Christopher
Barnes, UK
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Free Verse
Trampoline
Tramp
The bump-headed
curmudgeon
Nods off underfoot
Of Bousfield’s track trampoliners.
Drained,
He bars sudden sprinkling stars,
After clodhoppers
Have somersaulted home,
Revolving blown over days
As a stilt-bridge ganger,
Dirty sky
Like muggy sleep, remembering
Scoury sunlight
On rivet-married steel,
He no longer trips
A full swing
Of elastic straitjacket.
A snoozy night
Is knocked out with a dream-thwack.
The slam of adidas
Shortening black rubber
And an apple from luck’s tree
Brings another pop on the bonce.
Day’s blush has come.
Trap
In Baggage
Coach Café
The waiting line
Is inconsequential.
Mrs. Witherspoon’s engrossed
With scoff edibles,
Forage lips
For full cream
Shuffling a storm.
She plumps it.
Profusion is light.
I’m not a prognostic doc—
But still lay down a ‘No’.
She overlooks me
Clamouring the waitress
For another heart
To attack.
Typical
Saturdays
Mornings.
Fiat accompli—a
hat trick of sherbet UFOs
Delicacy on apricot Formica,
Puffed-up like Biafra bellies.
The Addams Family will be on on time
Then The Jackson 5,
A colour-disk animation of buffoonery.
Afternoons.
Not for long
My consciousness is a full crew of freighter,
The lie-still strain of fin keel,
Neat weight on the ocean floor.
Significantly it’s a tanning heatwave,
We’ll air the jazz band through bent grass
And kazoo the midges into staggers,
Eyeing the tug of ferry landings,
Kerplunking seagulls drowning for carp.
Teresa
From Woolworth’s
racks
this scaffold of tweezers
grates the ear (machinery, ripples).
Eyebrows braid black
to become puff-white pits.
She screeks like Hammond pipes
plump with needling tomcats.
Thanksgiving
By sands of time
this turn-off is not still;
gas guzzlers with blushing side lights,
coupes shimmering streaks
of ear-boom. A milk and water sky.
In the all-embracing splurge of the mansion
a blast of peeved friction. Hughes hangs over
a laming flask on the stairway,
a transgression of shocked glass.
Pernicketiness, small details.
His vigilance is fixed with raving mistrust
of the prevalence of infection on floors.
On raincoat nights marble gleams,
trickling splutter of leaves in sycamores;
The Bear lay flat on the horizon
splashes rapids on the underpass.
It will take a switchboard call to Romaine St.,
Mecca of all his designs.
A well-lit melodrama of the teaser,
a rigorous file on its remedy.
The bellboy is biddable,
confines the tainted surface,
with a T-square fetish,
a magic wishbone for checkerboarding,
a sweeper and wash-leather,
a soap flake for each segment.
Tar is smeared,
there is no down beat for languor.
The road moves its deadbeat grit
day and night between crewcut grounds,
upward to Bel Air.
The fever of the eleventh hour is brushed off,
hardening viewing in a glowing eye
and in the gloom a normal heartbeat.
From the Howard Hughes poems
By Christopher Barnes, UK
The Arrival
Of The Guest House Proprietress’ Sequential Amoretto
1
A car passed wide open gateposts, over gravel, a sound like
steam gushing
from a water drop. Swoop of firs, a parking square, calls of
seven different
birds, answered by its mate. With a clunk Mr. Bellini took
crisp air, light-
headed. Newness of senses tingles, slow movement. He looked at
bright
sun light, greenery, the entrance to the big house.
2
She floated up stairs, pollen, silent soft slippers, past
cracked veins, oil
paintings. Wood furred dust, more animal than her
sable-brushed fox, the
wonky lion, top-hatted tamer, apple-red cheeks. At top level
she slowed, shy
of her ability to float. Rattling a key to room five between
artless fingers she
trod edges, worn rugs, an ordinary mortal.
3
Was it the corner seat that creaked air where its second arm
would be?
Weight of sun ageing tapestried cloth? Or was it that chair, a
cushioned half-
moon back, shifting its springs to take each mood of its
braid? Unsettled
today. The landing smelled as it always smelled, fried
breakfasts, morning
damp, when musky lovers rose to close the bathroom door;
unfamiliar bodies
gently submerging, slick of swirling soap.
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