CHRISTIAN ANTHONY

Clean White Circles

Many white circles boldly lie
in wet grass that moistens
to exquisite dancing rot
the clean God mouth widens
unevenly to yellow slopping
tongues a ripe orgy matures to
blackness as limbs lock
blending and bleeding
a weight drinks the sea as
it sinks unthinking
belching soggy remembrance
the blades' thin life scream
slumps to a broad oak
swallowing moan melting
nature's old reds to a dark thick
drink intimate.

The white circles exist:
A smooth breath closed solid.

A limbless swimmer plunges into
A terrible ancient velvet weight,
Totally grateful:

The swarming blank of peopled
Darkness, of sticky drink, in heat,
Where brick thick music punches
Pleasure, so blood and breath thicken
Like so much fruit unpeeling,
A bursting river abusing
Fields of slow grown crops.

In opportunity, fingers on skin
Squeeze out thanks
And eyes become words;
The footholds in a mountain face.
Learn the language overnight,
Although it�s never enough,
And climb higher than childhood.

This is the playground;
Its loud vowel of discovery
Echoing, pouring long
But soon, after age,
Curling back, black on its edges.
A crisp white book. Pages
Cracking and fluttering
The erotic butterfly.

They move entombed: �Sexy�
And the word is a womb.
They hope to be born in a stranger.
Threads mingle and thicken
Into dubious rope. Grab hold for
The hot death jump
To something palatable.
Like lobsters before the great boil.

A precipice. Then a vague warmth.
But I lie, mountainous and confused,
Unused, like the white side of a
Half-eaten apple.

Death Bed

Coughs and careful shoes
Circle my tight unity
Of living. Stark rhythm
Persists on the fringes
Of a ballet. So white
Melts away from colour;
The jealous observer of a
Simple handshake.

A mind after high tide;
Only the smell of history.
Memory as mirage.
A thick red wine clings
To the glass edges.
Interpretation sweats in
The heat; so kind smiles
Are jazzed into malice.

Not a snap dictionary
Death. This is twisting
Possibilities; flirting
In doorways. Tall smoke
Gradually exists from
Slow burning wood-
But the air will blow
Itself clean. Spring clean.

That given gold ring
Will stop turning and
The familiar line break,
Clear, like its pencil lead.
So no hand on the shoulder.
Love becomes a word.
Quickly. Tiny dark. Put
Your lips on my mouth.

(untitled)

The eye glut of darkness.
Is a violence of space.
A noticeable absence.

Like an oak tree dragged up,
Not one remaining root
In the air swilling hole.

I doubt this is meant for me.
Unchaperoned in the light famine
Progression is untranslated.

A quick guilty wind
Touches the skirts of leaves
To a broken moan.

A dead culture rises.
Fear ripens to this
Illogical gasp at shadows.

I want to appear as an old friend.
A homecoming.
But the dark dances much too subtly.

So I crouch rigid
For the thump and drag of a day.

Three Coloured Birds in Autumn

Desperate orange
Peels and cracks the sky
Like an old belief.
Summer’s fatty excess
Boiled back to these
Raging angles.
Each leaf a grudging smile.
Emotions resealed in a
Backwards growth;
The roots hum with love.
The trees are alters,
The prayer is spring.

But these birds fluster and flirt
Before Autumn’s religion.
Screaming down the aisle
Like a terrible lie.
Child slung sky marbles,
Rolling boldly.
Somewhere, in lusting heat
A secret jungle
Cracked its sides,
This is the proof.
Clean green knives
Vandalise the season’s portrait.

This is pregnancy
Writ large.
Unfocused desire,
Which wandered the world,
Now spills its story
On these stubborn branches.
Absurd as a premature
Birth.
The tart birds strut
Past black laced Victoriana
Untrained ears
Ambivalent to the ageing opera.

Yet they want no audience.
This is no flirtation
But a handshake
Of calm history.
For it is a shared heritage.
Soon, a pulse,
And a use of many mirrors.

LUCY AVRYL

The Patient and the Wind

Lying here,
In a state of downtrodden splendour,
I hear the song of the world
Swell on in waves oblivious,
Outside the portcullis of my flesh...

A day�s influence lost to frail humanity.

�Not so,� breathes the Wind
Who has travelled far to find my face,
�A time of rest before change
When the way of the world lies uncertainly in your hands.�

Bitterly I laughed, but not at him.

�The Wall built in ignorance
And mortared with countless centuries of anger,
Will fall under the weight of realisation
And your people will be lost upon the track of their own discovery.�

�I do not believe in prophecy,� I replied with careful patience.
Filaments of breeze broke to fill the room.

