Submit your work, meet writers and drop the ads. Become a member
Stanley Wilkin Jul 2017
Mired in history, coiled around by cheap reflections
On previous ramshackle glory,
Roman armies camped in valleys,
Swords trickling with blood from the battle
On the heath. Bodies covering the bracken
Like a foreshortened locust swarm, wingless

Over the town. The triumphant Italians had there
On the high ground, above the sinuous Col,
Built temples
And baths. Marble hauled in from Sicilian quarries,
Loaded on to Carthaginian ships by fierce North African slaves-
Themselves beaten warriors.
They were in the town when the tribes struck,
Dying in chains.

Before their own savage deaths, they slaughtered
Others, cut them into ragged pieces, decapitated, *****,
Choralling songs of victory, leaving none alive.
That day, the dun hills smelt better!
They torched the temples and wasted the proud theatre,
The slender apogee of culture.

Now the town slumbers in the present,
Burying its past under beautiful gardens, purple flowers and
Raffish gladioli peeking out from unobtrusive suburbs
Stinking of ancient corpses.
Stanley Wilkin Jul 2017
In this contorted frame, badger-like scurrying,
Scrabbling for prey, in the midst of fratricidal disputes-
The dead lingering like ruptured sores-
The dead dripping like candy from Christmas trees,
Our lives meandering, our thoughts remain.

In this dry season drunken men walk like dragons
Scales roaring with white flame:
Fangs like industrial weapons
Formed into one ghastly metaphor, belching shells from darkened trenches
Beating out wafer-thin souls in Basra.
Here Hell soared like a Heaven of scimitars and virgins; angry youths
In Tennessee praying savagely to a dead god-
Lost limbs their accumulated homage
Laid on the altars with terrifying grief.

In the deserts the sun sinks more rapidly, or appears to,
In the deserts wars leave permanent evidence,
Carbonised debris, skeletonised trucks, gutted tanks with flaring giblets;
In the deserts wars are rarely tidied away.
The only thing to rot is flesh.


  2

The street in which they live is regularly cleaned,
Dustbins are emptied once a week. No one there
Hears the rumbling in the basements,
The cold sound of torture puncturing existence,
The fleeting sound of knives sharpening on blunt throats,
Children laughing in back gardens
Bullets whistling through winter weather,
The incoherent dragon feasting on rats.

The postman never calls. He gave up this route
A year ago, fed up of walking in shadows
Dripping with slime. Now, the doorbells chime,
But no one is there.
No one answers.


Tuesday morning an archangel called. No one was home.
He left a card waggling his wings
In frustration. Oh, how the archangel missed god,
Dumped here among the heathen
In an urban utopia-wanting so much to die.
The beatitudes of heaven, of choirs, of clouds, of shame,
Closed to him for infinity,
God rapping his pure finger-tips on celestial glass coloured
Green and blue, resembling his third best creation.

The archangel, like all his kind, had grown bored
And had taken to drugs
To alleviate the perpetual drone of eternity,
Committing genocide occasionally to relieve his despair,
Seducing women when that paled
Creating new religions, once every five hundred years,
When feeling particularly wicked.

Like god, he did not know how to die.



Around god’s head the angels flew
Searching for nits.  Swatting them with his
Infinite, multi-coloured hand
They flew through the darkening universe
Smashed through the earth,
Ending up at the nuclear core searching endlessly for Hell,
While their ominous creator
Smiled. They’d never clocked his humour
After a billion years. Everything he did,
He did in jest.
Stanley Wilkin Jul 2017
THE NYMPH

Beneath the water lived a nymph, beautiful as
A flower- if you like women with petals
Growing from out of their face
And lips adorned with myriad metals
Moving silently with infinite grace.

Fishermen who caught her, in alarm
Tossed her back with dismayed cries
Fearful that she would do them harm
When she exposed her fangs, darting from her eyes,
Forked tongues from each palm.

But apart from all that, she was a delightful creature
As proud as a catwalk model
Sexuality impressed into each feature
Death in each cuddle,
Poison injected from each freshly opened suture.

