A blowtorch, some pliers, some skin, and a scream,
C sharp pitch, the voice chipped flint,
smells of dry piss and fear of a cat; scraped off a shoe
a click prick’s will to politik, I think,

aNd…

so spoke Zarathustra — to sign a tear in the lake –
to be remembered by a cured black-foot’s mind.

A melting totem carved in soap
and precisely positioned, gravity-wise,
relative to a legless one, who leaned and said,
“Wave, I can’t die,”

today anyway.

Then died anyway.

~~~~~…..

Quark stood with shoulders broken
like cracked paving slabs, crumbling.
He twitched and wobbled with worry,
sweating with strife.The crowd’s surge like a river of mud,
smelling of rot and disease.
Quark stood amongst the midden,
shifty looking, eyes darting like swallows
or the flick of a Tiger’s tail.
He mouthed a word; a deaf mute’s mewl:“Quark”

People swarmed around him,
blank-eyed and symbiotic,
grey and lightly rusted –
reminding Quark of tanks in World War I,
or the Spanish Civil War.

In squeezing heat, sweat drizzled his face,
it stung Quark’s eyes. Eyes that reflected the streets
of glass and dirt: hard, sharp and smelling peopled.
The pigeons vanished, like steam in freezing air.

A frog eating a fly: Quark licked his lips,
He looked closely, scrutinising every aspect: hoping
for a perfect being. Quark inspects and considers,

wrapped in the fur of the eyeless horde,
reminiscent of silent canaries
in a brass-barred cage.

Quark runs.

Dodging the onslaught, he eyed it,
hovering above the greyness and flesh,
eyes of glowing obsidian. Reflected by windows
Quark’s head tilts,

                            he studied it;
inspecting for damage. The crowd grew soundless and solid.Satisfied — Quark approached — stuttering the special word:
a wicked muttering of faith and patience–
a word spoken with a crow’s caw:

“Quark”

Open-faced, striding through the rush;
palms up cawing at the crowd’s crush;
the city cramped, like a centipede’s pincers,
squeezing the thoughts of Quark.The perfect being hovered there. Above the stone towers.
A floating presence of faith-smog. Above the racket. He saw it all.

As a melon splits — Quark’s mind cleaved.
Great doors swung — the people’s eyes opened,
bookish faces spread wide, like documents.

They scrutinised Quark with reptilian blinks.
They all looked now,
hard looks,
looks of hate and envy. Crushing looks.

Through eyeglasses they squint
and saw it all
with magnification devices, drilling him out –
assessing him
for future usefulness.

22/7 = Pi
Neon light bounces — on fragile bronze towers;
dazzling yellow-white light — drenching
cold sap-swollen trees, like warm honey
dripping through fragrant warm half-light
unfolding leaves and erasing the streetlight.

Seven Sticks Burnt
Rolling beneath gilded temple-spires
of commerce and traders in his Deities’ guns.
Curled, like a caterpillar, snug and cocooned
in a rug, wrapped in newspapers: a foetal-man.
Last saw his kids in ’64. Now keeps his memories

3 of them
in a stained gabardine pocket: caresses it daily -
now curled with frayed edges. Smudges of numbers
and names on the back, remind him like half-thoughts.

–Hot light drills to the false skin –

lifting him through
layers of yellow-tint edged clouds, and a fragrance of Spring.

Falling and then
seeing them run in a circle. A circle of town-light,
the smiles ecstatic sparked him, lifting his soul
from the ledge toward a spangling firework spray

- of wonder -
Hot city sun-glare peeled away dreams
of a dazzled half-life.
Shedding his false skin of wonder:
a chrysalis crackling alive to mutate.

Ivor Griffiths 2007; Published in The South Poetry Magazine, Autumn 2007, Issue 36; Dedicated to, and inspired by thoughts of, my children: Rachel and Mark.

The copers manage the damaged –
by hand, deftly;
coping and hoping it won’t rain,

not today anyway,

me cat’s being buried today he is:
got squashed by a car.
We pried him loose from the wheel arch
with a pointy stick. His eye fell out,
a black hole, a purpled star, like it was cauterized.

I cried when my cat died.
I did.

Ivor Griffiths 2007

Blog Poet UK

Just click the links below to listen. Hope you enjoy them.

“Wolf” by Ivor Griffiths 2007

“Pussy” by Ivor Griffiths 2007

fluttered in woodsmoke
as he sat
hunched before the eye

imagining her pose
on a buttoned leather chair
cloaked by shade

in their chalk white alcove.

he’s fondling cards
outside the flat backed bar.
He’s a mottled sheepskin coat
his yellowed fingers curl to white.

When he imagines the twist of her:
the inkling is uneven,
like tarmac steam in the rain.

Ooh Err, she said, agog, before the tear
streaked ads of errant woes!

I’ve lost me Holy Grail,

the grimace of
the angstified thingy replied

even without needing to speak

Jump on your ‘orse why dontcha?
Go on a quest or summic, she cried (waving ‘er arms about like)

I’m gonna stay ‘ere before the dawn of morn
aglowing in me finest old fashioned stuff, she wailed.

Then wept and wept and wept some more.

Ivor Griffiths 2007

in a white shade of hessian — rough touch
smoothes a flinching wince,
like a stone frog catching flies.
It’s in the blood, 1989: On the wire

floating above a garden, dreaming
a compost smell, hiding a wobbly
neighbour, staring through the sash-windows
that squeal open, like cats drowning.

Smoke haze in the kitchen, everyone smoking
and talking; laughing at shiny photographs.
Monotone edged in white, like the life
of the neighbour’s wife, shaking to a bongo
and tidying like Andy Warhol.

Ivor Griffiths 2007

Propping up rusty railings by the shore – listening -
between eyelashes I saw flapping, it sounded like applause.

A skeletal osprey limped along cracked hot granite,

eyeing a red crab drowning in sunshine.

The crab was crunched — then wriggled.
Oscillating sine waves tickled the air,

a spider drowned in a bucket

next to my foot – squealing

Dirty fingernails scraped the earth
seeking out ancient dead: their stone-shadows

now ghostly skeletal images –

crushed in time and spatial vectors,
to emit crackling and spitting messages:

reminiscent of Italian and Chinese Art – in a white room.
With a high-brow air, but whining,
like a London Tube train,

late at night

then rubber-necking at the hard platform’s lip.
I watched litter swirling, between the tracks,
sniffed the warm rubber,

and flinched at metallic noises.