Poetry and Creative Writing for All

Derek Allsopp

Top

LOOKING FOR PEARLS

1

The man returned to a gate, the stone wall, a limping dog beside him. 

A fallow pasture, with it’s fastened green in quick place, is behind them. I remembered to say “hello.” 

2

The day before, I had been told to see through the thick of weeds something of the world that had once known my emptiness.
Upon Sylvia’s grave there is a string of pearls.
Yellow curls become a wider world; my naïve.

3

In the honesty of the setting lies surprise with the telling.
Of Christian symbols, pictures sold to my childhood’s sleep,
I keep one from the day, the low dull sky; below the sun, in the cumulonimbus that’s heaved from a keyhole there parts a formed angel.

4

How can the I be unseen, effaced, without memory, and is this the right question?
When answers are subject to change and chance, fear keeps and locks; with flux, contact’s with out.
Psycho upon one’s path, others are a country mile, and the reach is the ear; eyes signal content, contact, affirm I’m within.

5

The look of a stone can be a bridge to the past, it’s grain on grapes worn with time’s pain.

Measure the pleasure by what we are left, the vine of language will remember to cargo;
establish the body of work for here we have one road with crossings.
The stranger is not so dissimilar.
Know shocking and the familiar will always be new.

6

Scatological; to find truth from flaws, within the dirt there are laws of relief.
Change, and the question will always remain with a loss for words, with that cross to bear.
Tallow; and, with the fat of three cats, weight’s believed to trick the night.
Pet the wicked danger with a master’s stroke for death is knocking.
Light can be the dark in hands no-one knew.

7

I return, in a sense, to the day I became tired of hills, having walked from Lumb
Bank through Heptonstall, steadily down to Hebden Bridge with my Income Support.
Mellow; I bought a belt, a book on bird viewing, seven inches, Barad Dur, my ranger then tracking poetry.
Hughes’ found crowing.

8

With burning legs I remembered.
Turning to the churches, my mind avoiding lack, I began to search from out of respect her grave;
Sylvia Plath, my curious below and beyond, within my why? Uneasy grief.
A quote could never die without knowing.

9

Was it spite that stopped me standing over her? I had noticed once, then twice the pearls draped, upon her grave, slightly of centre.
My eyes, purple flowers voice, remember;
Fellow draper, besides you the enigma, and leaves.

10

A man returned to the stone wall, a gate, the limping dog beside him.
The fallow pasture, with it’s fastened green in quick place, is behind them. Would silence have suited before?

Top

RAFT

As the smoke dies to the surprise of the horizon,
wet with the violet of the encyclopedia sun,
hulled to the raft’s map of entries,
a thought is centred and provokes desire
caught in the affair of naught winking a curser.

Off- On- Off- On- Off- On- Off- On- Off- On- Off- On- Off- On

Off- On- Off- On- Off- On- Off- On- Off- On- Off- On- Off- On

Compost of event the blink of the interiors eye is thin 
as a stick -
as wide as the instruments tune allows,
the wick of its reed now the neophytes lipped itch
playing instrumental with the broken witch within.

Often thinking and often bled that bitch is sought familiar
while that seductive raft is stitched and the ordnance brought is clear
violent rupture that vies for laughter’s demise and otherwise rise;
the violation of the nape that is now pulsed and repulsed

Off- On- Off- On- Off- On- Off- On- Off- On- Off- On- Off- On

Anointed then in the lap of the innocents scent,
the raft is now in and out and in and out of the self styled rip-tide
in revolutionary rounds and the doubt of bounds
and making the wink of affliction glitch – And the vent of that rent
is now Medusa’s cast throwing pallid bone stones.

Rattle and blister the valence of pleasure.
Interior of the cranial room’s moment whacked white and thin with

the dice of cattle cleaved;
of the hemispheres cud and the should, the is and the ought
of mudded clatter is mute with the shatter of night and sunlight.

Off- On- Off- On- Off- On- Off- On- Off- On- Off- On- Off- On

Off- On- Off- On- Off- On- Off- On- Off- On- Off- On- Off- On

Offer the splintered a plinth of trite and the quiet riot swells
with the cognition of dissension. Cake off – On the take with the aspirant and the annihilate. Sliced off life is the mutter of twice shy. Deprived

and smitten and throwing rice at the binary of body and mind,
our souls are holes into which is poured the spin of pitch.

Floated grafts, the heave that choirs are still in refute. And my mute
knows hitched greed. Would it look back as if my care is neuter?
That’s history talking and now I balk in this present and spill

My Equality – My Fraternity – And my Liberties limit. Sister, my quill
is No - Is Know - And the film’s show does indeed have to go on.

