Norman Bissett
It's An Ill Wind
Things fall apart. And in the centre
the catastrophe is unimagineable.
The common herd is workiess, penniless.
The shops are unaffordable, but empty.
Classrooms and schools are gathering dust.
Hospitals are out of lint, iodine, bandages
hope. The MD’s have gone elsewhere.
The printing presses run off Weimar currency
fit only for Monopoly, or as toilet paper.
Eden has become the Wilderness of Gath.
Thankfully, in the suburbs, life is very much better,
altogether more congenial. Here the top brass,
in chauffeur-driven limousines,
drive between palaces and stately homes,
from mansion house to mansion house,
for luxury lunches, dinners and high teas,
accompanied by their coiffeured wives
and well-upholstered mistresses, sporting
designer labels. Through jaundiced eyeballs
the feckless, silent, contemplate the elite.
Page(s) 15
magazine list
- Features
- zines
- 10th Muse
- 14
- Acumen
- Agenda
- Ambit
- Angel Exhaust
- ARTEMISpoetry
- Atlas
- Blithe Spirit
- Borderlines
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- 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