The Celestial Hovel (2) She Irons With Dark Energy

(Hubby outside dices logs
she dusts, washes and irons

in a metallurgists scorched
earth leather apron

beneath ship’s oak trusses
a hazy orbit of stars and debris

dances round her busyness.
Above, nebulonic britches flap

pegged to golden string with split ends
between shiphull rib rafters

as she irons with dark energy
dimensional creases,

flattens 4d to 3,
2d to 1, grumbles

as what dimwit folded
the material, or thought

taffetta a sensible choice.
curses as a black hole appears,

bawls out sunblinded window “Oi!
Time you did the ironing again!”

as his adze end shatters the window
with a big bang that lasts millennia.

 

 

 

 

 

Ripple, Wave, Swell

Found.

Simplest difference between

ripple, wave, swell,

word, sentence, poem,

tongue, lip, thigh,

love, sex, work,

blemish, wound, sore,

siblings, children, death

is the time between each crest.

There are times when there are

ripples on waves on swell.

Your Damned Earring

Tell my wife before she goes out,

I’ll hoover, then garden.
Vacuuming her dressing table I,

accidentally suck up an earring
and spend most of the day

my finger up the thin hole
of the bag until it drops out,

and I am covered in dust,
empty peanut shells, feathers,

cat fur and damn my OCD.
My wife returns and says

you didn’t do the garden, then?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Celestial Hovel (1) Nine Planets Of His Hands

Straight as a loaded die
beside the ups and downs

in a lopsided house awkwardly
he axes logs in a mismatched

cosmogonic waistcoat and ill fitting trousers tied up with frayed string

nine planets of his hands
swings the sun’s arc

and his adze loses its sharp end
breaks another window into fractals

he’d recently replaced. “Day
can only improve.” He laughs

He Would Start His Novel

Even as they held hands and walked in unison down Hope street to their front door all  Faith could see were the stains he could not remove on the tea cups his mother had bought in Ripon Cathedral on one of her days out with her friend who knitted hessian baskets for Help The Heroes, after her son died from lack of proper equipment.
…the doctor said it was not stomach cancer as she had insisted but the wrong medication she was on, and that she needed to eat properly…
He would start his novel: “Old people despised experts and believed what they wanted to believe.” Then the battery went on his phone and he wished he had learnt how to write with pen and paper.

He Sculls The Plicas

Sits down between the rimples of a freshly ploughed field, grasps his wooden oars and sculls the plicas. Hopes the turned soil will not capsize because he can’t swim great distances. His broadcast seed fell below the surface of the waves he walked as now his wife and child bob up and down between these dry rucks. His oars are flower petals.

 

Life In A Raindrop

Opens his double glazed door to inhale the perfume of the petal that rises before him.
Sun rises and sets over its white curve. An approaching buzz makes him hurry back inside the door of his globule of water as his boiling kettle sounds like the fall of rain yesterday. A bees proboscis sucks up his home as he grasps the stalk that rises like a chimney out of it.

 

Hole In Her Stocking

Tentatively she examined the hole in her black stocking clocking the eyes of young men who tried to look askance while she remembered grapes needed adding to her shopping list and her mother’s pigeon feet
walking Hadrian’s Wall in the photo she’d sent from The Great Wall in China.

His Own Man

()

Peeled off the tissue as if it was a religious relic, as she always insisted he leave no ragged edges on the toilet or kitchen paper and showed the world he was not lackadaisical and was his own man.

()

 

Two Clay Pipes As Shoes

Unusually his two clay pipes fitted her small, delicate feet perfectly. Tobacco smoke swirled around her thighs as she contemplated the pencil describing his face held by the hand so realistically emerging from the front of the postcard addressed to his German aunt in Andalusia.