Sunday 25 January 2009

An Ex-Poem (with its Feet Nailed to its Cage) - Chris Brown

Where love is not, poets do…
And those who can’t? I hear they teach
Pupils with nothing else to do
But stare, solemn, on some grey beach.

The unknown touch of reddened lips
Is in all detail somehow rhymed
By those who, in darkness, sit
Scribbling that “The world is kind”.

O unkind world, O unpaid bills!
Where are the ways, where are the wills?
If green is fresh, and love is red,
Then the colour they make is I, so led
To memorise the sonnet’s form
When all I feel is hate and scorn.
Which words are mine, which were I told?
The air bites shrewdly, it is very cold.


Skinned amongst the prickle-stones,
In some desert of the future,
With unpaid bills and refused loans,
I am, torch-lit, the poet unknown.

With the grunt of twine and twist of knife,
I trap my ink in these self-bound tomes,
Please, Fame, don’t come with the end of life;
Beyond stained walls groans the neighbours’ wife.

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