�I do not prophesise,� he told me.
�What care I for those whose thoughts rest in fleeting tomorrows?
Peel back the Past and you will find the same,
Written in the language of civilisation:

�The walk of man is war,
His hearth the shelter of righteous passion,
Utopian vision crowns his blind crusades
Into the foreign realms of his brothers,
Dealing death to a foreign god.�

�Why then should mankind be perpetuated?�
This question I had asked myself a dozen times in melancholy.

�Ah,� said he, with a crooked smile,
�Your race is yet in infancy.
Should life be snuffed from a naughty child?�

Being part of this unruly race, I had no answer.

Gathering his twilight sails
Whose dreams would chase the morning mist
Into wisps of tattered day,
The Wind sighed and turned to go.

�If through life, by chance or skill,
You find the answer to all questions,
And a way in which to teach
The knowledge that should need no teaching,
Seek me out, for then we�ll talk
And wander the paths of enlightened society.�

He left me with these final words,
A windswept echo in the air,
And though my fever howled its course,
And though my blood flowed on, lethargic,
My heart had soared in strange catharsis,
Simple beyond man.

Autumn

What strangeness shuts its tired eyes
and bids me take a nettled hand?
�Tis not a grasp I�d love to share,
but a palm wreathed in mists and crimson;
mysterious in the strangled light
that haunts these sunless days.

I followed, for I had no choice,
swept before a fool�s parade
of colours, lovely in their grief.
My shoulders bright with blood-drenched gold,
neck strung with an albatross sky,
I followed into Fall.

Still it would not let me rest �
my heart, you see, was Summer-spelled �
but harried me with eastern breath
and double-bladed trickery,
until the path behind me fell
to naught but shreds of faint recall
and lost me in my dreams.

They shattered as a leaden bell
of chill familiarity,
chimed its way into my eyes
and froze my tears of green.
�Alas!� I cried, �this patchwork clown
has led me straight to Winter�s realm!�
for sure beyond those silver gates,
the icy steeds of northern myth
snorted their defiance.

�Look deeper than the deepest snows,
oh ye of little faith!� he crowed,
then vanished as I turned to look.
A small sigh wandered from my lips
like legend from nostalgic past,
I watched it weave from Winter�s web
a casement thin and strong as light
distilled from melted stars.

Although around it, Winter prowled
and shook the brittle-seeming pane
with roars of dismal dominance,
the scene beyond shook not at all,
but flowered in its mastery.
For there between the dusk and dawn,
the pipes of Summer sang the Spring
to life, whilst the only hope of man
in an Autumn swirl of colours danced.

Summer

Begin upon an every day
Where dappled sun in gardens glows,
A breeze that speaks in many tongues,
And memory, like a withered rose
That once was silver
In dewy childhood days.

Ah Summer!
What subtle power
Wafts a scent of early joy
Across the intervening years
To strike a match of yearning in my heart?
A flame that answers but in part
To such nostalgia,
Leaving like the August heat
An ember of remembered blue
When Time was young and idle.

If I could chase your twilight skies
Into mist and morning light,
Wander from the path unpaved
Through unsuspecting history,
I might just find the sense I lost,
A colour bleached by fear and change
Amidst the world�s intrusion.

And would I learn the name of Summer?

In every iris sky there stirs a letter,
Telling of the bells at noon,
The schools in children�s rhymes.
The melody of bird and breeze
Soars to leafy music,
And Autumn is a Summer dream,
Beyond the palest midnight.

Elusive season!
The wisest of our seeking hands
Cannot create existence such as yours!
Nor grow the tempting apple to spite our kind.
For all our misdeeds you remain
A cycle of continued hope,
The promise of a brighter dawn
When we must walk in Winter.

Spring

When Time is weary of the day
In which we find no breath of Spring,
The patient stars disown the moon,
(For patience is a human thing
And cannot be expressed in terms of light from distant suns),
He, Time, will call an end
To winter�s games of chance and skill
And dully toss his wooden king
Across the face of both our worlds
To She who smiles in fated triumph.

Then up She springs on wings of prayer,
To gather blossom to her breast,
And laughing does she run her hands
Through wintered earth too long in rest,
(And where they pass, fair bluebells chime.)
She who stirs the sullen sun
To blaze in greater shades of heat,
To smile as yet on Icarus
And let his people soar.

The moon has shed her frosty silence,
Notes a watcher in the night,
And pride does not become the stars �
They grudgingly concede their light may hone a stranger�s path.
For when She does not bring the rain,
Her eyes are in the evening wind,
Patterning the frayed extents
Of Winter�s mournful touch.

