Poetry Harris Coverley

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE: Harris Coverley

Harris Coverley has verse published or forthcoming in Polu Texni, California Quarterly, Star*Line, Spectral Realms, Scifaikuest, Tales from the Moonlit Path, The Five-Two: Crime Poetry Weekly, View From Atlantis, Danse Macabre, Once Upon A Crocodile, and many others. A former Rhysling nominee and member of the Weird Poets Society, he lives in Manchester, England.

The Gate

I stood in the ginnel in a bright afternoon

hollow stomach acid reflux stinging dry mouth

I stared at the new security gate the one I didn’t want tall wide irreal unnatural astroturfed onto our redbrick reality uglier than any crime against humanity

sat on tall black pillars screwed to the walls leaning on them like a tyrant leans on the weak he ultimately wishes to crush

the guy in house behind ours was in his front garden wearing the stay-at-home shorts that only husbands in their late twenties wear engaged in the arduous task of moving plant pots from one space to another and then another

“so this is it?” I asked him grinning

“yep,” he replied coming to his short grey wall

“I didn’t know it would be so wide,” I said

“no?”

“I thought they’d be like a short human-sized gate in the middle of a fence”

“naw, they said it needed to be wide enough for a vehicle to access it”

“shit man...”

I leaned into him: “y’know if this had been my house I would’ve vetoed it”

“yeah, yeah...” he replied not sure scratching his stubble

“fuck it,” I said,

“fuck it all. Why don’t we just burn the whole motherfucker down?

Right the fuck down.

The whole fucking lot.

Who needs houses?

Who needs gates and fences?

Who needs walls and plumbing?

Who needs electricity?

Who needs prescription medicine?

We can go live in the park... where we outta be.

Why should we continuously allow ourselves to be fitted into a technological system that demands only more of us

more pieces of us regulating us over and over until we’re nothing but interchangeable parts?”

“yeah, yeah...” he repeated vaguely

I looked at him and he looked at me and we both looked back at the gate

“well, see you later man,” I said

“see you bro,” he replied

and I got in my car and drove off to a location I was not sure I was aware of

and he went back to moving his plant pots from one space to another and then another

and the gate remained closed

for I had no key.

(Harris Coverley)

Bottle

sometimes you have an idea or a vision and it is like sensing a breath taken in a passing car with the window down

and then it’s gone rolling off into the horizon with the rest of the day

and a tiny part of you trucks off with it like one of those cans tied to the bumper of a newly married couple rattling along the tarmac shaking side to tinny side

and then there’s not even a hint of anything you just staring at the road into nothing

the memory of the memory folds into itself an origami made of sand

so then you have a moment a scratch of the scalp and you pour yourself another drink

and you hope the road the car is on circles the Universe and back to you

or failing that you manage to make the next car pull over and you catch that breath in a bottle.

(Harris Coverley)

Pile

there are more dead than there are currently alive and quite possibly more than there ever will be alive

Newton said that he stood on the “shoulders of giants” but the rest of us just stand idle on a pile of corpses waiting to make up the next level in the pile

it does not make me sad merely grimace inside

an individual can be lost inside the pile flesh merges into flesh bone into bone blood into red dirt blown away by time’s breeze

I can consider my high blood pressure that lump that won’t go away

and then think of all the other high blood pressures and stubborn lumps the world over

more for the bonfire more for the mountains more for the hills more for the sands more for the soil more for the dust

but if you can just craft a diamond or two and hammer it into that beneath to keep it steady maybe just maybe someone on an upper level might just in some distant time ahead after your bones have crumbled have a click in his brain and think: hey

I remember him he was all right

and then you’ll live for just one more breath and you’d better make it count.

(Harris Coverley)