Mike Jenkins
Looking To The Board
I can’t cope with the jargon.
The words seem clipped
by the lips like the grammar
I found hard as a kid.
Yet I feel as my grandad did.
fobbed oft with a lamp
after so many mornings
with only street-lights for company
Like him, I’ve given myself to numbers,
admired their even, inevitable tread.
Now my head is full of corridors:
their knockdown reek of urine
and grazes where feet have slid.
For the first time, I don’t admonish them,
those school-leavers in packs
mouthing around outside
looking to ring their final bell:
the fire alarm.
In the office, a button’s pressed
and I hear those fugitives running.
I want to be with them, but sit
resting the aching spine that once
hooked them into the floor.
Words of sympathy do not replace
the revenge those terms have taken.
‘Ratio’ and ‘average’: I regret
that I rubbed them off so casually.
I look to the board for answers,
but not a graph-line remains.
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