Today’s choice
Previous poems
Mike Duggan
The Stirrups Of Genghis Khan
A decapitated road sign
Spears the yellow verge,
Meaningless as a symbol
Of progress. A vain strut.
The bus driver’s hands are folded
As the stop approaches.
From the fields,
An algorithm of hooves enters the ears
Of yawning school children.
More is known than ever before.
The day doubles over, winded
And as language must
Death moves
A little off, as if uncertain.
Mike Duggan is a fifty year old poet from London. His work has appeared over time in The Rialto, Magma, Tears In The Fence and Perverse. He has a new poem forthcoming in The Rialto 104 and his pamphlet Masquerade was recently shortlisted by the Dithering Chaps press.
Ananya S Guha
The leaves are growing out of
a harangue of loneliness
palms cupped I listen to silences
of winter or summers
Peter Leight
Instead of Dying I’m Taking a Trip
to Kansas
where the light appears
as if walking through a gate
in the air
Daniel Cartwright-Chaouki
Its timber frame held together by the waste
of its own decay
The rot a kind of glue undisturbed
Cracked panes of glass hold their fractures
Rosie Jackson
I Am Trying to Love Frank O’Hara More
I really am! I am trying not to see his exclamation marks as cheap melodrama and his endless conjunctions as some kind of separation anxiety or fear of mortality for what do full stops signify except dying
Charlotte Holm, Jennifer A McGowan
A leaky drainpipe drips
creating damp patches on uneven paving,
slime green algae blossoms
forming viridescent ripples
James McDermott
if samsara’s concrete please don’t come back
as black jackal for I live in Norwich
nor spineless worm as I don’t have a lawn
Cheryl Snell, Alice Gregorio, Peter Lilly
I grew up on a farm so I should know all about expensive cows and free milk. You’re taking being a debutante much too literally. We only meant to give permission for you to make a good match, not flit among the suitable boys…
Jade Kleiner
There is the green that birthed all pine trees.
Tom Blake
We were the housing and the housed,
meaning nothing except that
we were always occupied,
or to put it simply never out.