Poetry and Creative Writing for All

Julius Man

I'm 30 years old and live in Cheltenham. I like the countryside round my way. Like a fairly broad mix of cultural type things, I've recently been listening to some of my old skool hip hop albums. I love reggae music. I've also been listening to a band called Arab Strap.  Poetry wise I prefer more mainstream writers such as Roger Mcgough and Sophie Hannah.  I like biscuits.  I'm interested in the country of Burma(Myanmar) in South East Asia which is what one of my poems here is based on. My poetry tends to be serious but I hope entertaining as well as thoughtful and thought provoking.

As we reach the edge of the park
and come to the long arc of railings
we still find ourselves looking,
listening for advice,
but our strife is ignored by the pigeons;
the statues gaze is indifferent
to the life all around them
as we reach the edge of the park,

and we recall the white corridor,
the nurse, the consultant, her voice
a slow, deliberate statement;
and noted her voice was slightly different
than when we spoke to her last.
And she would talk of spina bifida,
what it is, what it does, and more,
until we were leaving down the white corridor.

We have the phone number for a clinic
in your handbag with your phone
and your lipstick. Your mouth
still dry with the shock says little,
suffice to say what we both now know
of the unknowable future brings us low.
And you carefully fold the piece of paper
with its ten digit number for a clinic

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Leaning

The streets you’ve come to know well:
the short cut, red brick estate you drive through,
and the statue in the town centre
of someone long-since forgotten.

And leaning further, see through the window
more of the Midlands town in which you work,
and begin to think, only slightly,
of how it must link one to another,

and then your mind gets busier:
all those others, in cars, on buses,
that if you meet, you meet only briefly.
The far reach of this not lost on you,

and leaning further see through other windows
and other places that stop making sense,
until you’ve come so far
that all you can do is lean on yourself

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Into the black scarf of heat, the night
a rinse of sweat
under the veil of the mosquito net,
I fell asleep to flip-flop shuffles and the never-quite
shush of the guest house staff.

And was surprised before the cockerel’s hour,
an elephantine trundle,
to hear the deep-down grumble,
the walls shake with the sheer power;
I fumbled delinquently for a torch.

Awake once more I stayed windowside
and more came,
not long to wait for the same
unforgiving thunder, the dim discs of headlights
and then the big bruisers, the juggernauts,

their cargo a wealthy sum of dollars,
the teak turned
like dead giants bare and firm,
turned into weights from the chainsaws’ labours,
and criss-crossed in a stitch of ropes.

The guest house staff were nonchalant, shrugs
and a few befuddled grins,
after all a busy road brings
the cash-smitten drivers; and finger smudged
leaves of money, so many tatty notes.

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