I’m Just About by Paul Brookes

I am not a silent poet

managing between the barricades.

My kids play between sniper targets.

I fetch the shop through broken

buildings perforated by gunshot,

past cars jammed across streets.

I’m just about managing between regimes.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/nov/20/just-about-managing-families-to-be-2500-a-year-worse-off-by-2020-study?CMP=share_btn_tw

Paul Brookes was in poetry performance group “Rats for Love” and is in their “Rats for Love: The Book” Bristol Broadsides, 1989. His first chapbook “The Fabulous Invention Of Barnsley” by Dearne Community Arts, 1993. He has read his work on BBC Radio Bristol and had a creative writing workshop for sixth formers broadcast on BBC Radio Five Live. Recently published in Ekphrastic Review, Red Fez, The Bees Are Dead, The Beatnik Cowboy, Clear Poetry, and others.

View original post

hemisphere of shadows by Fran Lock

the curly mind linguistically innovative poetry - weird & risky

baby, doom’s slender evangelist, you came out of the night. out of my own
snaggletoothed imbalance, you came, when the black balloon was terror’s
chosen metaphor, and the black balloon was everywhere. no one knew
the world was ending. buttonholes predicted poppies; red kept getting on you,
with its shamefaced sensibility. history had carved a cruel act out of flesh. we
were taking refuge in a wound. it’s friday, with r.e.m. on the radio. dejected
data. clickbait, interpreted like entrails. money, our skinny green disease. i’m
typing pay mewhat you owe me, you mouldy posho fuck, but no, i know, he
never will. somewhere, over the rainbow’s phobic pouting spectrum, there is
a place for us. a french café in soho. free wi-fi, and my bandwidth is a parachute,
the signal sings a rainbow too. reading jeremy, his similes like sequins. screen
burn. the eye’s unsplendid choreography…

View original post 740 more words