Poetry Book.

 
  
 
  
 Chintz
 Tambourine clash
 Smash (music)
 A piping wail
 Hoots
  
 
  
 Day of the Cars
 A graze of grass sheep
 Hedgerow making a hegemonic skyline
 Wires cutting clouds
 Wonky dyke drive in
 Nettle Eureka
 Stacks without smoke
 Wrought iron window -
 Blurs a face in pastel blue.
  
 
  
 Day of the Crane
 Rocks the hill
 Lateral this time
 Just cross over
  
 Chevron bypass
  
 The high street's as empty as the daytime
 Every where's empty even out back
 The sky, the trees with no leaves
  
 Noticeable about the playground
 The sand
  
 Following the big black glass
 At the transport station – I walk into you.
  
 
  
 The skull in the bramble's
 Picked clean by scavengers
 Old before your time.
  
 A selfie on the road
 Skull time is skull time
  
 Smashed in a white torrent rolls
 A giant shining black trunk
 Cactus wave, nod, interested observers.
  
 Now's for the winding
 Next, you'll dry up
 But now the lagoon is – action.
  
 
  
 You're so pretty squatting amongst the rocks
 Which keep their own rites
 Remember how clean you look in the forest
 Nobody's like you.
  
 Look down, i'll look up.
  
 Back again, every where's deserted
 Kinda eerie
 There's a fence between me, the rest.
  
 Dense foliage. Smoke on the horizon
 The enclosures are the worst
 Because they look like the best then get you.
  
 Blow sky
 Don't diminish more
 I can scarcely keep you in.
  
 
  
 A high nest on the lowlands
 Here come the Imaginals.
  
 Watch my stick.
  
 Into the mouth of the cave's roar
 A flood freeze
 Does time freeze, flood or fall?
  
 Nosey Chico.
  
 Perspectives unfold
 Nice profile
 Chewed up most of that.
  
 
  
 Day of the Crane
 Rock cleaver. Leveller.
  
 Beauty keep your eyes shut
 Where's it gone
 Oh shit
 Rotate baby
 Suspicious, wandering abroad without visible
 Means of support.
  
 
  
 A white cathedral
 In a city through the trees with leaves
 Who could ask for anything more
 Skip along
 Moonlight through the pines
 Hogey. Cakes. Nifty. Hooded.
 Get the picture!
  
 
  
 There's something about moss
 Life's tough
 Short cuts are stressful, as well
 Out in, in out
 That's landscape cheating in the original!
 Repetition is not completion.
  
 
  
 Say panter not panther
 I'm in saliva
 Wrangle, tangle
 I bear witness to your fall
 Helpless before your might
 It's your deal.
  
 Coming back, it's still deserted
 Day of the Crane.
  
 
  
 Day of the Car
 Hood into the snow
 Much time spent waiting
 Come over here sweetheart.
  
 
  
 After the bath
 Night lights. Skyline a selfie. Scarfed.
 We come in peace – so what!
 Grotesque obelisks – endure us
 It's just days for you!
 A portrait will do
 On the street, no one meets
 first one, last one, beggar man, thief
  
 Fame as we all know is an illusion,
 What's upstream?
 Day of the Imaginals.
  
 
  
 Share, share alike
 who's pulling who?
 Deserted again
 Framed.
  
 A solitary mister
 On the look out in the lowlands
 Halfway bridge, cross both ways
 Under the arches
 Just a step, careful -
 Upstream, downstream, in the stream, where!
 That's it, stand in the middle.
  
 
  
 Rain drops, bird shit
 Fractals in summertime
 Who's lost?
 In the circumference, on the periphery
 Roll,
 Primroses wild in a meadow sweet straw hat
 Arms akimbo
 She, he munching the same cud.
  
 Moving on is a must
 The great, the small huddle
 Stone, - paper in the solarium.
  
 
  
 Day of the Crazy Carnival,
 Flags, crucifixes
 Pattern soliloquy with a dazzle
 but the antennae steal the show
 in an odds on – hurrah!
  
 Lotus versus lilies, splatter the pane
 As magic appears again, in a sliced frame.
  
 A saloon's interior – plus furnishings
 A dilapidated roof where the green abounds
 Weather matters in the symmetry.
  
 Footpath. Wind generator. Harvested field
 Fern
 On the way she pirouettes on air, there
  
 To the Pond
 Fish, fishermen
 An hour ago
 Temporary emergency
 Closure
 3 ways to nowhere
 Pay Here
 Go green at the Pond
 Day of the Pond.
  
 
  
 White mannequins in high window
 A getting wed celebration
 Shot on location, city in a window
 According to law.
  
 
  
 Story of a dog, what follows on
 High rise, she poses in a garden of roses
 Frog at Pool Farm
 Do not touch
 Danger overhead. Loose dogs on patrole.
 Pick your own here, at a price.
  
 
  
 It's an unnatural dead end
 A National Trust cul de sac
 Back at the farm – a fine day
 To grow, property.
  
 Leftover tractor's out
 a world war relic
 an outlaw, unwanted in every land.
  
 A 30 foot the wind generator
 Heralds the patchwork downs
 Behind the field the battery foreclosure
 Non-giving slopes, scrub
 A fine day for what, unrelenting power!
  
