Paul Hodges
Silence 
Paul Hodges reading Silence 
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you move shakily among books,
the heavy breath of years of knowledge
unsettled and unsettling as dust –
black print. The silence of books
is ominous and threatening. Unopened,
untroubled, perfected
in their hard complacency,
yielding nothing. I move
confidently among children,
lives unopened, unread
as the complacent books
casting neither shadows nor bruises,
*
this room’s a conspiracy of books.
Listen, you can hear them breathing
angrily on quiet nights.
Sometimes I dare to open one,
spilling a few words on the clean surfaces:
I use a damp cloth before they can stain.
The T.V. I keep silent, unattached,
but next door he is deaf
and the voices graffitti my walls
with obscenities. I don’t go out:
the kids down the road won’t let me;
wherever I am they’ve made sure
their graffitti-tags mark me as theirs;
wherever I walk, the same
walls surround me.
*
the books are insulation now:
a warmth of unused words
to save on fuel bills.
*
in the space behind words,
between the spines of the paperbacks
a comma of fur;
a black mark, once warm like flesh
and suckling the nuzzling warmth,
eight elastic hearts, now inflexible
and black as full-stops
peeled from page after page
of dead still, calm chaos, yellowing
poems. The books are solid
as skirting boards, behind which
blind words grope with pink tongues
at the dry dugs.
Page(s) 22
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