Today’s choice
Previous poems
Anne Stewart
03:41 Downstairs
a poem for insomniacs
Huddled on the cat’s blanket,
hyenas crying through the night.
Scribbled notes regretting tea,
the need for light.
Time passes, shoulders settle the hyenas
to a quiet shout.
Everything goes cold as energy, as will,
goes out
and him, snoring like a mammoth on
temazepam upstairs.
Sleep, hyenas, sleep.
There, there…
It’s just the sound of safety
winnowing the air.
Anne Stewart created and runs the poet showcase http://www.poetrypf.co.uk. She has won the Bridport Prize and Poetry on the Lake’s Silver Wyvern, and has published 5 poetry collections, the latest: The Last Parent and any minute now. https://www.facebook.com/anne.
Charlotte Oliver
On a bench outside Next,
a punctured woman
traces circles in the air with
a pale finger
Peter Devonald
He is bitterest regrets,
dark chocolate, olives and kale,
The Telegraph and Magritte’s
pipe, the treachery of images.
Anne Ryland
Restless two-hundred-year-old village elder,
a ragged playground of words, or is it weeds –
fragments of chant to slaps of skipping rope.
Colin Dardis
I have never climbed a tree,
never broken a bone
and will never walk on water.
May Garner
The house keeps score
in places no one checks any longer.
Sally Spiers
Night’s white noise is over. Day arises
to stillness. Light crouches behind windows
Tim Brookes
In the charity shop I try on a coat
flocked with fake shearling,
shaved-soft almost: fibres
fired onto plastic to fool the wrist.
Kim Waters
You’re a character, a Roman numeral,
an internet meme. Descendant
from a peasant’s crook or cattle prod,
you’re the twelfth letter of the alphabet,
Sylvie Jane Lewis
Being quiet and easily tired by being alive among people, I take
the cowardly route to community. I curate a digital garden of oddity.
At best my phone is a menagerie of queers: trinket makers, amateur
playwrights, witches, and, over and over again, my own personal monarchy.