The Great Storm
So the three of us are sat there like Compo, Foggy and Clegg,
on the trunk of a storm-wrenched oak between Gallows Pond
and the sugar-maple plantation starting to turn; sharing a joint
and genial nonsense.
Mike relates what happened when the storm arrived last week,
just after our mate Dave’s stag do: he’d got home to the house
he shares with his brother and the frontman of a soon-to-be
seminal prog-punk band, guzzled a mugful of magic mushroom tea
and came up to Foetus and The Fall; wandered the wind-fisted
streets, taking/not-taking everything in – the lampposts snapped
at ninety degrees, fences wrecked like a set of smashed-in teeth,
road-signs pointing in the wrong direction as if the War were still on
– until he finally returned hours later, to gurn in delight and alarm
as his front-door key drooped before the lock, like a candle melting
back into itself.
bone-rattling winds
the taste of painkillers
colours my world
Matthew Paul has a blog at http://matthewpaulpoems.blogspot.co.uk/ , has recently had poems in Fire, Poets from Art (Ed. Pascale Petit) and at Nth Position; is Associate Editor for Presence magazine; and co-wrote/edited (with John Barlow) Wing Beats: British Birds in Haiku (Snapshot Press, 2008).