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Terry Collett Mar 2015
And Helens mother says as Helen climbs down the stairs of the building mind the road and dont talk to people you dont know and make sure you get the right change from Baldys you know what hes like Helen holds the stair rail and takes one step at a time as they are quite steep and she doesnt want to fall down in her small palm she holds the coins for the shopping and they are becoming damp as she holds them so tight and in her other hand she holds a bag to put the shopping in and thinking over in her mind how much change she ought to have if her sums are right and she thinks she has got it right although Baldy will get it right no doubt but she must try and get it right or her  mum will tell her off she reaches the lowest stair and stands there looking back up the stairs and waits to hear if her mother has stopped talking and its all quiet and so she moves out into the street and the sky looks grey and rainy looking and that man is on the corner in his black coat buttoned up to his neck and the black trilby hat and he looks at her as she passes and she looks away her mother had said dont talk to people you dont know and she doesnt know him but her dad said the mans a bookies runner although shes not seen him run anywhere as yet although he may run when shes not looking and she wonders as she passes him what a bookies runner is and why he stares at her so he doesn't look friendly in fact he looks like a criminal as far as she knows what a criminal looks like the man turns away and gazes up Rockingham Street and she walks quickly to Baldys shop and climbs over the steep step that leads into the shop and it is quite full and so she waits her turn behind Mrs Knight who is a tall thin lady from upstairs who has cats and she smells of cats and when she looks out of her door when at home she looks like a cat too Helen sniffs yes cat smell she thinks and looks at Mrs knights coat and sees cats hairs and she holds a purse in her thin hand and a shopping bag in the other Helen being only eight years old cant see beyond Mrs Knight but at the side she can see other people at the counter and Baldy is busy and his assistant is rushing about quite madly Helen thinks she ought to have gone to the loo before she came out shopping because now she feels like she needs to *** but she doesnt want to go back home again so she tries to think of something else to take her mind off of the *** wanting feeling then someone taps on her shoulder and as she turns she sees its Benny the boy from school who lives up the road and whom she likes and who doesnt call her four-eyes or take the mickey out of her hello Helen says looking at Benny what you doing here? shopping for Mum he says holding up a brown shopping bag got a list or ill forget I always forget he says he moves close to her and shows her the coins wrapped in a paper list in the palm of his hand you shopping too? he asks yes she says looking shy and gazing at him got to get some things I can remember what Mum says and what change I have to get afterwards he studies her as she stands there her hair in plaits with a center parting and the wire framed glasses which make her eyes look large and cow like and the faded red flower dress and green cardigan with two buttons missing what you doing after? he asks dont know she replies why where are you going? going to the herbalist he says get some liquorice sticks and a glass of sarsaparilla could I come too? she says if Mum lets me and Ive done all that she wants? sure you can he says meet me by the Duke of Wellington if you can go about ten or so if youre not there by ten past ten Ill go without you he says she nods her head and hopes she can go and looks at him standing there his brown hair and hazel eyes and a cowboy hat at the back of his head and the six shooter in the belt of his blue jeans and she feels happy for the first time since shed got up and she says can Battered Betty go too? sure he says and she smiles and senses her heart go quickly in her chest thump thump thump thump yes Helen what can I do for you? Baldy asks her as she is next in line to be served so she recites what her mother had told her so much sugar in a blue package and a certain amount of cheese and a pound of broken biscuits and a loaf of bread and o yes a dozen eggs she says offering him an empty egg box and he goes off to fulfil the recited list and Benny is served by the assistant and he hands the man the list and the man reads it and goes off to put together the items on Benny list and suddenly Helen feels the need to *** again and hopes Baldy wont be long getting the stuff she asked for and o yes Benny says my old man says hes taking me to the pictures on Sunday did you want to come? he wont mind its a U film so kids can go too she pushes her knees together hoping Baldy will hurry up Ill ask Mum Helen says feeling the sweaty coins in her palm and having to pass the bookies runner and hope she wont do her any harm.
A 8 YEAR OLD ******* A SHOPPING ERRAND IN LONDON IN 1955.
Robin Carretti Jul 2018
The Amazing Grace
Face
Place
Glance-dance

"Her Pleasure" Eiffel Kiss France
The lost place trance-spell-
You should see the look
on your face
*        *        
It wasn't her wishful thinking
Bringing her deep love the wishing well
  fuller up guilt tells the trips
Feeling lost but it turns Global
somehow it follows rose stem rural
Hard pillow but painful
The glow her words felt like a burn
His wicked candlelight so stern
smile concert rearranged

