From a Beach in Crete (Summer 2019) by Mick Corrigan

Mick Corrigan’s poems have been rejected by some of the finest magazines around, his debut collection, “Deep Fried Unicorn”, was released in to the wild in 2015.His poems have been nominated for The Pushcart Prize (USA) and The Forward Poetry Prize (UK). His second collection if ever completed, will be launched on an unsuspecting public like a clown fired from a cannon. He plans to do wild and reckless things with his hair before it’s too late.

From a Beach in Crete (Summer 2019)

A deep chest chant from the sand raking man, love song for his mother sea, close by the hut of driftwood and palms the languid moon-touched sisters wait, combing out their seaweed hair tying it back with brooches of bone, hollowed from the shipwrecked men broken on a crown of thorns.

White mote in the distance, God sailing her yacht,

sails full, tiller down, utterly indifferent to everything but the tide.

The Bleak Winter Dreams of a Social Media Content Moderator

A dreaming horse in frosted fields, witches’ knickers in the trees, the well of bad weather getting colder and deeper as a dark river runs through the sleep of our dead. Erotic chanting hot as blood, carnal balm for a troubled mind, the trembling hand reaching to touch all the breathy “what if’s”, never more than a yard from a salty mortal sin, the slumbering town is twitchy tonight. A pinstripe prince from the chamber of commerce, eyes like poke holes in a plate of lard, drinking dark spirit from a fat lipped bottle while angry weather climbs over the windows. His curated life never once troubled by even the waft of a tremulous fart though down by the lake when the water is clear you can still see the faces of his drowned.

The lumpy land like an unmade bed left by a creature most concerned with itself, a virgin boy on a humming rail, arms wide like a welcoming Jesus washed in the light of a heavy goods train, sometimes these times are more than the weather, sometimes these times are the sum of all winters, never more than a yard from a salty mortal sin, the slumbering town is twitchy tonight.

The Wild Sleepless Nights of Late Middle Age

Some shithead shouting out in the dark, offering to fight his neighbours or the moon. Anxiety murmurating beneath respectable roofs, sleepless over block-chain technology, crypto currencies and the essential thread count of expensive, cotton sheets. The night-light odyssey of people who don’t wave when they’re drowning.

A samurai sword and a giant tv, proud on a lilac coloured bedroom wall, each mocking the other as a ghost wolf raises her muzzle to the air. In the pagan fields at the foggy gather of those who died from blind optimism and unshakeable faith, a small bird trapped in a barren tree heart fluttering against the ageing ribs. Beside the tidal river of sleep a wild hare on the winter grass dark eyed and ethereal, sleek, agile, ancient. Light in the east new made.

Forty Days of Fasting, Abstinence and some Mushrooms Scavenged from Under a Rock

You were a found poem, a stolen song, dying on the desert floor, a revenant sea gone to dust, home to scorpions and erotic dreams of cold, beading water across the map of a beloveds’ skin, your magical mind telling you stories beneath a carousel of pale, carved horses.

Bees and Bells Humming, Pealing. Out of the haze, a firebird in silk, carrying a posy of night blooming flowers, silver robe and white sand shimmer, a necklace of souls reciting their sins. Flaying wit of dark eyed bright smiled at your hallucinating head, from a fashionable bag of stretched, ancient faces drew honeycomb and crown of thorns, slipped the robe from smooth brown shoulders, whispered to your groaning form “time to talk of pleasure and freewill”.

© Mick Corrigan/liveencounters.net