Grant Tarbard

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My Feet Point Downward

1.
Exterior: oblivion buttressed,
a pierced honeycomb of cogs.
A delicatessen of identities  
with less substance than
a bird in the bell jar, suffocating,
the tracery of the crumbling skeleton
beckoning towards the dark earth
that springs from the thunder.
2.
Foliage carving of my skull
a melody of rose widow eyes
beneath the receiver tree
with a circling root of gravestones,
death is the only way to discover
what is beyond the fence
perched on the brow
of the hill of insomnia.
Chance has made this
my second hand burial place,
my mouth agape,
my feet point downward.
3.
The walls of my grave are my canvas
I paint with my opium coloured distal phalanx
in the gallery of white harts.
I water the daisies with my balance
on the crushed artery of the harvest
and the making of the dark.
I am witness to the birth of impregnated night,
armed to the teeth with stars.
A new fledged blackbird,
the moon hides behind smoke
and evening is at a right angle to midday.
Underneath, the black lake was lit by candles.
​

Lost Poem Department
                 ~ for Richard Copeland

​The poet is a
forgetful sort, marveling
at seaweed in the
fog. He has many
slipped fragments and loose regrets
made of lilac lines.
Violins engulf
his eardrums, the newspapers
drown his watered eyes,
modern contraptions
conspire to befuddled him.
He loses his spun
poetry in the
dim chambers of the madhouse,
bruise coloured, he gives
in. He should store his
unfinished poem in an
empty room with a
safe. He could swallow
it like a goose, the feathers
would be stitched into
a white pillow with
invisible ink pages
for a pillowcase.
No no he should keep
them in the butt end of a
Woodbine cigarette,
he could prize it with
a milk elephant's tusk that
he appended in
the wilds of long tongues.
To find his strange poem at
the bottom of a
lake of drawers filled
with silverfish paper clips
and drifts on the sea
of staples would be
inelegant. No, he’ll stow
that leaf in his bones.
​

Self Portrait, Under Water

The water I drown in is a mirror,
an awry portrait of a swollen face
collapsing in on itself, sewing a
picture book of anaemic reflections
liquefying into the linseed oil
of a sickly sunset of eyes yielding
to amber ovum. Debris floundering
over the jamb of my waist, gaunt tufts blow
away like a gypsy dandelion,
there’s a millimetre of oxygen
between death mask poses. As I surface
I pretend the morning is new, painted
by Holbein, jewel-like and imposing,
not rotten with my gangrenous fragrance.
​

​Grant Tarbard's profile

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In My Lover's Womb

1.
In my lover's womb
I play her ribs like
A xylophone. We
Make music until
The roses wither.
2.
In my lover's womb
I knew that I would
Have to clamber down
Out of her jelly,
Swaying crook morning.
3.
In my lover's womb
She flowers inside
A crimson kiln, a
Roses firestone
Seeking the Sun's flames.
4.
In my lover's womb,
It is a place for
Making noises, hear
The breeze outside her
Lining of sunset.
5.
In my lover's womb
Desire is a red
Dye of joy untold,
Cocooned in her shy
Blue November eyes.
​

Old Father in the ​Café

The old father speaks in a riddle of
crumpled time, just spare hankies 
in his coat, out of tune with the season. 
The old father speaks rapidly, yak-yak, 
in a hitherto unknown flamingo language, 
all gestures and ticks with a voice that smokes itself.
The old father's head is broad and flat, 
like a piston stamping out a steel saucepan 
with his boxed cranium of lobster shells.
Old father moves rigid, dust being remodelled 
in the light of the air, like old books at the back 
of a library found after a long absence.
Old father removes himself from the café chair,
bones play the creaking tune of arthritis, a hand cranked 
music box weaving through the peaceable streets.
​

Leaving the House on Grub Street

The possibility of a troop of
grotesques breathing on me on the old goat
bus into town is unsettling. Do they
appraise me through my paper-thin disguise?
I’m sure that my headphones are screwed in as
the rasping doors open, eyes fixed to the
chewing gum spit on the pavement as the
unrested traffic of hawkers, swindlers,
makeshift leafleters peddling their paths to
God billow around my sickly white feet,
guarded by the sole hounds of Derby, cold
as stone. I hear strolling minstrels rhyme their
temporary poems, disposable 
as beauty, needless as a description
of sunset, splendour of ended day. I
barter for a poem of dusk and this
exits with me as the day coughs its last.

(in italics, "Song at Sunset, by Walt Whitman)
​

Patchwork Eden
          (inspired by Galileo's 1616 drawings of the moon)

Dimples beholden to light,
a reflection of orange peel.

I can almost make out the face
the peak of the nose,

the shadow of the right eye
a crest of lip, a sunburnt forehead.

A gravitational monograph 
within the vividness of the midnight oil,

six spherical bites, an apple that's about to fall
on the sunless grassland of a patchwork Eden.

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