Tall buildings shadow pavements, squinting their windows against light that spills from an insomniac Manhattan diner. Anonymous at a timeless hour, customers sit at the cherry wood counter with dirty coffee cups and a hankering for cherry pie, sugar to take the sour edge off a night of cigarettes and alcohol. Smoky thoughts curl […]
Category: Poems Inspired by Artists, Music and Other Writers
Friday Night at the Cardiff Novotel
(after Philip Larkin’s ‘Friday Night in the Royal Station Hotel) Light spreads brightly downwards from the wide- screen television between high windows that face the car park, where taxi headlights flare. At the bar, men in short-sleeved t-shirts flash tattoos, down beery dregs and, glancing at the score, jostle in a noisy exit. Receptionists issue […]
Many are called…
but few are chosen in the symmetry and ritual, the circle of life and death, from the first gasp at birth to the very last breath. Fresh grass grows on mountains through snow and stones; saplings take root in graves among crumbling bones; new life and innocence bring hope and vision. Many are called but […]
Poetic Purring
At peep of morning I hear the soft pad of a poem on the bedroom floor. A darker shadow sharpens in the gloom of my room and jade gems burn amber in strengthening beams of light. Verbs of velvet paws, sharp nouns and adjectives of claws swipe and glint at dust motes forming into stanzas. […]
Hylas and the Nymphs
She is shameless in her intention, that nameless nymph with titian hair, skin soft and luminous, her tender grip upon his arms, offering her charms. She will not let him go. He sees the flash of light on translucent green water, lapping and trickling on the flawless skin of these woodland daughters, their long hair […]
Painting by Numbers
Painting from early morning, with the gusto of a New Yorker a Glaswegian a Marseillais eating a haggis a hot dog a bouillabaisse, the artist tried to beat the August heat before his still life wilted. Applying chrome yellow with textured impasto, he was determined to paint them all in one go. Now the tournesols […]
Invitation to the Tyburn Jig
In the shadow of the gallows, not far from the hangman’s noose, the young pick-pocket drowns in the shallow murk of a blindman’s holiday, once the jailer’s doused the glim. He was born under a threepenny planet, dipping wipers for a tot of lightning, dodging charlies and soul-drivers. Holed up in a gospel-shop, pot-valiant, he forgot […]
No Remorse
The master crept into the chamber of his hangdog handmaiden’s shame again and again. There was no remorse. The bruises on body and soul got worse, while his penitent wife battled nightmares in their marital bed, plagued by guilty demons shrouded in shadows of sleep, which was never deep – just a wallowing in the […]
Eyes Wide Open
At five o’clock, the moon’s face Peered into my window, Suspended in the space Between the branches of the willow, Pregnant with poetry. At six, I blindly tip-toed down the shadow Of the stairs, carefully Cradling my lunar embryo, Crooning a lullaby, a celestial tune To soothe the baby moon. At dawn, the poem was […]
Untitled (Last Piece of the Ocean)
each ripple is a piece of jigsaw shapes that sea and saw to infinity and beyond pieced together in a pond swimming pool lake or river warm as blood or cold as a shiver interlocking seahorse rocking seashell washing beach-crashing a wavy motion casting away the last piece of the ocean Kim M. Russell, 2016 […]
writing in north norfolk 