on the road that Margaret Thatcher was born on, the home of the Roberts Greengrocery. Yesterday and today the town and road have been assailed by media from around the world. What they expected to find I do not know)

Picture
Picture

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Squib  ☊

Rigid truths and squared guaranteesTexture this boy
His morseled fantasies
The graceless torrent of impotent gods
Wary as the wasp on the chameleon's
Trapeze tongue
For even as the microscope remains
Boxed, in cotton, in woollen peace
Rags may still record
Fidelity's soiled tapestry
Once stung, the swollen speech
Of reason's soured and thickened song
Bastards the condensed apprenticeship
Fields a howling, childish drove where
Dreams so quickly cloud to sheep
I could so easily...shhhh
You shall not impeach me for the rhymes
That I decline

good morning, good morning

this house is awakening
It yawns and stretches
aged bones, as last night’s ghosts scurry home with the copper blood running warm through worm pricked floors

I lie, like you, while you lie,
as we, under the nights warm stink and the claw and the purr
of the cat’s half lidded lazy gaze
as the foundations shake with each passing race of 18 wheel freight

the breakfast chorus is missing,
presumed drowned,
so this morning demands a virtuoso performance “how do you want your eggs my dearest,
square or round?” too early for her
to answer a question quite so profound

“still inside a bird please” whispers the cat

hedge fund

Jo on my shoulder he has my ear.

picking out worms, putting in pearls
but he goads

“run!” he caws

and in a harebrained haste I race

faster than the flash flicker fire of neon engagement
I beat my chronic heart across the room

but did not pause and left it pounding
against slatted ivory walls,

those brittle buttresses of my soon to be archaeology

and in the same instant I am far away
yet rooted, indentured, carbon draff

Jo values the worth of his investment
and he gnaws

what crisis?

nowadays they have to pinch the ends
of their cigarettes before they cross the threshold
no longer allowed to herd the crumbling swarms
of ash across the gingham veldt

outside the window, on the pavement, lies a bible
and the radio declares their readiness is high
seems like a good night to let the smokers
in and warm around a last embered light

on the table I browse the “priest“ they called him
in the centrefold, deep in the heart, a flyer,
man’s journey into christ,
I guess we’ll find out soon enough the veracity of the divine

but until the young-un and the white horse riders
have decided who can piss the highest
leave us to the daily diary and its tales of
days of fucking each other’s husbands and wives

I bought a Dylan Thomas book on the way home,
from the junk shop,
when I got it back I saw blood on the back cover
I licked my finger to wipe it off but she said “no! you fool“
sure it carried the plague of some cursed lover

I plagiarise myself

a drink is most definitely in order
the tawny coolness tock tick toxic keen as the
sharpest dissection
and then you can find me not just like everybody else but just like
everybody else, lying, hemi-hydrate, below the bridled tension
of life’s meniscus

business class

I am yellowed by indecent sights
and drowned from hawking snake oil
by the wafered byte

amongst the dialectic devices
and a little below the belt advice

but your face sewn on and sugared sheer smooth,
iced Pierrot white, means it is time to remove

though I should mention my scorn for the circus fool
and my cruelty fuelled twists of hate

five fathomed fingers shelled by the dollar hungry well
spastic, cupped and feathered ignoble in a
fizzling slow rare light

street wet not from rain
no
more indulgent my shame

in a corner where the rats cut a dash in Boss
as happy to pick my pocket as I your bones
in the sweating fist of night
or the blast of this mad dog’s febrile noon

how kind now is the Englishman for whom your knees bleed?

may it never, yet it does

the monsters used to live under the bed
now they walk the streets, most often,
with halos around their heads
cold sunbeams stiffen my hyphenated bones
and even singing does nothing
to evaporate the frosted water in my veins
splash my neck
slap my face
I’m sick of talking
I get no satisfaction
from my lower case hate

Go to page 2 of Paul Sand's poetry

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