"chipboard" poems
A composition, bordered by brown track, white shelter and
yellow line;
off-white, smear-windowed building (background)
hexagonal floors, brutalist mandala;
triangle across the frame, a ***** polluted structure
one half of a red cross logo, boarded windows
- chipboard, corrugation, MDF;
and Southern Rail green is grass in the lower foreground
arrows, words, people.
Jul 12, 2018
Jul 12, 2018 at 10:34 AM UTC
“What kind of life is this?”
Pradesh offers his hands in supplication.
“We should warn them there's nothing here.
My family sold land for the journey.”
Here in a back street
eager to disclose his inner space
Pradesh drags clear a square of chipboard
distressed corners shedding altered wood.
He breast-strokes through a gap
kicked into crumbled brick,
swims in against a thankless tide,
Imagines he's safe here in this place
veiled with yellowing plastic,
the stench of decayed waste crawling brittle walls.
“Others venture here too – in their thousands.”
“We are the Nameless Treaders of Earth.
We share the same contiguous roots,
the same seed, the same flowering.
We share the same goal – survival,
even the unscrupulous....
even you my friend.
Mindful of dissolving into prickly cynicism
he slumps onto his lath-thin mattress,
draws up his knees foetus-style....
and slips into half-sleep, submerged in dreams
of a home to which he can never return.
copyright © Caroline Grace 2012
Mar 2, 2012
Mar 2, 2012 at 10:56 AM UTC
For your birthday this year
I bought you a frame
And put in it a thing
From our last holiday.
I wrote the year in the corner,
See? Just through the glass.
So you'd always remember
That moment together, the two of us.
On the back of the mount
I wrote my love declaration.
Lucid and bold,
So unlike my stifled diction.
Shocked, I replaced
The chipboard backing.
Honest words hidden,
Exhausted, mind rumbling.
And there it will stand
On your shelf quite plainly.
My confession laid bare,
For you to see, daily.
Aug 25, 2014
Aug 25, 2014 at 2:20 PM UTC