Mothballed
(after Ezra Pound’s The Garden)
Hollyhocks on her orlon midi blouse
gum up infectious railings.
A sundial fields this exquisite birdcage.
Blue-mould sky is analgesic
applying pressure on plumago, kingcup, buddleia.
Explosions have arisen, fixed:
coming out hop, a love-lyric from Mosley,
a hundredweight of turning traitors,
vehement months.
At 80 her keepsakes are cliff-edged.
Beige-cheeked sprogs
blah-blah through the side-path
to Comprehensive doors.
Swankpots, stiff-necked,
flagrantly dressed and feisty,
starkly alive.Christopher Barnes
'tis the season to be jolly
The clap and slam
of kitty-eyed marbles
over orange-pink and purplish wagon wheels
of a polyester bedroom rug,
shallow cut as gossamer threads,
a one-dimensional, under rub to on-ice air.
Blasts skim the nonstick door,
back up from lilac skirting,
rat-tat-tatting a grey-glass window,
that sash with a buckshot peephole
condensing powdery snow.
He was a prettyboy pocketmouse, I clinched
into the mousebox, monofilament eyebrows,
epileptic whiskers,
a gnaw of indifference
to cuddlesome nerves of fur.
Blanched on the fire -
I'd been black-sheepishly forgetful,
"it's dead, it's dead," I screamed,
blind to the mask of hibernation.Christopher Barnes
In The New Art
Polarities flux,
there's a palpable distribution of shade
when you're packing a gallery
- like braiding the wind
around a stranded hair.Christopher Barnes
Cropped
(after Gerard Manley Hopkins' 'Hurrahing In Harvest')
The leaf-down season's a suffix. This moment has
a dummy's charm. Serviceberries grease over.
Top-heavy, split level, blue sky's Plexiglass.
Wait for unsprung embankments,
silver-grey scud clouds,
a celestial sphere of junk,
acid dyes, volatile chlorine clusters
stinging the tips
of a GM harvest.Christopher Barnes
The New House
Next day the burn of high summer.
I was dewy when the thundering beak
scabby heartstopping feathers
plunged through a full-face print of Malcolm X
sabotaging the props of the room.Next day the burn of high summer.
At rush hour a bloated daddy longlegs
belly flopped onto the valance
dancing like a paralytic
across the sunbaked nodes of lino.Next day the burn of high summer.
A nocturnal bogeyman of rotten gales
came and went, began again,
plunked open the sneck
unfolding the endless passage.Next day the burn of high summer.
Christopher Barnes
Test Tubes
Once only the tussock’s
bananaslide of obverse moon
blanched its fool’s gold
waxing into a ubiquitous moth, glassy scales
vapour-like with fine drawn night lungs.Legend in a blinding flash,
L.S.D. is my drug.And again it’s unwrapped
a soaked-up compound.Gather sounds in the Dene,
goblins crackle in wild flowers,
rats and chiffchaffs
on the jungle-green leaves of twiners.Maytime and Whitsun,
Michaelmas and winter,
the nights are always sable black
edges tinged with pale purple……and little-butch Kristina,
insisting with reflection
image-building and invention
are wings on which we fly.Disbanding infusions of Blue Note jazz
with Malcolm and the universe,
I had a Sun-Ra fathomable eye,
gobbledegook to plot
the electric orb of life.And trips were like river Oz
with lighthouses,
a galaxy of broken water,
incredible bearings to find
before climbing down from the bar stool.Christopher Barnes