And Time, old chronicler that he is,
Will sit and mutter through her dance,
Casting frowns at daffodils,
Longing for those games of chance
(Of which he mostly won.)
And bending law, he�ll speed the days,
Shortening her time of life,
And think himself so very smart
Until one morn a different sky
Proclaims the dawn of Summer�s heart,
(A better player yet.)

July 7th 2005

The way of the world is beyond knowing,
Yet more understood in the beat of a heart
Than in the silence that follows the snap of a trigger,
Discharged into night,

Into mind;
Knowingly, with ability to comprehend
The sorrow of life lived and lost
And the inequality of revenge.

For what we make of love and hate,
We are misguided
Souls bent on our own destruction:
All the beauty in our name
Is weighed against our darkest heart
Where madness like the tongues of men
Whispers words of blood and fear
And drains us into never.

Within what dream of perfect realm
Does mankind make his laws and break them?
An archipelago of violent difference,
Voices raised in war and song
To silent monarchs of the sky,
Are they voiceless?

This question stretching time for answers,
Smothered in unreasoning,
Is perhaps the greatest riddle
Riding high in human eyes,
Cataract of twisted history, twisted sense�

The ways of the world are beyond knowing,
Yet less understood in the flight out of truth
Than in the courage of one who has so much to lose,
Standing for difference,
Reaching for change.

Apurba Bhowmik

The bull st-0ck Hunter

(image)

Sean Bonney

The poet Sean Bonney lives and works in London and lectures in creative writing at Birbeck College. A book of his selected works, "Blade Pitch Control Unit", has recently been published by Salt.

DOCUMENT TEN (in progress) / straight body:

HAIR is suspicious. You've been watching it for five hours and now its in your mouth walking toward you: practically universal, the full panel of the five senses is now in session (rub, prick, or pull upon a hair). Now you are open to brainwashing or till it feels that your face may laugh or burst, leashed. Like the taste of hair moving through connecting offices. It glows in the dark: there is paint in it, then water, a bright disk located in the sky.

*

HAND is non-returnable reflex from nerve conduction corrupted due to intercellular barriers to active connection. Translate as see you on the barricades, my sweet quasi-cortex. Most cash it in for swift replica diamonds, or make blisters with peroxide and opened match. Ignore all that: a single brief mechanical stimulation of the skin and I too will glow in the dark. The smallest contour of the ground, the most insignificant line on the palm, all becomes a sign upon which escape depends.

*

The EYE will sell you marriage as a word pressed into compassion ordered up as career opportunity senses a two-dimensional disk of brightness: discretion, a minute black spot sent from partner to partner and yet the optic nerve is unable to enter into a heightened phase of its own specific activity. Like a book of black pages they fold inside each other. 'Side' is not 'to', 'in' is an amalgam of imagined memory and the negative image boiling into the nerve-net.

*

ARMPIT is stress maze: health, love and x-hole says the culture is armspray, as dry as tongue says put it there - in end press transistor and retain armpit is logic circuit, and has gates where teeth are. Between them, the fault and flaw is peep school and social crunching: put moisture on second tongue, insert as. As. Set particular armpit inside what mouth is heave is thrust, is stress yarn, is love bore.

*

Take LIP as small string feature, a private one-word meaning goes like this: is seam, is fault or flaw. But still press lip cluster, a flat wave travelling down the line must wipe out memory for both numbers and orders. The taste of waking strange with new speech circuits, corrupt villages were handfuls of tiny bright bees. If I say love I mean lip or spit what the voice circuit means when stopping.

*

Richard Budden

Connectiong with a Young Magpie on a Damp Shed Roof

Choral Evensong resonated round my room
In an afternoon of A-level revision.
A segment of time - a break - I peered out my window and revised roof
tiles while
Humming milky light was coughed through the glass
By a sun sick of itself and the wind, which pane-whipped
The wood frame�s painted white to a brighter hue, than nature�s
semi-luminescent sigh.

And then a bird, a simple thing, that need not sing,
For this newspaper magpie stood tall on a common shed roof like �The
Times�:
Proud; prestige with age, but unlike the distant Ecumenical choristers,
it sang a silent tune
That struck a chord with me. Sensed an adolescence�s quick rage as I
watched it perching.
Sympathised with it�s anger used to hide it�s trepidation,
Could swear I heard it�s heartbeat, thumping and pumping, its small
stomach lurching,
It�s feathers rustling, nearly loosed, by cold blasts of air, bristling
like cats hair in fear.