Too many heavy metals
Iron Clad Civil war deeply hanged
Something changed all deranged

Change of weather
England his hands are happy
needing more water to sprinkle
The happiest  time in London
Pub cheerful Lad star twinkle

I saw her standing there

Her friend was reminiscing
but lost some memories
Until an image appeared of him
she found herself

Pleasurable oneself she was
Wondering feeling the thunder
now as two cockpit rambler
Being lost on the shabby
chic shelf
The Greyhound those
Siberian Huskies with her
plaid hankies

The race is on those bookies
Growing and howling I was lost in his
Skydiving but I didn't see him
going down bits and pieces
The picture shows what a blow
falling for Autumny leaves
High price got low
Lost his smile that was my pleasure
Reaching
Stretching
The praying Mantis Rosary

How do I resume soup consume
Sipping his alphabet words
Always lost it said
Innocuous
Delicious Dove flight
Details of the lover wings
then there split in two lost
Like an experiment pleasurable host
They are strangers in the night-star
Or the economy of life went too far
Like the mosaic artsy wife

Being loved its drawn to you
The intense side
Sunnyside he's up ******
The contrast comes closer
To their bodies hot
streaming intensity
Eyes lost with fragility
Lost in each other what hotties
Procreation

Lifted to the heights seduction
The lost pleasures images rounded
On the edge of
Ecstacy she is lost
but he was found
The mighty cool way of thinking in her
pleasurable fun wedges less
said without a sound
Not about apples and oranges
Sweeter and hotter but her lips got dryer
The lost painter the splash on her cheeks
Her sheer face lost inside the curtain
Her wetness arise on her lips
What high waves she had and
he the showstopper

Pleasurable but hot wilderness
her wildflower caves happy camper
So demure with an allure
The lost pleasure when you find
it the whipped cream she became the
Debutante what Suzette
Meeting her it was her pleasure
The hard teeth bite that ****** apple
crushed  it came
rolling down
the hill
She caught his jelly roll
His little bite burst her dream soul
Moving on with pain
how can we
meet our pleasure

Whats lost can be found freely
The taste is always there
The pleasure we try different
methods not always nutritious

