David Barnett
Invalid
Down his mine a lad
drags a wagon to
a cage’s cables. Lungs
smutted, he reaches for
the prop-shafts of a forest,
for a blatant sun
among the honeysuckle
musking leverets on a heath.
After his bath
he peers through double-glazing
at a rave, skippy
as the ponies with
their pampas-grass. He craves
its blaze and fugitives,
its giants across the passes
to a sky.
Just
his nickname for her whiffles
through his mother’s tubes,
her turns on the stage
she’ll shortly dodge from
to a night lavish
with cat and poppy seed,
spider fibres.
He’s left
to grow into a sloth
or a patient mole
in his infirmary whose
floors are quarry-tiled and
whose corridors cramp him like
his passage underground.
magazine list
- Features
- zines
- 10th Muse
- 14
- Acumen
- Agenda
- Ambit
- Angel Exhaust
- ARTEMISpoetry
- Atlas
- Blithe Spirit
- Borderlines
- Brando's hat
- Brittle Star
- Candelabrum
- Cannon's Mouth, The
- Chroma
- Coffee House, The
- Dream Catcher
- Equinox
- Erbacce
- Fabric
- Fire
- Floating Bear, The
- French Literary Review, The
- Frogmore Papers, The
- Global Tapestry
- Grosseteste Review
- Homeless Diamonds
- Interpreter's House, The
- Iota
- Journal, The
- Lamport Court
- London Magazine, The
- Magma
- Matchbox
- Matter
- Modern Poetry in Translation
- Monkey Kettle
- Moodswing
- Neon Highway
- New Welsh Review
- North, The
- Oasis
- Obsessed with pipework
- Orbis
- Oxford Poetry
- Painted, spoken
- Paper, The
- Pen Pusher Magazine
- Poetry Cornwall
- Poetry London
- Poetry London (1951)
- Poetry Nation
- Poetry Review, The
- Poetry Salzburg Review
- Poetry Scotland
- Poetry Wales
- Private Tutor
- Purple Patch
- Quarto
- Rain Dog
- Reach Poetry
- Review, The
- Rialto, The
- Second Aeon
- Seventh Quarry, The
- Shearsman
- Smiths Knoll
- Smoke
- South
- Staple
- Strange Faeces
- Tabla Book of New Verse, The
- Thumbscrew
- Tolling Elves
- Ugly Tree, The
- Weyfarers
- Wolf, The
- Yellow Crane, The