WordSalad: The Poetry of Luke Prater

.

soft fall,
upturned hands;
luxuriate in let-go forget.

the relief trust brings
the falling leaf, held aloft
with an exhalation

of cobalt firmament;
ephemerality taken
with soft, upturned hands,

and held.

☆

Join us for Meeting the Bar: Crit and Craft at d’Verse Poets’ Pub where we are exploring the Craft of Poetry and the giving and receiving of Constructive Criticism. Bring a poem to link and pull a stool up to the bar.

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Amy Winehouse (14 Sept 1983 – 23 July 2011) British R&B/Soul/Jazz singer

I sat with death at twenty-seven.

If death an absence of life, I was alleywayed alongside.
Lying, unafraid, catching a fox’s bark – that eerie
cry for carnal comfort – around the copse across the track.

I wasn’t to be taken back to Earth and Sky;
neither was the fox. Morning light split my face
and drove all nocturnes down.

Cobain’s split by double-barrel self-prescribed
for the deepdarksink; Jimi, Janis, Morrison’s
by uppers, downers and bangdownupside vomit.

Twenty-seven, twenty-seven, twenty-seven.

Read the news today (oh boy). Amy Winehouse, twenty-seven.
Rolling out and unfolding the appled silverback, announcing
online, with every ounce of gravity cyberspace allows -

‘I survived twenty-seven’.

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Bangkok Redlight District

If inauspicious that Roma
had love back to front,
what tragic prophecy

in naming Bangkok.
Phuket a beach for
boorish tourists

paying pittance in tuk-tuks
take-take-taking on
lascivious escapade.

☆

Onomast: a person who studies the history and origin of proper names

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There was a time
when sex was a capricious portcullis
and platonic playmates were few;

those I knew were bent, or bent the rules
and fools we felt when we lost the love,
not that I dug the push and shove, but

guys were vastly less complicated for a
hormonally elated-unelated semi-obscene
and masturbated hetero teen.

The portcullis guard was put in the stocks
and pelted with boxes of rancid tomatoes
for being a toxic incompetent sot;

his successor took the task seriously.
Mishandled once or twice, but the
emotional intellect of Circles of Sisters

buried a derelict teenage libido,
swiftly short-shrifting potential fowl-play of
an inner turkey, and chickens were made of

single-night Braves, limping lacklustre hungover.
After Custer’s last one-night stand with ten
beers in one hand, I opened my arms to Plato.

Circles of Sisters (prose-poetry)

There was a time when sex was a capricious portcullis, and platonic playmates were few; those I knew were bent, or bent the rules, and fools we felt when we lost the love, not that I dug the push and shove, but guys were vastly less complicated for a hormonally elated-unelated semi-obscene and masturbated hetero teen.

The portcullis guard was put in the stocks and pelted with boxes of rancid tomatoes for being a toxic incompetent sot; his successor took the task seriously. Mishandled once or twice (more nicely), but the emotional intellect of Circles of Sisters buried a derelict teenage libido, swiftly short-shrifting potential fowl-play of an inner turkey, and chickens were made of single-night Braves, limping lacklustre hungover.

After Custer’s last one-night stand with ten beers in one hand, I opened my arms to Plato.

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Beneath my nose
I run a happy thumb
across the top of the pages

so they flurry and flail uniformly,
wafting upwards the exquisite smell
of factory-fresh paper.

‘Can I help, sir?’, unhelpfully.
I consider offering her a turn,
but she’s got a bookshop-full;

this one’s mine.
On the bus, I sneak my hand
into the paper bookshop bag

touch the smooth cover, finger
the impossible symmetry of the pages,
run a hand down the perfect spine.

Sitting with it on my lap, on the bed,
I ease off my jacket and slowly,
very slowly, remove the bag.

Hardly breathing -
a soft flick, another deep smell,
I pull back the front cover

I’m in.

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Tony Blair addressing Britain

Ex-’president’ Bush and Mister
Blair thought they’d play God,
create Hell somewhere.

Take those black, widowing hands
and say your earnest prayers,
because, sure as Hell:

you’re going there.