Someone lost inside her delicious
Like the lost lobotomy

Of the Rite
This wasn't *** education of the
Deans list pleasurable digest
How it leaps up every year
Leap Year, not the frog to kiss
Finding love constitution
Follow me we are on our
next mission *
my pleasure what
are you waiting for?
Being lost in someone's love can be difficult  somehow it gets
harder to find our way every day  but the pleasure word is like a God and the pain word makes it painfully sad being lost is not something to take lightly add some fun the whip-cream and get to her pleasure of her cherries there are so many love theories
Melissa Nye  Jul 2013
Poem 2.4
Melissa Nye Jul 2013
How I feel for you is like trying to remember your dreams or recollecting where you left your phone,
Because I don't know where it started from,
Just like how I don't remember the exact moment when my head hits my pillow for the first time,
Or when I took my first phone call or replied to the first text that came through.
I can't retrace my steps to where it all began.
Because it was so slow,
And I don't ever intend to recognise the position I am in at 2:36am while trying to get some beauty sleep or the angle of my phone on the coffee table next to a tea stained coaster,
Just like how I didn't intend to realise the beauty of your face, the outline of your jaw or the mannerism of your voice as you say my name for the first time,
And how I feel for you is like a tonne of ******* bricks,
Because I can't even breathe when you're around,
And one by one each brick of insecurities that I have collapses onto me because I can't hold myself up to push away the bricks,
And say how I feel and it's concrete, set in stone that I am not for you.
I don't think that by finding my phone I can figure you out
Or buy myself some time to remove the aspect of sleeping from my life
So I never have to dream again just to live in the only constant of reality
In order to realise that I am naive and young and free minded but I am the world if I want to be.
Tell me, if I remember my dreams like I remember the solar system or the quadratic formula does that make me unworthy?
Because only astronomers can recall the solar system in a flash and only mathematicians use the quadratic formula day by day,
But we are not all astronomers or mathematicians but I know that one plus one equals two, me and you
And I know that as long as there are stars in the sky that you are important to me.
So believe me,
That when I say I need you I need you to need me too,
To need me in the sense that I probably can live without you but the fact of the matter is I don't want to
Because that wouldn't be as far as interesting as the two of us being crazy at 3am by throwing cookie dough at the wall.
Not to need me in the sense that I need you to be next to me every minute of every single ******* day
Because you don't.
You just need someone,
Someone to care or not to care but someone, anyone because then you won't feel even as half as alone as you did the night before
And I know you did as we all did but I want you to want me as in you want me to ride Saw with you at Thorpe Park
And I want you to want to walk me to the bus stop not because it's on your route home.
I can't remember where I've been
Or the dream that I had last night
Or where I left my phone,
But I know that I've been to the moon and back thinking about you
I know that last night's dream was about you stomping on a spider
I know that I put my phone on the breakfast bar of the kitchen.
I know fractions.
I will never know the full story to anything besides from my own stories and histories
Just like dreams and places I've been and where my phone has gone
I know fractions of you like how one third of the time you are sleeping
Three times out of eight you are at the bookies
Half the time you are on my mind.
The next time you remember your dream back to back and recite it like a subtitled drama,
Or the next time you find your phone once you realise you left it on the table on your morning train,
I hope that you recognise that nobody loves like that or lives like that in a constant perfection
I hope you realise how some people don't want to remember their dreams when they wake up because not all of them are good ones,
That sometimes it's best to leave our phones where they are to disconnect from a world of social media for a couple of hours
That maybe it's okay to not remember wherever we wish because bad things might have happened at those points in our pasts
And that's how I fell for you, in little bits.
This poem is Spoken Word.
this girls got it down
when she stomps on the ground
the whole town
looks around
"say what"
what
what
what
(no thanks, macklemore)
when she flips her hair,
and it's in dee air
the boys all go
"heyyoo"
and shout the whole dayyo
caz look here allison
i know you like peanut butter cookies
and your percy jackson bookies
and singin' josh groban
like (you gotta be jokin')
really girl,
you think you got it goin'!
you inspired me
and to climb up in this tree
and write this poem
just so i could show em
that i can take it
as well as dish it
and girl
you the best roommate
you got the best traits
even though you keep me up
caz you be watching 30 rock
and wearing my fav pair of socks
but that okay
caz with you girl, every day
is a par-tay
An Ode to my roommate.
Francie Lynch May 2015
As new immigrants
We were sent
Irish Sweepstakes
Across the blue.
Too young to understand
The ponies,
I understood the secrecy
Of keeping secret
The lottery.
Half a century on,
Life is the lottery;
A more exhilterating
Game of chance
Than a one Punt ticket,
And the bookies
Give good odds.
Punt: Former Irish currency before the Euro.
Edward Coles Dec 2014
My hands are trembling more than usual,
so I have altered my coffee to a camomile tea.
I administer everything as if it were medicine;
a chemist punctuating his day with
guilty cigarettes and vague homoeopathy.
It's all *******, I know-
but whatever gets you through the day...


In the season of advent, my fingers are bitten
down to the quick; throat seared with
half-functioning lighters and fragile matches;
I can scarcely operate either in this state.
The fairy-lights turn the high-street to a runway.
But all I see are charity shops
interceded with bookies and coffee houses.


This home-town exists to keep up my interest
in finding some purpose. A path to eventual escape
from all of these old bonds and ties,
pinning me down with memories of ***,
and all of the street-names I have learned by rote.
*I'm treading water here-
living in the comfort of a sink-hole.
C
René Mutumé Mar 2014
I smoked. There was a good hand in the sky. It looked like a peach draped over tatty buildings. Hemisphere broken open at the end of a fist, and then at the end of an arrow shattering the pieces of night surrounding it, as the moon clouds shot, devouring it.

I flicked my cigarette down on the floor of the fly over instead of flicking it into the avalanche of cars below. Who knows what something as miniscule as a flying tab **** might make a person think. It would not be a fly. It would be a tab ****. It would be something that distracted a driver on the motorway, which they traced back to my finger flicking it.

It would be rude and imprecise, a car loses control and then flips over for a second, then paints the carriageway with ten multiples of itself flying and screaming. The driver flys inside the car. And I continued to cross the fly over. Outside the bookies at 10pm there is a dog looking up at me, his head tilts like he is asking me something, as he starts to follow me, leash dragging.

"Oi! Oi! Where the **** are you going?" A mouth from the ****** says, "Oh me, just down here." I reply, "I was talkin to the ******* dog you ******* mug." The gentleman added. The small white staffy was still looking up at me. Well, one of us is going to have to answer him, his tail said. "Oh ******* then." The mouth says changing back again into the building. "I guess we're going down there then." Schrödinger says, or 'Schrö', as he allows me to call him.

I light another cigarette as more arrows are fired from the sky, more like wet arrows now. "Well you'll need to pick up my leash mate; I don't want to look like a ******." Shrö says, "Ah sorry dude," I say picking it up as we continue to walk.

