Christopher
Barnes, UK
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Free Verse
Spilt
Popcorn
Spools
frizzle on footlights
Groping to suck The Terror back
As it wasp-rides the pit.
Near a paint-melt zigzag
The ticket booth’s a bonfire.
Our usherette’s been cold custard
To blood-shiver movies
All with “Scream!”
On ink-panicked billboards.
Until now…
Slackening
The Frames
Alter ego
Dorothy Gales
Unruffles heavy lids
In cradling grass plaits, poppies.
She wasn’t the girl tumbling diapers
In the gilded age of mania.
None the less it’s sedatives a la carte.
We all nibbled then, doctor’s apple pie,
Thingumadads chloroforming bursting bubbles
In the American dream.
Revolving
Lights
Under
fizzles
And swoosh-swoosh-shoops
Silly Billy the chip shop rat
Knits brow storms
- flops
Into swing No. 11
Of the Trip-To-The-Moon Ferris wheel
Flashing his pecker
At stomach-churned drunks.
Nausea: mustard-yellow vomit,
Paint-pot lightning,
Perching bristles
Up sunburnt backs.
A rotated starlet with thumbs erect
He claims whirls of applause.
Rudolph
Valentino
Day-larks,
popcorn, we cheer-chirrup Him.
In flicker-bed dreams we mouth His name.
Reshaping A
Redress For Molested Shirts
A
giddy-paced spasm
In the Hotpoint window.
Convalescence is a pick-me-up iron.
Running
Wild
“Louisa Jenney
pulled into port in her palatial new 75 foot yacht which she had
named ‘Three’s A Crowd’. Some people said that this could be
taken either as a tribute to the title of the hit show or a
comment on Libby’s romantic situation.”
~Milt Machlin (Libby
Holman’s biographer)
Rumbustuous with
moonglow capers,
I’m frazzling,
Lip to nipple water treading
In the pool with Louisa.
We are boozed-up detonators,
Mermaids, hot springs the Atlantic couldn’t quench.
So in Barker’s Point’s saltwater sun, splash,
I’ve slipped into theatrical shorts,
Reeling hand in hand
With you over the briny morass, reviewing
The broken reed, the gauntness that you are,
Leather-bound in your runway suit.
An hour or two in the shingle
Is our time together, Mr. & Mrs. Smith Reynolds,
Though you’ll give rounds, bang a tantrum,
Clear off in a tail of shrapnel
When I temper the pout of my other lover
In the dark ripples of night.
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