FTW: Poets Against Atos is a winner!

Great news from the editors at “FTW: Poets Against Atos” – an online anthology I am proud to support: they publish poetry which protests against the current unjust “welfare reforms” impacting on some of the most vulnerable people in the UK.

“It was announced last night at the Stoke Newington Literary Festival that the Fit to Work: Poets Against Atos campaign has won the inaugural Morning Star Award for Protest in Poetry 2013,” says Mark Burnhope, one of the anthology’s editors, all of whom have put staggering amounts of work into the project.

The full article can be found here!

http://ftwpoetsagainstatos.wordpress.com/2013/06/09/for-the-win-poets-against-atos/

Well done all at FTW – much respect and very proud to have made my own small contribution.

Holly

Without Permission

———————————————————————————————————

Without Permission

Yes, he was indeed an artist.
So, it was inevitable he’d laugh.
Her half-unravelled handwriting,
it scrawled away from her
ink-blotched fingers, wonky
and lopsided. Her love letters,

as illegible as doctors’ notes.
She was rubbish with make-up.
Mirror-painted pretty smeared
to distortion in fifteen minutes.
Her impermanent game-face.
Couldn’t colour inside the lines.

Stains would bleed and bruise.
She seldom drew his eye.
She’d never be a painter.
Never be his muse of choice.
Another perched that pedestal.
Now she knew for certain,

she’d rather stand.
Squeezy tomato sauce bottle,
back the kitchen cupboard.
He’d stayed out all night again,
daubing all over town. Lewd
images, lurid and skewed.

She squirted fast: decisive
blasts to his white studio walls.
Red and messy. Unrepentant.
First independent composition.
Exhibited without permission.
“GOODBYE. I’VE GONE.”

Written for Anna’s “Graffiti” prompt at dVerse. I’ve taken the idea of creating an image “without permission”… You can read the prompt and others’ take on it here….

http://dversepoets.com/2013/02/21/meeting-the-bar-graffiti-poetry/

Purple Tongue

Purple Tongue

Her breath is chemical-sweet.
Saccharine and batteries.
Powder-sniff theatrical,

she slicks on the pan-stick,
rolls eyes like cheats’ dice.
Her purpled tongue drags

chill-burns on vodka ice.
Hands whip despicable slices,
rip new holes for weeping.

Fingertips smear wet hearts
on fogged glass. She singles
out limpets and lingerers.

Pinocchio

Pinocchio

The lies slip soft from your tongue,
like dribble, like when you doze
with your mouth dropping open.
They pool on a sofa cushion.
Harmless, a little silly and sweet.
“Oh bless, Let’s let him nap.”

It should be different. The lies,
sliming and sliding from your mouth:
they should hurt, cause you pain.
A Pinocchio nose for the modern man.

Your tongue should swell, bulbous
and throbbing, with the poison it slops.
Your saliva curdle acidic, metallic,
so your teeth rot brown and spongy
and your gums recoil in disgust.

Your lips should blister and crack,
a bloody frame, shrinking back,
from the corrosive foulness within.
“It’s what’s inside that counts.”

Your stomach should roil, up-gorging
uncontainable gases, oily bile to choke
your spasming throat and, even when
you sweat and gulp to swallow it down,
like a good boy, like Mummy taught you.
that churning mouthful of vomit
should leave your breath
sour and rancid.

That way we would know.

 

I wrote the original draft of this three or four years ago… Given it a bit of nip and tuck!

 

The Sticky “L”

The Sticky “L”

He’s wearing fingerless gloves
while he types, the sort beloved
of market traders. His tea cools
before he can sip it, so he gulps

in fast glugs to warm his sluggish
blood. A striped beanie, left, lost,
by some long-forgotten someone,
snugs pink-tipped ears. Nothing

bad can sly beneath its woollen
fortress. Blue-tinged fingers jitter,
still chilled, stuttering out spatters
of frost-hope words, his keyboard

with the sticky “L”. “I ove you, I do
and I ust for you, that too” doesn’t
quite sound right. No icicle melt.
But his “ove” pelts his chest like

snide white snowballs midddled
with rocks. Like the bigger kids
would hurl at him. Just a skinny
boy, whose snot-nose ran faster

than he ever could. But he “oves”.
It’s undeniable, blackest ice biding
time ‘til a spring that doesn’t come.
But it might. It should. Snowdrops,

this frost-hope tingle in his hands.
Cold tea slopped in the pot plant.
He clicks send to digitally declare
his “ove”, then puts the kettle on.

The Agent

The Agent

She’s an Avon agent, sells just to her friends, perched
on the edge of their draylon settees. Afternoon soaps,
a coffee sipped and maybe a rich tea. Custard creams

preferred, but not on Weight Watchers days. “It’s a curse,
being a woman!” A plucked laugh. We’re all girls together.
Her wicker basket is a lucky dip of flowery free samples:

she delves at her own discretion. “Sorry to hear about
your husband, Yvonne – men don’t understand, do they?
Maybe you’d like to try a sachet of our new night lotion?

It’s ‘anti-ageing’ you see! No, love – a treat! It’s on me!”
Manicured hand shoulder patting. Coral-frosted sympathy
blotches on front teeth. Perfume testers squirt front rooms,

tear-jerker sharp. Dogs, from terriers to arthritic old labs,
yelp and bolt for safety. At Mary’s a cat coughs and vomits:
it’s the same shade of orange as her new swirl-pattern rug.

