Ed Targett has submitted three poems – Painting Away, Crying and City Songs, which is effectively a trilogy – the product of his 'pixels, sweat and tears', enjoy…
City Songs
Occasionally
Some staccatto quick steps
Some jitters
And people passing
In night mode:
Hoods up, caps on
Arms swinging
Or crossed.
Occasionally some
Back alleys,
Rectangular shapes
Pipes and steam,
Restaurant workers smoking break time
Cigarettes
In the dim.
Yellow street lamps
Bulbous
Hang suspended
From private frames
In a private delight,
Glow
Not far extending
Not much including
Like spoilt toddlers
Clasping their toys
As mother night calls us to bed.
Occasionally clusters
Of Kurds
Turks
Jamaicans
Poles
Outside bars with music trespassing
Onto the street
With glee
Shaking heads and laughing
In other tongues.
Occasionally a road crossed
Poste-haste
White on the one hand and red on the other.
The city swallows you
From the approach on the train
Inwards
Wreaths
Smoke haloes
Tighten as you struggle
Like modern military
Plastic handcuffs
Get a grip.
Don't fight it
Surrender
The rain spitting on old streets
New people
Balkan beggars; headscarves and
Ornamental babies
Sympathy
Is dead
I thought
As I averted my gaze
Clusters of machismo
Taunt
The girls in tight jeans
Fifteen or so
Somehow, faces look like they are
Chiseled from flint.
Urbanity, yet;
No one is urbane
Just jaded, polluted, tired, scared
A casual gesture
Of camaraderie
Offering the paper you've finished reading
To your neighbour
In the Tube
Elicits a startled jerk
Suspicious glance
And several seconds of scrutiny before they
Realise
There are no ulterior motives.
The city has ulterior motives though
The city wants you as its own
Foreign bodies
Objecting to the city system
Planting grass on their designated
Parking place
Are swiftly repelled
No more night-time jams
On rooftops
Tiles a-clattering
Noise pollution,
Acid rain.
Even my poems
Have been co-opted
Urban laments
Eulogies?
The city hears me as singer
Scribe
Royal historian.
Soviet air-brusher
Of official photos
The Metro tells tales of
War and blood in distant lands;
Perchance
My neighbour's family
Screaming at night
With the caterwaul of stray cats
Outside,
Acknowledge this violence
And are racked with grief.
Perhaps
The old man,
Is not keeping up with the rent
And the plastic guns of the kids on the block
Echo, like a shadow song
War
We all fought
Once.
– – – – – – – – –
Painting away
I exist in isostasy
Delineations of you, my monism,
My molten crust.
I love in spite of you
To spite you
Bite and just fight through
These delusions of dualism
Things aren't what they seem
She says.
“The problem is with the seeming
Not the whatting,” I retort;
Life is endless and art is
damn short.
Who wants frames
Eyes are frames
Blue and brown of canvas daubing
A world of colour and cubes
Angles, angels –
“Modern pretence, give me naked women and cherubs”
she says with palpable glee.
Pastoral stultification? Not for my time:
Naked or nude or nubile or neither:
Cloaked in royal purple, Praetorian guard!
My skin.
There's no debate.
– – – – – – – – –
Crying
It's like a trick:
Spatters of steel
In solemn
Skin cutting flashes of stainless
Heal with herbs such
Heroically hewn
Flesh wounds in memory
Abound.
Here with all the
Wherewithal withers not in
Autumnal tints of glamour
Perpetrated with all
Wishful clamour of
Leaves a-fallin and
Now: A crash of
Timber; tremulous and
Juddering such death throes
As betake an old soul like
Breath caught on the
Intake after,
Outbursts of
Such passion you
Shake like
A trick;
Spatters of collusion
In saline flashes of
Stainless hewn
Memories abound.
• Ed Targett is reading Politics and Religions at the London School of Oriental & African Studies. He is published in torn fragments across small media. He is 24 and married with a small, smiley, son.