 
  
 Everybody knows reflection deceives
 Water lilies, moor-hens
 Sunken branches in their shadows
 Are all in their boundaries
 Layers of surfaces where we drown in shine
 across on the peripheral horizon
 In attendant regard they stay in non committal
 stares on the edges of muddy banks.
  
 
  
 So expensive – Monumentals
 Shoppers in displays. Christmas trees
 Identifiable by their electric coronas.
  
 Streets are ghosts
 Mew in the park
 Stay, forever stray.
  
 Coffee table bird time
 Perch which-a-way
 You peek that-a-way
 I'll peek this-a-way
 Look straight up.
  
 More monuments
 Inside crinkly colours
 Embalmed in sweets
 Outside more ghosts
 Even with the ladder
 You carry to climb out from
 Where the shadows carry you.
  
 
  
 Clipped in a mirror on a silver stair
 A sectional action recorded
 In a space time bloc
 Whose being had!
 Tombstone blues on the pavements
 Bull fights – Bull shit
 Make my day.
  
 
  
 Paper floats as air boats
 Hanging besides the stair
 Clock on the wall
 Locked door
 Glass walls
 Sit in the New Gardens
 Paper refreshments, art décor
 All the world's a collage
 On your doorstep
 On the polished wooden bench
 Where you mustn't die
 On this occasion in the Arcade.
  
 Lest we forget
 Time branches in the mist
 A mix of entropies.
  
 
  
 Artifice in perspective
 From a high window watch the queue
 In the rain paying to go in.
  
 I'll watch you walk out
 Follow your backs
 Against the back of the day
 A day's visit down river, bank bikes
 Cathedral caught in a glimpse
 Between trees
 Instanced in a stacked stance
 The barges being for the other.
  
 Under the bridge again
 Cat on the roof, (Black)
 There was a plague
 A multitude in pastiche
 Heads up everywhere
 Old Masters eternally retouched
 Ghosts forever young, where we fade.
  
 Offices to let
 Sitting out history on the lawn
 Where no birds sing, a few pigeons
 Alms at the Workhouse, hard times
 Every tower aspiring sweetly like a flower.
  
 
  
 Sheer in carved stone it looms before its minions
 Inside the double white non parking line
 We stand around between pickets
 In the name of tyranny.
  
 To see or not to see, mere mereness of distortion
 As if the far side were the other side. As if
 One step were an inexorable impossible reach
 Not to its impossibility but to serve only ruins.
  
 Daytime is a sham of inverted symmetry.
  
 
  
 Beyond the blur
 It glows down the strand
 Hidden in foreclosure
 A gem gleams.
  
 On crowded sunny days
 Heroic kudos to their statues
 On a deserted place by night
 A glittering cone of light
 A winter festal. Emptiness.
 A grey bell tower chimes the hour
 Adds a person in less than a minute.
  
 
  
 Bubbles beneath the surface
 Amazing amber in golden silt
 The hazes are in flight
 Bridle the day
 Growth, overgrowth is not so lush
 Wreckage of our spoil
 A poisoned banquet for all
 But for a day.
  
 
  
 We must peer down
 There's room in the street for us
 The ultimate consummation
 Hunger is a cause
 Try it side on – both
 The wood's laid out in plan
 Round another magic bend
 Behold, Day of the Plague.
  
 
  
 Access to the land is denied
 Use your wristwatch after arrival
 Don't look now - it's behind you
 At last form, lilac on the hill
 Time to pose.
  
 
  
 Lets try it in reverse
 Turn twice, above us only bell
 How picturesque, the large
 By the wayside, which side are you on?
 A relic of yore, want to play?
 No exit from the bus stop
 Is this an argument for sufficient reason?
  
 
  
 Almost spot on
 Suddenly it's lilac again
 Whose playing anyway?
 Another time
 Close up you fall but shouldn't
 Close close the water waits
 Waits more still, the whichaway sign
 Advances the retreat.
  
 
  
 A garden of your own
 Tooth in claw after all
 No where’s safe.
  
 What's that
 A workhouse turned theatre
 Burlesque in a cartoon charade
 Civilisation is never far away
 Just round the corner in fact
 Follow the path you can't get lost
 Names name names.
  
 
  
 It will have to do
 It's choice after all, isn't it.
  
 Either the sky or us
 Take your pick
 Is it a UFO or the government.
  
 Only the downs sing on
 Caught up pointing nowhere
 A place from before
 On the crown of its own desolation.
  
 Meanwhile on a broken wing
 Clouds tangle with the moon's moment
 A sufficient distortion of fact.
  
  
  

Robin Ouzman Hislop was an Editor at the 12 year running on line monthly poetry journal Poetry Life & Times, now at Artvilla.com, as its Editor. He has made many appearances over the last years in the quarterly journals Canadian Zen Haiku, including In the Spotlight Winter 2010 & Sonnetto Poesia. Previously published in international magazines, his recent publications include Voices without Borders Volume 1 (USA), Cold Mountain Review, Appalachian University N Carolina, The Poetic Bond Series, available at The Poetic Bond and Phoenix Rising from the Ashes an Anthology of Sonnets. He has recently completed a volume of poetry, All the Babble of the Souk , publication now available. He is currently resident in Spain engaged in poetry translation projects.