Scents “designed with seduction in mind, to intoxicate
our men. No, Susan, I don’t mean like Guinness.” Bottles
named things like “Impromptu”, “Occur!” and “Odyssey”.

You can buy matching bath bubbles, soap, creams, even talc.
Four-for-the-price-of-three promotions at the back of the book.
“Spoil yourself! He’ll appreciate you making the effort, at last!”

 

Undefeated

Undefeated

He likes quality porn and
his Mum’s roast dinner.
Action films and Top Gear.

He likes pork scratchings
and Thursday quiz nights.
The pool league
and the darts team.
(Undefeated.)

He’s a proud regular,
got his own barstool.
(No one would dare.)
Knows everyone:
who they are, who they do.
(Barmaids are all called “love”.)
Lager appears, with winks,
continuous. He leers a chaser
of cleavage with every pint.

Used to be a local legend:
a hero in the Sunday league.
Doesn’t play these days.
It’s a knee thing.
Still, people don’t forget.

He doesn’t smile in photos:
blank-face Ross Kemp stare.
Moody eyebrow frown.
Birds love it.

He conceals his receding:
keeping clipper-cut close.
Though he knows it’s a sign
of virility. He proves it
most weekends,
out the back, by the bins.
Brewer’s droop? Not him.

Then Sunday night, it’s family night.
Arm-locking the wife at the bar.
(“Her indoors”, “the ball and chain.”)
Her grin creaks veneers of happiness.
He buys her a vodka, spoiling
his (Sunday only) “Princess”.
The kids at home with their Nan.
He’s The Man.
(Undefeated.)

Fireworks (Safe Distance)

Fireworks (Safe Distance)

Our muffled elbows nudge. Awkward
in the turnstile crush. Murmured “sorry”s
for nothing much really. Too conscious,
touch-sensitive, a little flammable.
Quicken my blood and blush.

Crowds thicken, squish us closer,
upper arms brushing, pressing.
My mittened paw skims yours.
Crackle-air and white out-breaths.
Smoke in our smiles, still shy,

still not quite daring. You’re looking
at me. I’m looking away. But then
I’m looking

at the bonfire. It’s massive.
Impressive. Burning high and alive:
yellow, red, orange, sparks biting
into the November sky. It’s beautiful.
(I always keep a safe distance.)

Kids have sparklers.
I want a sparkler.
Am I too old?
(I was scared to hold them
when I was a little girl. Scared
the fizzing, spit-tickle would bite
my baby fingers.)

People packed in, babbling all around us.
You stand quiet behind me, much taller,
a broad solidity in your long black coat.
I can feel the flames heat my cheeks.
(Even from safe distance.)

I can feel your warmth through our coats:
we’re not touching. Still not quite daring.
I could lean back, pull your arms around me,
like couples are doing, watching the sky.
(I always keep a safe distance.)

You fumble my hand, slip off the mitten,
tangle our fingers (naked, clumsy) palm to palm.
Stuff us into my pocket, with your
black coated arm curled soft
round my duffled body.
Touching now.
We watch the sky, ready now,
for the coming fireworks.

Pumpkin Smile

Ok, well seeing as it’s Halloween, here’s a re-post of a sinister little number written last year…

Pumpkin Smile

I am ripe and firm and round. The best
they found: selected, bought, then brought
home to the warm. Left the others, rejects,
neglected, cut-price on the grocer’s rack.
Not me, this time

I am admired with oohs and aahs, stroked
and gazed on, tender touch grazing my
smooth orange skin, the children’s eyes
skimming me: the glow of acceptance
tickles deep to my seeds. Me, this time.

Then they get a knife.

I am cut across my crown, top lifted off,
insides scooped out. My flesh, my seeds,
my juice bleeds over tugging children’s
hands – sticky with giggles, fingers
wriggling in my ooze.

They hack me a face. I never had
a face like this. Eyes triangle spikes,
a decisive point of nose slashed out,
jagged smile of prescribed happiness.
Their choice

is a jolly ghoul. They put a candle
in my hollowed out middle, my sides
swept clean still weeping. They replace
my crown, my stalk stuck up, a silly stump
from my mother plant.

They dance, squeal as I burn: fire inside
crackling tears of orangey goo congealing
my new face. Me, this time.

Butterscape

Butterscape

The knife in the butter is all wrong.
A raised middle finger poked
rude from his kitchen table.
He can’t stop looking at it: an insult
in his weekend breathing.
Dry crumbs to cough on.

She’s gouged out slabby wedges. Ruining
the gradient of slope he’d landscaped,
the perfect angles he’d created, fastidious,
since Monday morning’s breakfast,
when he’d peeled the greased paper
from the creamy surface of the new tub.
It had been pristine.

She doesn’t even notice
how he’s coaxed out this precision
with the smooth-blunted blade.
His careful curls and skimming stokes.
Planing with deft and delicate touches.

She doesn’t appreciate that. She has
no dreams of sweeping alien valleys
and no street-lit insomniac hills to roll.

She destroys his efforts without thinking,
as is her way. She mashes the wreckage
into burned bread and snaps crescents
in his composure with her loud teeth.

The room is acrid and the smoke alarm
battery must need replacing.