Twig-legs twitching, knees knocking with paroxysms
From anxiety around thoughts of propriety,
And catastrophising that a small thing like himself,
Can�t fly, and that he�s bound to crash into the ground.
Time past as these thoughts flashed like lightening through his mind,
Yet with confident pedagogic decisiveness, he swallowed, muttered a
courageous comment and
made
his
descent.

Rain began to fall lightly then, texturing my
Window with transparent birdseed, when the magpie stalled,
And so I recalled my own graded Rite of Passage.
Not unlike the frail creature�s, shivering on the blackened damp
Shed roof, serving as his stage, to prove, he had come of age.
Yet unlike his tested step of bravery and his virgin flight,
My examined pen, paper, letters, exclude freedom out of sight.

Poem on Theme of Future

I am a me. Rejection-fears thump off the we
And winded, I feel future�s a thing to be feared.
Is that a tinge of red meat I see?
Sip cup rubbed on the rim and know I�ll feel weird.
Now I�m Socrates, but dying from a cup of tea,
More precise - the hand germs to which my gut�s endeared.
Ifs, buts, multiply, convincing me I�m thick,
Oh let�s not drive to Brighton, I might be travel-sick.

Meditating in the West Quadrangle of Royal Holloway

Acts deemed sins, seem to be so,
As they bring the beast out of all of
Us, crushing the years between unconscious
Uncouth ape and man of tears.

Yet birds still breathe a life of ease,
That evades people and their boiled peas.
This little blue-tit, eating ants pecked from the lawn,
Has caught a happier life, than we, lost in thought

And I that sits stifled by sentience; silent, but inside
Render sentences with self-centered ambition,
That they�ll one day be considered importantly:
Know they will not be.

Elizabeth-Jane Burnett

For the next 12 days I will be placing a rose somewhere in the city...

(for jenny)

finally he moves -
event fully – in
visible
space -or
lighting

shy photographs

(for sean)

I appropriate in (appropriate)
his eye-gloves closed rows
looking
through a rose
built box

concrete children opening

(for sean)

when is it occurring?
during they co-exist

behave maybe employed
businessmen girls

(for david)

Slag Flower
‘ – ‘
Infidelity On A Flash Placing
Flowers Aiming Flowers Screaming

and I happen inside you
happening inside

(for maelynn)

thanks for bringing me -
any excuse
- to love –
or
see –

I don’t want to leave
but I want to be left

(for albert)

Cervantes is also Shakespeare.
a connection couples between a rose and
a book

in Catalonia

(for ben)

river holding light
into recognition - an excursion
- the recognition
that you were my excursion –
watched by so many

unthought angles

(for ceri)

is it my body leaking or
sentences what is lingering – time –

no time –

somewhere near the entrance

(for sarah)

combining with the stared at
moment when she stepped off and
entered the Evangelical
patisserie

before noticing

(for david)

I’m which one? a reminder?
a tribute to lost –
not wanting to leave but wanting
mandrakes –
to be –
right

at whose point do I occur?

(for becky)

6.19 she –
sewn into suburbia –
she weddings

does she cancel me out

(for alan)

thought over net
different only in –
size –

at what point does opening and
saying here is – everything –
at what point is saying

at no point - illuminates -

James Byrne

The Ashes

Who knows what has become of him –
the mad bastard. But I sense somehow
he’s still at it, prowling the backrooms
of dive-bars, as if stuck in a labyrinth,
with the same not-to-be-trusted look
spread across his face, the same smile,
readable to anyone in the entire room
that says how tonight is not merely
an episode in his life, but moreover,
that here is a man who would sell
some of his own organs for a nightcap.
I can see him now, carrying two brandies
back from the bar, shuffling along
in that way of his, as if he were trying
to walk a line of string. I can hear him
telling long tales at The Troy, like how
he survived three weeks on a mountain
in Tibet on nothing but tea and cigarettes.
Or my favourite story, the best of all,
if only for the way he would tell it:
the one that always seemed to end
a week after the cremation of his Pa,
when, as he sat there, striving to mourn,
the urn suddenly fell from the mantelpiece
and he scooped up a handful of the ashes
to taste his father for the very last time.

Blueberries

We prowl through the orchard at midnight,
to that high point, where the roads are shiny
and small boats bob quietly on the lake.

The moon is quizzical and cold. Our faces
both caught in its bluing whiteness. Up here
there’s barely enough light to see each other

or where the dark stems of our fingers lead.
Forcing its way through the creaking elms
the wind surges around the orchard –

its clout rebounding off the cloister roof.
You lie back and study the express freight
of clouds hurrying over the church spire

and mumble something about marriage.
I eat the last of the blueberries, pretending
not to have heard. Instead I wonder

why the water below seems concussed.
The blueberries roll in, one-by-one,
rubbery at the touch and dark as a mouth.