"Most of the people who talk to me are a little mad." The small staffy says. But why am I called Schrödinger? The staffy asks me. Ah come on, you don't get it? Well I do apologise but I am not that sharp on my quantum theory philosophy, and I am also a dog. Oh yes, I concede to him in my flat.  "Do you mind opening the door to your balcony pilgrim?" He asks me next.

"Sorry sir?" I ask him, "Well it either goes on your floor or I do it outside." He says. I open the door as he asks, and then lean against the frame as he takes a ****, and I watch him. He scrapes his hind legs on the concrete as if forgetting that it is concrete and not soil. You remind me a lot of love, I mention to him, smoking.

“You know what pilgrim? I think I prefer the name Otto Gross.” The staffy says looking up at the mixing night and I hatch open a new can pouring some into his bowl on the balcony. Cheers love. He says. He puts his two front paws on the meter high wall where my balcony overlooks a junk yard, and begins to speak.

“There is my lover! As screamed across sense and filled with conjoined gait, of my eye and hand, I am jealous of the city she walks in, by me, as I am half departed, myself, near a fox that gathers in ball, by me and is a better *****, than me, here, so I learn, from vermin, how to hide, how to fight, and how to re-appear. How to have humour, like theirs, and there unplanned joy-“

Woah “*******”, I’m spewing, a poet dog! A pile of dosh in the equilibrium! I rush back into my flat and grab a pencil and paper, shake a bit, take a sip, keep on listening, then nearly fall **** forwards returning to the balcony scribbling. And there’s a ****** dog talking.

“I trit-trot across roads with my last owner, winning jobs only within tasks of cemetery light, inside and on, the wall; so curled so, as I sleep outside, so sojourned within, grey dusk, car rivers- I spit! Not so far as giants can, just a piece of spittle, just shadow puppets dancing, just marionettes laughing-”
Schrödinger sang on my balcony beginning to howl, making the lid of the box open.

“To ******* the rain. To share within it, its fire, its knowable drench, of skin like hymn, that is so far penetrating, and mingled past flesh, opened and quakeless to the onslaught of lightening swans! The quickening fury, of several slow days, and lives, devouring the metronome of salutes, upon heart buildings coming down like tetrahedrons drawn by many hands, of dusk filth opening to the arrays of data goods and gods, and produced from the pockets of gibbous mooned skies, and I whisper to the tsunami: mood unhung, bellowing away from the dog fights, and unpainted streets, I seem: To be praying...”

Monday may come soon I doubted, watching the staffy speak.

“Planets growing teeth, in the stars and the junk-yarded iris, succour comes, and so do the sad journeying flies, flying in the mouth of many gales, as extremities to the planet’s engine, affordable, losses, condensed in- and danced solarlessly -in, dances of mortuary, and wedding sung precipice, the edge of a gale, happy to blow my face, away, just gust gust gust! And yes. I do pray a little, and past holocaust of saccharine tune, our shame is forgotten in the simple, rhythms, of a cup- a hand, a castle flock of gulls, landing in water.”

A dog wags its tail because it has just shat, his owner gone, bag ready below ****, I feel streets clean with loving owners hostile to the madness, of the furious dozen dozen flies- lobotomised drool, ready and alive enough, to laugh, and if you are knifeless, maybe a lil knackered, from work - - we might haul up: eternity, my love, and have a lil more, humour! In our sheets and face and sky, an take a **** holiday, right where you are stood or sat, walking, or resting.

And there are no gods, but the ones that let you see them creasing their soft cheeks and aging beside you, together, letting time die, parapets soak in the weather, and say: ‘hey’, here are my bones, there has been a lot of twisting done, but all they need, is yours.
Mateuš Conrad Jan 2016
if you spot any spelling mistakes, it's due to the html.*

