Cracking British Pen
There is a pig in my pen
unable to crawl out,
its snout protrudes, black with ink,
sniffing across the paper.
I think of Great Britain
and its cracking citizens.
The pig shrieks its last noir drop.
Its squashed fat shivers.
I break the pen in half,
fleshy legs quiver from one end,
little corkscrew tail springs
and I ease him out
on to the altered paper.
Run fast little pig!
His trotters jolt him forwards;
for fear of the black ink
he treads only on white,
running between things I have drawn –
pitch dark streets with little light.
Between the bars of terraces
with tiny glittering pin-point teeth
into slack bored chains of detached,
sucking his belly through ginnels,
he loses himself down cul-de-sacs.
I take another pen and begin
to draw cracking citizens.
Arms, legs and heads appear
of a cold blue ink.
They stand still in the streets,
they peer from the cross-hatches
of grand black mansion blinds,
their faces complete blanks.
Piggy can’t look up at the sky
because I haven’t drawn it.
My eyes like a pair of moons
shine above his doodled world.
I snatch the last black pen
and draw a house around him.
Tonight, I watch him suffer.
Jonny Reid‘s poems have appeared in magazines such as Stride, Magma, Stand, Ink Sweat and Tears, The Warwick Review, PN Review, The Hat, Clinic and Nthposition. He recently graduated with an MA from the University of Manchester and has just started a PhD on Edward Thomas at Royal Holloway.