The Girl With Blue Butterfly Hair

—Poems by Andrew Darlington, Ossett, West Yorkshire, England

—Anonymous Artwork 
 

A SQUALID ROMANTIC

questing the air for words,
eyes stalk the hotel lounge
across carpets of faded red concentric circles,
patches of wear in tonsures of thinning hair,
beyond the faintly reflecting glass doors with
their reverse lettering in cuneiform symbols, an
out-of-season promenade is predatory, while a
steel-grey ocean flagellates itself with silent
gull-patrolled waves

I lean forward,
“how to describe a squalid romantic?
the fin-de-siècle of Barnsley reading
Pound’s Cantos in a book-lined room
that smells of stale cooking and sweat,
or then again,
him emerging late afternoon in off-white underwear
from a brass bedstead mountained with a patchwork
of jackets and unmended sheets, him talking of frost
sparking on bottle-tops on a pre-dawn milk-round,
natural bohemian intellectual scratching his beard
with grace—‘poetry is the point of light at the
end of a long dark corridor, there’s nothing else,’
me, upstart prole with hazy pretentions of seizing
and encapsulating all the words I can never speak,
or then again, first meeting,
me drawn by delicate poems on obscure small-press pages,
him working a mustily twilight second-hand bookshop,
sat on a stool with manuscript pages strewn on piles of
trash-paperbacks, untouched by their dog-eared mediocrity,
mentioning Orwell’s Aspidistra that sits in my anorak,
standing back as he irritably sells economic histories, me
wanting desperately to buy a certain garish science fantasy
but feeling intellectually intimidated,
coming away with Ovid in Latin instead…”

I lean back, glass in hand,
beyond the reflecting glass lounge doors
a carrion wind lacerates dead privet,
‘yes, perhaps that’s how it was’
 
 

TWO ONE-LINE HAIKUS
(one by Pris Campbell, and my answer)

scrap metal yard
future archeologists
peer in wonder

future archeologists
peer in wonder
a mountain of ring-pull tabs

__________________

SUMMER SOLSTICE
(for Bruce Hodder)


sometimes I forget
I'm an old guy,
other times
my body reminds me...
 

TO LIVE AN UNFILTERED LIFE

she bleeds from the eyes
in the painting on the hotel wall
a trickle of pigment stain
smears her cheek and neck,
through bleeding eyes she watches
the sketch perfectly aligned
on the opposite wall
of the sleeping girl
with blue butterfly hair,
they watch each other
across the hotel room
where illicit lovers snatch
moments of fleeting paradise,
married one-time lovers
now sleep back-to-back,
lonely travellers jerk-off to
internet porn, drunks throw up,
junkies take pharmaceutical trips,
suicides weep into the night and
the sad Polish maid dreams of Kraków,
she bleeds from the eyes
in the painting on the hotel wall,
watched by the sleeping girl
with blue butterfly hair

__________________

Today’s LittleNip:

You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children.

—Madeleine L’Engle

__________________

Welcome to our latest poet from across the pond, Andrew Darlington! He’s had masses of material published in all manner of strange and obscure places, magazines, websites, anthologies and books. He’s also worked as a Stand-Up Poet on the “Alternative Cabaret Circuit”, and has interviewed many people from the worlds of Literature, SF-Fantasy, Art and Rock-Music for a variety of publications (a selection of his favourite interviews were collected into the ‘Headpress’ book, I Was Elvis Presley’s Bastard Love-Child). His latest poetry collection is Tweak Vision (Alien Buddha Press), while his new fiction collection, A Saucerful Of Secrets, is now available from Parallel Universe Pub. His Scientifiction novel, In The Time Of The Breaking (Alien Buddha Press) was published in January 2019.

And check out Andrew’s website, Eight Miles Higher—The Blogspot for People Who Don’t Like Blogspots. Latest postings include “Tales Of Wonder: the fully detailed story of Britain’s First-Ever SF magazine, The Walking Dead: The First Nine Seasons.” See andrewdarlington.blogspot.com for monthly updates.

Thanks for stopping by the Kitchen today, Andrew, and don’t be a stranger!

Tonight at 5pm, Poetry Off-the-Shelves poetry read-around meets in Placerville at the El Dorado County Library on Fair Lane. Scroll down to the blue column (under the green column at the right) for info about this and other upcoming poetry events in our area—and note that more may be added at the last minute.

—Medusa, dreaming of blue butterflies in her hair, instead of these darned snakes ~

 

Andy Stoned

Andrew Darlington

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