Projections
Projections, a poem by Jenny Middleton at Spillwords.com
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tube trains scuttle, juddering
rushing, not stopping but slowing
to pass through
abandoned Aldwych — abandoned
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as the newspaper curling
on the toothed nylon seat
itching at the back of my thighs
clad in Lycra tights— at last
aching with sleep
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seeping into muscles
and itching— knowing
more than seeing
but feeling loss zip-zip the tracks
thundering and screeching
through the carriage and into my head
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like decades that flash with pasted
paper advertisements crawling
into tunnelled black—
commuters’ voices playing dead beat
beat into night and a woman
dressed in blurry, white lace
walks into a CCTV camera’s frame
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and dissolves, jumping
into nothing as I wake
shivering–sweating— still seated
silence humming and whirring
from each empty compartment
reaching the end of the line.
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Fear is a Common Denominator
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Stumbling through 5.30 AM
and clasping a Tupperware container –
instead of sleeping – I am saving a mouse
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from my cats. It hunches, shivering
amongst looming furniture
fright’s seeds germinating
beneath its fur
scrabbling against the carpet.
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I can’t tell it the domed plastic box
isn’t a steel trap where air will expire
spent breaths as blood filled chokes
or that the day will
not vomit scratched-up pain.
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I can only show it open
alley-ways mazing behind the street
and let it run from me
back to dank undergrowth.
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Twentieth Century Fantasy
Poem by Jenny Middleton - oddball magazine
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You imagined me in silver lamé and platform boots striding through mimosa and lime trees – made me into your unattainable, pin-me-on-the-wall poster that could be lost in space as you grew up and I aged into a retro collectable.
Now every valentine is only as valuable as its data and love is an advertiser’s algorithm burrowing deeper into your buying habits, I stay in sewing the fallen sequins back on to my A-line mini-skirt. I want you to tune out, old style, turn off your I-pad, computer and mobile phone, strip them of their gold and plant them beneath a gorse bush — listen to the fat bees gathering pollen unassisted by the buzzing of machines.
The future is always about finding a way to fall back in love with your first dreams.
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Highgate (a prose poem) published in the anthology 'coming home 2021'
Published online at Spillwords
https://spillwords.com/highgate/
December air, smudged with cold and clouds, lies heavily on the street, weighing loss with leaded weights at our lives and their thin scurry between work and night. An orchestra might sing weather like this as a descending, single note drawn out long from a saxophone or hide it amongst a fluster of pigeons. Highgate cemetery is in business with theatres of death like this, its wrought iron railings and fester of ivy a risen curtain hoisted with grief's strings.
Once, August was loose here and teenagers would push between the fence gaps, heady with sun and searching, they’d wander the shaded greenness, murmuring, drinking and then tasting silence’s stuff at reason; laze on the mound of daisy patterned grass and feel young against the rot, lithe against the cold immobile stones. The fence is thick now with technology’s spy, youths lurk at the edges, leaving cans to rust amid the docks and nettles.
It isn’t all angels though; a slender needle shoots to the sky bearing Mary-Ann Evans’ name in balance with her nom-de-plume, George Elliot, Death, if not Victorian editors treating them eternally as equals. ‘The Mill on the Floss’ still spinning water beneath the ink she eloped her days through to us.
Graffiti rages like rain on some headstones and is removed, running fumy chemicals to straggle with weeds and clumps of lost words – Karl Marx’s head has borne its blisters – the spray of anger flumed across grey stones in the deadened stillness of misunderstanding. Unquiet ideas wielding rage at stones. Unrest an eternal wage watermarked with philosophy, entombed within the turn of limey, chalky soil, tongues still full of argument.
And ash. Cremation was new to Victorians, Greek urns cavorting with gods and grapes were suddenly purposeful and filled with remains – the flames last ownership of flesh is still contained on cold Highgate shelves, written with copperplate inscriptions, standing in the hollows of walls built with stony flowers, kissing at damp air.
George Michael would have sung it carelessly, a smoky whisper scented with patchouli incense and the drift of a car flooding towards the final barrier in a blaze of metallic, tabloid headlines, a piano elsewhere and tuned with the smoothest dusk intoning the chords of unplanned endings. Christmas an unseen hiatus hovering in radio airwaves, a charcoal mark drawn at the back of a guitar strum blurring the man and the public machinations of life. A small cross marks his place and real flowers angel their faith into perfume sweet as lyrics.
It was the Romans who would feed their dead, stealing this coin from Greek mouths and their customs; naming and abandoning London to a grief, as Christina Rosetti wrote and writes now in the earth, here with these others, echoes still singing, flowing through her remembered hands.
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The Dive
Surging,
and falling
line upon line
catching the light less
the camera sinks lower,
as the saline dark
gathers and sucks
away the source
of skies
to the murk
of drawing tides.
The lens locks
focuses on
a Jig-saw of spines
and filmy eyes
peeling with vacancy.
Fins spasm and swim -
apostrophes shaped
to the jellied
bloat of a predator -
glowering
in a hush and sway
of cells.
Teeth protrude,
their drilled line
an opening picket,
as tentacles of flesh
give succour
In loomed gulps, its identity
no longer certain
and eroded
as the bitten land
above.
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Quarantined
(published in Writer's Egg Magazine issue 7)
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The sun is all spring sequins today,
flecking with the babble
of minutes gangling longer
and lusher with a flamenco
dash of daylight
the drapery of winter
almost tucked away
with our thick coats and thermal gloves.
Yet our lives lay in lethargy
and our limbs are pent,
our movements curtailed,
crammed within our homes
as we gaze at television news,
its stream a-pattering and awash
with this sickest of springs.
And outside people place themselves
to metres - stretching queues
to the strangeness of spaces that lie
between sparsity and suspicion.
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We Ride the Carousel
The carousel spins blurring
us with its candy stripes
and gaudy-hurdy-gurdy glee,
smudging the still shingle
beneath with speed.
We hold the painted flurry and flare
of wooden horses
rising and falling in revolutions
of frozen canter, pretending
at racing as we are turned
and turned back to our beginnings
gladder and giddier for journeying nowhere.
Gulls screech and circle elsewhere,
twilight’s shadows tipping
from the underside of their wings.
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The Happy Return
published in the 2024 Anthology 'Freedom'
The earth is hungry—
it wants its ash
its flowers
and all of its sand
back
whether you’ve
woven its gifts in to skeins
of paper, written
all over them, or smithed
them into silver
charms.
Your garden needs
the paper aeroplanes
and macramé strings
you hung them from
to feed its grass
then to fly.
There is a time
to leave
what you’ve been
left for a different
life.