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Nikolaos the Wonderworker<\/strong><\/p>\n Asthmatic pipe smoker, gift giver, on your Medusa strands, A pile off of the tinker’s cart in the crook of your arm a painted rocking horse, a wooden doll, pouches of tobacco and a cutlass sheathed. leaving dead Christmas trees like a pantomime villain placing <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Grant Tarbard<\/strong> has worked as a computer games journalist, a contributor to football fanzines, an editor, a reviewer and an interviewer. He is now the editor of The Screech Owl.<\/em> His work can be seen in such magazines as The Rialto, The Journal, Southlight, Sarasvati, Earth Love, Mood Swing, Puff Puff Prose Poetry & Prose, Postcards Poetry and Prose, Playerist 2, Lake City Lights, The Open Mouse, Miracle, Poetry Cornwall, I-70, South Florida Review, Zymbol<\/em> and Decanto.<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n The Bay Sleigh<\/strong><\/p>\n Green as the present, green as presents, green as old St Nick, <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Katy Evans-Bush<\/strong>‘s two collections are Me and the Dead<\/em> and Egg Printing Explained<\/em> (both from Salt). She writes the blog baroqueinhackney.com\u00a0 and reviews widely. A collection of her essays will be published in 2015.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n The least accessible place<\/strong><\/p>\n It’s what the reindeer talk about they marvel, at how he leaps from he squeezes into toothpaste tubes <\/p>\n Seth Crook<\/strong> taught philosophy at various universities before deciding to move to the Hebrides. His poems appear in recent editions of Magma, The Rialto, Envoi, Gutter, Southlight, The Journal, Prole, New Writing Scotland,<\/em> and on have appeared on-line in Antiphon, Snakeskin and Ink, Sweat and Tears.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Nikolaos the Wonderworker Asthmatic pipe smoker, gift giver, you wear a crown of holly fixed on your Medusa strands, beard of clouds stuck fast on top of wire. A pile off of the tinker’s cart in the crook of your arm resting on your cauldron belly, a painted rocking horse, a wooden […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7917","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-twelve-days-of-christmas-2014"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7917","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7917"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7917\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23966,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7917\/revisions\/23966"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7917"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7917"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7917"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nyou wear a crown of holly fixed<\/p>\n
\nbeard of clouds stuck fast on top of wire.<\/p>\n
\nresting on your cauldron belly,<\/p>\n
\na Union belt, a pocket watch stuck on 6.20,<\/p>\n
\nYou started as a pore and grew,<\/p>\n
\nin your wake. Secretly you crept<\/p>\n
\na coin in shoes left for tomorrow’s feet.<\/p>\n
\nthe leaves tumble out of their branch, curved as a sleigh \u2013
\nand at its back, a little broken bit where it was torn from the tree,
\nwhich any sleigh must be, if it\u2019s to fly. The pulsing sap
\nhas given over to the power of metaphor and the curving leaf
\nthat sits among the others, in the middle of the sleigh,
\nas if it\u2019s leaning back, but really it\u2019s bellying
\nforward into the sky and into the timeless night
\nof Christmas, the night of the year when the sky\u2019s most spangled with stars,
\nand the air is clear and remembers when the earth stopped spinning beneath it,
\ninside it, and just for a tiny moment stood still. Still, all over the world
\nlittle branches like this one are growing \u2013 small conveyances \u2013
\nand old St Nick sits in the bushes, laughing and hiding.<\/p>\n
\nin Spring, when he’s still sleeping,
\nafter his labours, the genial old boy,
\nthe super athlete who breaks all
\nhuman records in one night. Marvel,<\/p>\n
\ncontinent to continent, remember
\nhow he accidentally dropped a package
\nin Hong Kong, so then leapt back
\nto pick it up from far Peru. But when<\/p>\n
\njust to make the gift of paste all red
\nand white. How they roar. Bravo.
\nStill the best, Sir. Still the ace.<\/p>\n