Top

THE TECHNO BABOON

The hundredth monkey writes a page of this

Lectern
Blessing the labs entrepreneurial
spider
Blemish of wise extremadurnal
tycoons

Width the word hungry – (ark) – Might the rage of his

western
stress incur habits proverbially
strident
Phlegmatic which lacks arithmetical
typhoons

The breadth butterflies lights blend- Staged of risk

The Disco – Whore’s tunes

thousandssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss

Top

A SPIDER DROWNED IN MY BATH AND PROMPTS

1

Illusion. Symbol of quiet. Realities chime
with time that’s come to still while gravity swells.
A thought filled with the weight of chance and tells:- 
“Indeterminacies strings are sureties hung.” 

2

Has the spider in our noiseless net had its fill?
Negative and positive. Nothing and life,
and I am Maya, aware of the differing voice through my sync whole.

My thoughts shows are of the tumble of space, plural, 
jet wet with my fumbling tether and further grace.

I am suspended between the face of nothing and the present of life.

3

Past’s quota of being that knows nil and the nameplate (erase)
inside this poet who saw eight spread legs of floated hush - 
The outward push and sink of my creation -
Decaying naught and inflated impressions of further dates - 
is my honesty. And I cannot leave it almost there for fear...
I am allied to the exposure of time and the barren of where, 
and the return occurs, bothers with the wealth of parallel worlds 

4

When did the stranded spider know of the staged rush to stream and death,
and this gyp of language that appears as its turning sequel,
a call and fall upon the wielded image of timed closure? 
Did it know this fashionable cartouche abides composure? 

Top

THE BLACK CAT 

1

On the wane of the sundial lies the ink
of poetry, stormed poets in beatnik 
black; types to flack by the knowing public,
as I type to re-tract the demotic.

This profane indulgence in hurricanes
of words shifts the settled to span our brains,
who’s grains of sand are picked, sifted, drifted 
apart to make one individual 
a jewel of style; one phial, I broach, mind.

Locket of Loki, genius loci, 
the wearing of death is present with life,
polished by the plural, the greave of we,  
uniquely sewn this season’s evening, 
spelled in this pitch of poetry’s demise.

Rhyme’s dusk is invocated. This High Priest
and the High Street fashion it, then release
with the grit that’s flipped with thought of averse;
negative stitched by positive’s converse.

To the point: - the blade of the dial’s discord
is like a coin without pleasure: afford
the want and crime is nothing to treasure.

2

And back from the ebb with a knowing edge.
Like a wedge through celebrity this pledge
is for one’s place in mediocrity;
reality worked with democracy,
the shared graft of living diplomacy.

3

And back to work upon the faulty lines
that shatter within my conscience the spine of Ge.
Is there rhyme enough for my rhetoric?
Is there time enough to know the classics?

Ge is the gas that fuelled Greek; Pythia
and fascination in her Oracle
that lasts until war’s call then ends our ball.

Apollo and the know all.

And then to follow the final of time
is the project of nothing that is die,
like ice, with it’s shelves dropped to flow in cries
of end all our wars; the price in our prime.

4

The sea is weaved with a want and a wield
before that night. Sword’s shield burns with love light
in the sun of the Aegean that spites
the syndicate of time within the bet 
of others noir; sheds the sea’s crew until 
the holes now trialed, below the torn suns dross,
beneath Apollo’s sun, underneath the Asclepiad. 

The prized hole of now is of the and then;
the ripped womb of cross-crowed Coronis
that yields from known betrayal medical 
that’s now made to turn with the twice, and dice.

Snakes are upon the evening’s altar dial.
Of you... what should our questions be... Of them?
Posed within our brothers, an otherworld?
Do we trial, thus ask of the dusky dead?

The sleeping shed?

Oracle, should this poet hereby link, 
speak and make the skinning serpents The Dread? 
Why should the shaded past gather as dead?

“With wiles” she could have said, in her meanwhile, 
out of her box, behind the waxed surface 
of the mist that gathers by the dial’s moon;
cast of lunar, full writhe.
                                            Fit hissing cats, 
ticking claws stirred to pain and catch the spurned 
when night, the void’s stalked by the new poet’s
own Olympian purr- 
                                   The Last Panther,
modest in word’s wild furs that are black tracked,
whose proffered shadow’s now cast through real to 
infer the truth of youth’s aged love affair; 

Poetry, it’s a lot of toss.

Top

BRISTLE

As of the mists stroke the Willow then spoke
with listless prose upon the scroll of new.
The trees response is a whistled silence,
hills roll a quiet hew of night in rice
paper thin and stretched as atomic waves/
particles of write whirl icicle snow, 
show lyrical white’s porous porcelain, 
aspects of sensei in linear refrain.

Having flown the mourning there is settled
a patrol of doves upon the Willow
that lights up the grave weary traveler
whose view remains with the oregato 

flow of nature – “Have my life with the dust’s
pattern brushed with loves host and Nature’s trust.” 

Top

Submission Guidelines: Poems of no more than 30 lines in length each will be considered.