Christopher Barnes, UK

 

 

Free Verse   The Assassin   She’s cryptanalytic, head bent Over ruffled-silk animal heat, (Ripcord, hook, eye, combination lock, Knotty bliss) Flip-flops the awning from their bed Into his parachute. In a twinkling death-deal He quick silvers to a splatter. She spirals triumphantly, A golden-dyed head, Purrs an obsolete lyric Remindful of love, Warps and guides A vanishing trick Into curly clouds.     The Be-Loud Stork   A plain word: — night. I crossed the rivers Of washday overfloods In terraced lanes Blank as North Shields sky, with the percussion Of nervous marbles, Lynxy optics sparkling, petrol Glittery on numb pavements In the dips of hunchbacked streets. Roll back to where the radiogram drifts along. It’s ‘Baby Love’ A skim across grit, Motorcity glamour And my sister flings dough Onto brown-lung sticky-back plastic. I could never have guessed That in a trembling of fit-for-nothing hours Penny would slap the midwife, nor that she Would spend the next two years blubbering, Loud…through Captain Scarlet, Bill and Ben And even The Magic Roundabout.     The Bishop Suffragan’s Devotions   Two triangles joined together by a small annular platform. From this a great sculpture sprang thirty feet into Square Berlino. Malformed heads, open mouths spat out water. Silver needles, glinting, hypnotic sunlight, pricked oxygen-filled spray. Lazy jets of Adam’s ale, slopping into the font’s reservoir. City of fountains. Caravella’s design was most original; murmurs gave bewitchment to sleepy days and nervous nights of this dasyphyllous district. Was it those liquid spheres, capricious dribbles that sent him off? A soft breeze through the vestry wooing the bare wooden stomach of Christ? He was certain that he was sinking; ambers, sapphires, lemons, a closing lens, blackening at edges of Bible-stained windows. Puckered, he wandered through a special unbelonging, his desire. As if a candle had been lit, Eden appeared, blond-haired, broad-shouldered, sky-green eyes. At a lift of basilican robes they were one, a single bead of sweat cried down the Bishop’s back. Then his usual horrors came, the fall, swirl of brume, swollen heads, shrivelled-genitals. Aimlessly, a rusty sawfly crawls over an El Greco. Ebbing moon, blood red through glass, throwing ensnared glimmers. A malign annoyance unsettles the Bishop. In shadows, cathedral towers he glides dark streets. A turn, a calamitous eye in stone, ogling. On, and a whirling of splashes following, beyond a broken-up fence into Valentine Yard. Steadily, a fussy look straddling his face, to the dilapidated beef warehouse to cruise a muscular beau.     The Bohemian In Winter…   …defoliates light on the mystique of things slips into (flexitime, before noon) a punctilious wardrobe of finicky lines, hot-quarrelling colours. Mark time with a jaunt, intercity steel, express-express, a townhouse landscape, cheek by jowl semis, crow’s nest bridges, the bloodshot brick of jettisoned factories. And first and last it’s the tearoom that tempts him in. He’s off and on solitary, otherwhiles pally, sampling at the edges of a billow of quick-fire cream in the dreamy mists of coffee. There are the backbones of tomes to wrick, deep-browed searches, airings of splodged watercolours, crumpling oils, skin-deep installations and pacific walks along the riverbank. So this life is never-ending he squanders only Art, makes secret studies of survival, flings abracadabras up to evening stars.     The Busker’s Bin   I’ve sunk the pin-up of poverty in this shop-soiled scratch card. I’ll bloat with the Mexican Wrap, out-of-pockets, sucking fizz from a can not a lick of nutritional gravity. Mundane cardboard gift-wrap— high hopes sour and in the screw-up precast as ‘Litter’ a printed woman’s neck accordioned into her dislodged leg.     The Casual Prophet   The paving-slab diviner crayons… “in self-absorbed minutes a Day-Glo King will be garlanded”. Succeeding this… “an hombre with no back-harking plonks into the bull ring”. And lo, the transsexual who would be Matador of Bilbao Street thuds tan brogues toewards to Conquistador inevitability… …and a skin-graft pizzle.