I take a final swig of wine and we touch hands,
staring down into the village, the home
that we have known so well and for so long.

The home we will soon leave together.
See how it bronzes calmly in the distance,
beyond the dimly-lit terraces, the silence.

Born in 1977, James Byrne is well-known as a poet and promoter to audiences throughout England and America. His first collection ‘Passages of Time’ was released in February 2003, via Waterways. James Byrne also founded New Blood, a monthly event at Covent Garden's Poetry Café in London and he is also co-founder of The Wolf magazine. James Byrne will be one of the featured readers at the forth-coming Openned Poetry night on Wednesday 29th of March (details of night to be found on the news page).

Fire Service

(after Richard Wilbur)

The siren-blast; a violent whistle of pure verb
through Temple Fortune. An old Jewish lady
trips on her shopping cart, gazes mournfully
as if after a hearse. The sound tempers away,
and when it dies down to distant punctuation
versions of fire begin to travel inside the mind:
the deathly smack of thick smoke billowing
from a high-rise, a firecracker gone off beam,
a warehouse, arson-lit, its upholstery gutted.
Traffic wedged against the curb soon restarts,
the drivers, their faces studded with intrigue,
follow the clamour towards Finchley Road.
The masterstroke of a sunset guides them in,
brilliant, unhurried: the roof of a city ablaze.

Martin Cooper

Apart - For Now

Sitting here all alone in my room
Makes me begin to think
Of the joy, the very life
Of the wondrous love I share with you.

In every moment we spend apart,
Each hour, minute of the day,
I hold dreams of you.
Both you and I, one being in two halves.

For without you I cannot feel whole,
Without the love, the strength of feeling,
my life is not complete.
For since we met, my love for you has grown.

But whenever I get these feelings,
Begin to feel lonely or sad,
I just think of the past, all we have shared,
And look forward to when we next meet

Falling In Love

My feelings overflow in me everywhere,
Tumbling forth with a passion,
An energy, without compare.
The reason for this is the action,

I thought about, worried, planned,
In a way never believing
That in any space or time it can
Possibly have led to what I am now feeling

I Like What I See

I look at her seated across from me
A radiance in her eyes for all to see,
The laughter in her eyes that shine,
Oh, if only she were mine!

He ethereal beauty shows so bright.
Why, everything about her is just right!
Beauty, wit and intelligence too;
Oh, if only I could be with you.

Parents

Parents are the roots of every son�s life
But is this so when he is older,
In married life?
For the leaves of a plant alter with time,
As a son grows, learns and lives life.

Those once fresh leaves may perish,
The plant discolouring,
Showing every blemish.
But the roots of that life remain,
Unfazed in their task by the pain.

For whatever happens to the son in life,
His choices, good or bad, may cause strife.
But the parents, the roots, still do their best,
To nourish, to enrich
Their eternal child, to bless.

Will I Ever?

Whenever I see you, whenever you�re about
Looking so lovely, both inside and out,
That familiar yearning returns once again
Will I ever hold close what I find so alluring?

As you walk in the room, a tide of emotion,
Love, hope and dreams, a heady concoction
Washes over me, as I drown in it willingly,
It comes to me - you are the one that I need.

But will I ever attain, in this world of pain,
The very thing that can drive it all away?
Oh I can but hope, that in even a small simple way,
I can make you feel as wonderful as I may

Alex Davies

I saw that man CALLING (from behind that rock)

I saw that man
CALLING,
from behind that rock
WALLED-IN,
wailing and howling and
COUGHING,
i tell you it sounded
CALLED-IN,
there weren't no feeling or
FOLDING,
of heart, mind or mother's plea,
and the tree that
MAULED HIM,
pushed by another free-
FALLING
balding old man with a
TIE PIN
attached with hair to his
FAT PEN,
oh boy that boy was cat
A-WAULLIN,
unfree blinded hostage,
beneath bush and foliage,
COMBING,
i swear that bald man was
COMBING,
the hair on his pin he was
COMBING,
the world i tell you's gone
BARKING,
stark trunked man bleeds -
APPALLING -
couldn't stand his lapsing throat,
MOANING,
the stone i took in fair i'm
WALKING
towards the dying, dying man
TOLLING,
his bell in front of my brother,
by the tree i took that rock,
and smashed a piece off his skull,
FALLING,
and watch his brain wash out,
FALLING,
and blood and sweat and tears and more,
FALLING
to the peace of this place.