At the sea’s dark bottom lived the nymph
Devouring fish raw, terrifying sharks and barracuda,
Dining on shellfish and prawns for lunch;
Darting amongst Angel Fish and eels, a hungry aficionada,
Tearing into shreds what she could not crunch.

Gentle with her own kind until coition
Was complete, when if hungry she devoured
Her temporary mate without undue consideration-
No please or thank you. Feeling duly empowered
By her actions, as confirmed by her thunderously satisfied indigestion.

No longer young, her children dead,
She glides through the water from China to France
A preposterous seaweed hat upon her head
And criss-crossing her piebald nose a serrated coral branch.
Her sartorial taste filling even the sharks with fin-quaking dread.

The last of her kind. The others are (literally) toast.
Protected by animal charities here and abroad
She gladly subsists on ambitious swimmers who venture far from the coast-
All she can now catch or afford.
A capricious tyrant until the last, when, victim of a fisherman’s boast

She was hoist up like iniquitous cod
Out of the sea, paraded on the deck while she struggled for breath.
Shot at. Abused. Poked and speared with a steel tipped rod,
Dragged into the harbour, pummelled close to death.
Screaming out, as in unexpected agony she died: “I thought, I thought, I was god!”
Stanley Wilkin Jun 2017
&
buried in his body like a swollen prayer the pain chugged within his heart,
& tearing lungs and guts apart
& gasping for broken air
& dying in filtered solitude, the scare
was a ticket for paradise &
a ticket past hell
Stanley Wilkin Jun 2017
How do we know of god?
By word, visible presence or internally-constructed belief?
Can we read a book and know
That these are a god's words
Or sense that an ambitious man
-great or malevolent-
Created them for temporary gain,
To impress others, or for power.
Is god a grandiose representation
Of either gender, and why should that be?

The myriad flowers scattered around,
wind-blown, gale tossed
are but our planet's codes
Tree and toad
are equal products of earth and time.

Why ask for another kind of being
in a world replete
with every grim and wonderful sort,
in another realm surrounded by
other winged and chubby divinities?
Why believe that old books,
written in time and place,
are products of gods?

Do gods really write so badly?
Stanley Wilkin Jun 2017
They walk and stare and walk and stare
Like I am some alien, not meant to be there.
I ask for help, they smile and nod
And then they simply walk off.
Is it me I ask? Is it me?
Should this place me free
Of one so clearly of another breed?
No, surely not.
That can’t be right.

I ask again, I beg, I plead.
Yet one by one they ignore me
As if I were a rotten seed
Planted by a foreign hand.
It is me. It is me.
They want this place free
Of one so clearly of another breed.
Funny that.

I leave.
I return.
With warmth and smiles I am greeted.
Refinement it may lack
Without a doubt that’s a fact.
But at least it has its humanity intact.
By my son-Stephen Francis
Stanley Wilkin Jun 2017
Walking over the moor on a sunny day, the wind at my back,
I saw before me a woman over-burdened by a voluminous rucksack
She trudged along face against the wind
Reached a gulley filled with bramble bushes and turned around a bend.
I looked for her when I reached her point of departure
But could see nothing. In fact as I looked I became increasingly unsure
That I seen her that day. The moor was full of mist,
And in truth, I was fairly ******.
Walking over the moor the following day
I searched the land for the best possible way
To reach Croven, a village first settled by the ancient Brits,
Whom the Romans had routinely cut to bits,
Where I had left my wife and car.
Going around in circles, up and down, lost in the mire
Of marsh and bog, the mists kept descending
And my return to Croven, wife and car, seemed never-ending
When I saw the woman approach me again
The rucksack straddling her back like a fin
I called out in a tired and plaintive voice
She walked through me over the purple grass in a trice
Stopped, looked back, noticed my agonised expression of a man completely lost,
Squealed, dropped the rucksack and began screaming about a ghost
I did the same belting headlong into the marsh
Dying swiftly there, which I thought was kinda harsh!
I still see the woman when I trudge a sad spectre through the moor
But we greet each other now, knowing each is Nevermore.
Next page