Good Morning, Good Morning

this house is awakening
It yawns and stretches its
aged bones, as last night’s ghosts scurry
home, with the copper blood running
warm through worm pricked floors
I lie,like you, while you lie,
like me, under the nights warm stink
and the claw and the purr
of the cat’s half lidded lazy gaze
as the foundations shake with each
passingrace of 18 wheel freight
the breakfast chorus is missing,
presumed drowned,
so this morning demands a virtuoso performance
“how do you want your eggs my dearest,
square or round?” too early for her
to answer a question quite so profound
“still inside a bird please” whispers the cat

Quietly, I

quietly, quietly sat a lie

arms outstretched

palms staked to the fierce eye

observing within

as, first, flesh mottles

closer still to see without

while blister

vermilion doubts

one apiece of each

seized mortal engine

dripped of framed wax

placed in a filleted whole

gas pored

for a hungry earth

this is all I wish today

let each word die in a dusty throat

a melt that no tears will slake

I want away

Joanne Elizabeth

published in Forward Poetry Near & Far anthology October 2012

Joanne Elizabeth waits.

Beneath a powder blasted
cornflower welkin,
washed by a summer zephyr’s
saline kiss,
she waits.

Atop her rubber footed
iron bed,
on the sand and pebbles
amidst the tidal spume
and detritus
she watches.

A brusque, oily breathed
airborne flotilla,
the sky's very own
flotsam and jetsam,
gyre and gripe
and tarry.

The ocean
is ready now
as garrulous salvos wuther
up peaks and troughs,
and churn the beryl
into muddy soup.

And now there are men,
in a flurry
of flavous oilskins,
who rough house
Joanne Elizabeth
stolidly asea.

Edged mindfully into
the grubby moil
she bucks atop
each tumbling crest
and turns her back
on Neptunes cache

Those brine zested swabs
set fair to the wind
and pitch her alee
once more through the surge
but Joanne Elizabeth
testily abjures

Rebuffed , repulsed
and firmly aground
the mariners surrender
their petulant mount
and humbly drudge
ashore

They stand
forbearingly in the face of
a caustic mizzle
steadfast  gaze
a  good league distant

“No fish today”

Bone

god said “there’s a bone in my soup”

and spat it out

and for many years it crawled

before it learned to stand

and it said “I will make you now a fresh bowl,

from my family’s blood”

MQ-9

seen through the columns of rising smoke

the intention couldn't be clearer

while the tattooed roads wear the organic stains

as footholds for a memory of fallen phosphor rain

yet more caustic the harvest we reap

from the drone grown crone wept bones

even as the stone groves grow over the dead hope of

the pebble eyed children in their dreamless sleep

suffer the children our selfish gains

our bloody games

always the children

Itchy

each night I sleep

entwined in the comfortable branches

of a mossy oak

by day I play

among the lissom saplings

and wonder

how far I might still bend

mild frenzy

they lined up

in their smart suits and executive hair

outside the foundation stone

of a nations ruin ready to eulogise

to heap praise upon a legacy

of division

the traffic slowed

and the tempers frayed in a burg

where there is never enough

most had left by 8PM

save one expecting maybe

a ghost?

returning at the earliest light

most had moved into town

I popped my head inside a truck and said

"she's still dead you know"

one yet remains

awaiting the stone to roll back

my wife, the daughter of a miner,

council bread and margarine raised,

nods, obligingly, at the checkout

as she scans the customers cloying praise

"its nice about the flowers isn’t it"

“yes” she replies “they look great on my fireplace”

she reads people writing

the miners were greedy and she spits

"tell that to those with emphysema,

white knuckle and crippled joints

go stand by the graves of the hundreds that died

better still come here and say it to my face"