first match, kick-off 12.30, woke at eleven, door-knock
hangover, whole body, not the amateurish headache
off the binge on a friday disco, sun shining, god almighty
sun shining - eyes like a vampire's,
itch upon itch from the sunlight,
                                          turn it off! turn it off! turn it off!
placed the 5 quid bets on three forms,
spotted all the metaphysical ****** addicts
of anger in the ******'s  shop, felt odd watching them
addicted to the futility of the monetary system.
went back home, overcast came and my eyes were
very much pleased, took to drinking
the best bet odds i could ever get,
8-9 of a bottle of whiskey, started reading
articles about david bowie, and realised,
artist? maybe. entertainer? predictably yes.
the comparison? entertainers attract critics,
artists don't - entertainers attract idol worshippers
centre stage, cult gimmicks, artists pulverise
those heathens with fear, remorse, repulsion,
a one-man show attracts one-man passers-by;
where art flows freely criticism does not follow,
where are flows freely criticism does not follow,
why would it? giving the majority of people
treat art in a debasing way, keeping it a pastime,
a hobby, a way to unwind, a way to test their "creativity,"
to be less boring than the average paper-pusher
pencil-sharpener suit... look, you chose the ease life,
deal with it! i don't want your creative crap in my mailbox;
the last thing i want is a person with roughly 20 poems
to their name, and that lovely phraseology of:
i love languge... i'm sure you do, esp. telling me to be
conscious of metaphors and other techniques,
and a vocabulary so rigid that i'd get more fancy from
the range of onomatopoeias not noted from the animal
kingdom... go on... write the adequate lion's roar.
lize kingston  Aug 2013
starlight
lize kingston Aug 2013
Starlight shines from limousines
On the streets of Monte Carlo
But I'd prefer a cup of tea
In a caff with Gary Barlow.
He'd draw inspiration from
The drabness of the venue
And weave sweet melodies around
The items on the menu.
Spreading sounds of happiness
Around the greasy spoon.
He may be a chub-a-lub
But he sure can write a tune.
I could take him back to mine
To feast on milk and cookies.
Watching pirate DVDs
In my flat above the bookies.

I would part the curtains
So the jealous neighbourhood
Saw me ****** rewarding
The blond scribe of 'Back for Good'.
He could climb atop me
Like he mounted Kilimanjaro
Everything changes forever
Once you've tasted Gary Barlow.

Down to earth despite his millions
Cuddlier than Robbie Williams.
Looking pensive in a vest,
Gary Barlow is the best.
There are those down the bookies and them in the butchers and they're all a bit hooky, a right bunch of wrong 'uns,
young guns.
The police don't have a clue, but you know what?
they're all tooled up too, and what for?
for a war on the streets
blood down the drains,
making widows of wives who'll spent the rest of their lives looking through the curtains on lonely window panes watching blood down the drains.

Reminds me of what's behind me,
back in the days when crazy paving was the craze and the grass was covered in cartoon concrete,
I'd take a seat by the bow front and look out on the car, a Singer Chamois which was green, seen it parked in front of the house on crazy paving where there used to be grass through which no water was able to pass into the water table and so having to go somewhere it went down the drains, a waste of an element because we had no brains.

Hooky's not new it's what some people are and what some people do, we try and we die or we thirst for and win, but I always did think that to waste was a sin and now it is blood down the drains because we've all been trained, it's an army out there and they've got to go somewhere and the drains are open to all.
Richard Riddle Jun 2016
I have had two opportunites to meet Muhammad Ali, once in Oklahoma City(1972) while working for KWTV Channel-9, and the second time in 1975,working for WAVE-TV Channel-3, Louisville, Kentucky, which is his hometown. On each occasion he was in town for some type of benefit appearance. At Channel 3, the sports director was Ed Kallay, who was to do the interview, and who just happened to be Ali's mentor when Ali was much younger and involved with "Golden Gloves", a youth boxing organization. I was a 'director' in the production dept. and it was my job to set up and direct the cameras, etc., during the taping.
He was a fascinating man, eloquent, extremely intelligent, charismatic, approachable, with a great sense of humor. When I introduced myself, he looked at me and said,"I've met you before, in Oklahoma City." Needless to say, "I was stunned!"
During the 'pre-taping' conversation, the three of us were having a cup of coffee. I made a comment on the size of his hands. I placed my right hand flat against his left, thumb to thumb, finger to finger.. He curled his fingers over mine, nearly hiding them. I sure wouldn't want to get hit by him.
He was, admittingly, also a 'bit' of a 'self-promoter.' During that conversation, he made the following comment: "A few weeks before a fight, I start shooting my mouth off, make a lot of people mad, but come fight night they really lay it down, (then took his thumb and swiped it across the open palm of his other hand, simulating the money bets being placed with the Vegas bookies.) let the 'show' begin!" And, did it ever!!

He was also a great humanitarian, donating to various charities, youth organizations, and never forgetting his roots.

A remarkable man! God Bless You, Muhammad Ali!

richard riddle: 06-05-2016
Alexis Garcia  Oct 2013
Strive
Alexis Garcia Oct 2013
I strive to remember when white powder
was the flour
that we would bake mom cookies with
instead of the list of bookies
I keep sin in
and ring in
when I need 'em.

I strive to make clear water, ever clear again
instead of the Everclear I decided
to drown myself in.

— The End —