Featured Poet of the Week --- Miles J. Bell

Smart words

I am going to have to
watch my mouth
these days
when the adolescents
insult me to impress
their grunting friends

I don't look for trouble
I keep my head down
and I suppose I don't often notice
but sometimes I do

time was
I could get away
with responding
with wit that either floored
or baffled them
throwing insults like

evolutionary cul-de-sac

I fucked your father for
a doughnut and the doughnut
was better

or the classic

learn to read

and my height helped
and even though I would never
hit anyone
they didn't know it
or weren't sure enough to
go too far

but these in troubled times
the boys are fearless
carry knives
and it would be a pathetic way to go
stabbed by a lad with less hair
on his balls
than I have
on my toes
sliding weakly to
a wet pavement
listening to swift footsteps
retreating
then nothing but
my own shallow breaths

I will keep quiet

I want to be taken
in the end
by time
listening to the years
gently dissolving behind me

so now
I will save
my smart words
for the
poem.

Anyone who had a home

It's not what you'd call great
architecture but when the fairy
lights refract and reflect from
a thousand raindrops on every
window every backstreet house
looks like home

in the future you will see the world
without leaving your console your womb
with a view the only breeze you'll feel
from the ceiling fan suspended from
your disbelief never knowing
the most beautiful weight is yourself
as you take it off tired feet and you may
start to believe the world's such a small
and ordinary place these days

and I'd argue the hind legs
off Thomas Wolfe when he says
you can never go home again
because I really have to get back
I mean I have several plants to water
and I think I left the bathroom light on
and I understand Tom's saying you can't
get back to yourself but I feel I have to
do that every night after these grey hours
uselessly packing useless packaging
in my alter ego as one of God's
spectral children

till I tap together the heels of my adidas
Ruby Slipper ™ and remember when
we got back from holidays to a cold house
my grandma would sing home again, home again
like a holy ritual and it sometimes made me laugh
but it always made me cry

The good and the wise lead quiet lives

(for William Taylor Jr.)

The whole world's a
noisy place these days.

A phone bleeps
in an infested shopping arcade
and everyone checks
irrespective of whether
they heard their own individual
tone.

Music plays for three quarters of a minute
from the PA system
before another advert for a product
you don't want to buy
but can’t do without.

Every shop has its own version
of music or
something almost like it.

Conversation is impossible
and becomes loud
ugly and
cyclical.

At these moments
all I want
is an old man's pub
before they banned smoking
and watch the sunlight hold my breath
in its warm hands.

Maybe a jukebox
turned low.

The clink of glasses
as afternoon ambles towards evening.

And the hardest thing to decide
is whether this pint
should be followed by another
or a quiet walk
towards home

or something
almost like it.

-----------------------------------
Miles J. Bell is 36 and lives in a UK backwater in the shadow of oil refineries and dockyards. He has released 3 chaps with 2 more on the way; "Everyone knows this is nowhere" (Audacious Art Experiment) and "Propaganda for an ego" (Scintillating Publications). His favourite colour is turquoise, and he lives with a maths teacher, a 3 year-old whirlwind, and a fish tank that won't be empty for too much longer.

Last update : 30-11-2007 04:39

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