a literary magazine.
Four Poems...
December 19 ‘21
Dusk comes down like ashes,
a shellburst
from a fire
gutted
sky.
Traffic crawls
in stop
start stall;
when then
a leisured bird makes dark
unclear
its monstrous
petalled
flutters.
Factory stacks wave tuneless
flags
and beyond
the plant, a mile or two,
the mica
shine of sunset rarefies
the either eye
of day.
Fragmenting the Night
Darkness drips to the garden
through the sieve of the stars
and the splendid silver moon
collapses on its rotted mast.
I close my eyes. My imagination is blank as a book without letters;
an absence, perhaps more like
an emptiness
or a laboratory of nothingness.
The garden is near the end
of its life. Its hedges are withered, and last year’s tawny leaves
still hang on its trees.
There is a greenhouse somewhere in the south, half grown
over on its murky pagoda of weeds. Beyond the greenhouse, open ground. Empty fields.
The autumn sky’s abyss.
Above the shorn fields, the telephone wires hiss like iguanas
as the north wind returns,
bringing back
the night
and the blackboard
the imagination requires.
Billy
Nothing to see here except a touch of hoof and horn; in general, nothing sinister, just a file-on-iron abrasion for conversation, a touch of Devil’s Chuckle—Paganini, B-flat major. An agate— cracked—rolls in its socket and reflects the landscape, inverted, as the ebon chapel of the tree-torn, branch ripped sky opens in prelude to purposes dark, dark for heaven and us.
Finding a Voice
As a writer I am dumb; faux prosaist, my words shrivel and die on the page like animalcules over-scrutinised on a biologist’s
slide.
As a poet
I am worse—a wolf
in a church of words, chewing
on metaphors and choking
my throat with verbs. Lexiconic beast salvific, aprowl—
stalking the dark arrhythmias of Dante, Bishop, Bukowski and Frost. In the absence
of imagination,
depollinated of meaning, of muse— deprived of the honest
amanuensis
of an empty room, I snarl at Merwin’s formidable yoke and gnaw at the storied bones
of Plath, the tarnished amplitudes
of Hughes.
Bio: Thomas Farr is a British writer of fiction and poetry. He enjoys travelling, running, reading and writing. He tweets @TFarrHorror