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.

Visions - Chris Brown

Jump for the moon; find yourself in the
Depths of blue-green water; clouds of
Ecstatic sand brushing the pearl afloat.
Can you touch the ground again? Or will
The white-green eye pull your fingers from
That lamppost and let you fly from the spotlight;
Past the clock and the beating of your heart. Then –
You can join the universe; soul-bound at the edges;
Where the voices of the dead tattoo signals
Into the night; revelations for the stars to
Align against; a magnetism that is found in
Forgotten vessels; interfered with by the
Burning masses; deciding fates by the chewing
Of herbs. White-eyed and blue with time, forcing
Breath from the trees, the mother-god prunes her
Universe-pet, watches another drama. Jump, and
Meet her face-to-thought. She is telling a story
With angels; They sit, the Three, and wind paradoxes
From the air; build the thoughts of men. Jump, and
You will see dead grey hands left clinging to cold metal.
The clock ticks the life from them, and the star-eyed
Angels sit amongst their knowledge. Jump, and in a
Cloud of dust, reach for the pearl in the green-blue depths.

Words to a Winding Key (Once) - Chris Brown

Wind, you, this oak grandfather clock;
That clicked and knocked in Nature’s wind;
That grew and leafed and once housed things
More and less than clockwork. I grew
Once in the sweet season scents,
Ignorant of axe-men and axe-wounds,
Who, sent on their rounds sent
Me to be wound. Slung to the
Round, conforming blade
That confined me to box. And yet
This age would be young were I but
Livelier wood. Hands
I may have, but my rings are now lost,
And my boughs and roots, once strong to climb,
And my new-leaf shoots, gone now for chimes
(Do they comfort your nights, my new-life screams?)
That are of a gold less precious than green.

My youth was the joy of each wind’s breath on my branches –
Before your deep breaths in the chore of your winding.
Now we have purpose, but once I had meaning –
In whispering and twisting and creaking and leaning.