.

☆

This was written in 2009, when Tony Blair’s New ‘Labour’ Government was still pacing the Corridors of Power in Westminster, though he had wilfully, as planned, given up the Premiership to Gordon Brown by then. Quoting something about ‘health’, and admitting popularity was a problem (for him, and for his Party), he resigned an ashen-faced shadow of the young and vibrant man who came to Government with a landslide in the 1997 UK General Election. The ‘War on Terror’ continues, George W Bush and Blair never held to account for quoting ‘Weapons of Mass Destruction’ (and links to Al-Qaeda) as reasons for  invading Iraq in 2003. None were found.

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.

‘Blue Dress’ -
can that be your epithet?
I’ll put it with your name.

It’s pushed ‘Pink Top’
out of my mind,
but I was careful to catch it

before it broke on the tiles.
While away some hours
indulging in your get-up,

get down. Brown thighs;
French knickers. There’s another.
What can I peel away from

petite and lissome (stopping
to smell for the unhinging
bouquet of your body), to further

festoon a fool’s brain with?

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Today, according to my Events Diary,
was the International Day of Peace:
Tuesday the twenty-first of September.

If I hadn’t remembered
to write what I needed to do tomorrow,
Wednesday the twenty-second of September,

I may never have noticed that today was
the International Day of Peace.
Uncannily though, mine was rather troubled.

Had laundry to do, and the colours ran.
Wondered how many others
didn’t feel the Peace? I scoured the Internet for

news stories of ceasefire, just for today,
in Afghanistan.
For reports of football played in

No Man’s Land, dribbling around land-mines,
using helmets for goalposts.
Enemies shaking hands,

tasting happy sweat for the first time in forever.
Three hundred and sixty-five days;
one dedicated to Peace.

And the damn colours ran.
I wondered, as I folded my spoiled laundry,
if the colours had bled in Kandahar today.

☆

I have been reading the two-time US Poet Laureate Billy Collins lately. Being the sponge I am, inevitably a poem was to vomit forth in his style. This is a first for me, writing so low-key in tone yet attentive to small detail, and more notably, with no aural poetic device whatsoever bar some repetition of key words/phrases (and very little visual device either).

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Blurred, doubled, indistinct: object
edges softer than sheepskin. Wobble
amorphous like double-dees jogging

bra-less; there are two guitars on
the wall from this distance, this angle.
Dangle persistence in a pool of piranhas;

headache, mind-fake, double-take.
Walk round in a fuzzy haze, days flow
into days, semi-sound in a muddled

stupor. Through counterfeit pink-tint
eke out this vista existence; deep
sunset sky to safety, yet too far for

these arms to stretch. Too far for
these hands to fetch, too far, too far.
Rescind want, accept: ephemeral me.

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Arise out of ashes a smeared Phoenix,
hanged, hanging, hung with a sweaty
Coalition tie. Sins of the Spin-Father

forgiven and forgotten; beget and
begotten one rotten apple in the
barrel, taken out and tossed aside.

Tosser you are, to toss it that far.
Let it compost in the Common Garden,
Guardian of the Common-Folk.

Common yoke we all bear; give us our
share of the Open Source spring you
jeopardise. Closed-Circuit TV and ‘Net

passive-listeners rape Civil Liberty.
Threaten with threat of terrorism -
protect me? Nothing to hide, nothing

to fear, you’ll say, in that way, that way
we’ve become numb to. Bored now
by your snakes in the grass; kiss my arse.

Get round the table with the guys in those
sweaty other-coloured ties we made you
embrace, ash smeared on your ashen face.

The UK General Election imminent, my dream is for a hung Parliament – and this time round, it’s very much a possibility. A hung Parliament and Coalition will scare-force the politicians into cooperation and at last we may see some sense in UK politics. My fear is that, in many constituencies, the Liberal/Green vote will be split – or even the Liberal/trad. Labour vote, which should be united against a common adversary: David Cameron. Not to demonise the man, but he may well soon be calling himself Prime Minister if we split the vote.

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