FOUR POEMS
by Miguel Cullen
Margarine sun, coiled up in a ball
Denim skies, folded up by walls.
Nice guy, boarded up for sale
Fumando une cloppe on Facebook
My murderers four saw and loved it
Finally he was going to die.
The clouds in Argentina looked like reclining mobsters
Leant on the skyline eating pie.
I saw a star shining in faraway shires
I thought of its population
150 people in the windows and the aisles
It’s you, overflying UK airspace to New York;
Or a star, radiating columns of light;
Or a Tiger Moth, with air-raid lamps all over it
Speckled with little red dots.
Your hair’s a sight,
Wagging with rat’s tails
Vermin cover you like a tarpaulin.
Sex, the ultimate cognitive dissonance –
I cum like hot wax, scram!
A mestizo Maria’s nacreous tears.
I travel next to my forest of spines
I found upon a cream creature in the Galapagos
She’s my skin-eating virus.
Me sacaste el sol con una cuchara
Mi corazón está reventado
¿Me lo rrebatas?
Space Oddity
When I go home, these days
I hold my yields with grace
With the pride of someone who speaks sparingly
Playing with children’s toys,
Then I think of you driving in your monster truck –
Its rent frame,
Shuddering with G-force
White bodysuit, gumshield;
Your body seems galactic, frail
Unable to handle it;
Pinballing inside your car
Breaking your threaded bone shells.
I always dream of your funeral,
My fury for you breaching the metal seal
Impressing the mourners into an admission;
Letting me into the big box;
And the palomas; up, batting chorically, past the white church,
Into the blue netherland, and the sun.
÷ Double-Loupe
Right now, In Argentina
The Magnolia are opening like opera gloves,
The startled purples of the Jacarandas
Row the avenues, surfeits of light:
Pil l lows rhododendron.
The seasons reach away from themselves
8,760 nicks in compass of the star –
Light leaving dark, dark leaving light –
Piled slides; luminous
With spindled branch and flushed leaf.
The brambles of light and dark
Inter-weave a canopy over the sea –
Atlantic ceiling of polarized vines.
I know what you are because I know how I grow against you
I smell the narcissus in the hollow of my hand.
A Town Called Malice
A Town Called Malice played,
And the organs spooled like dun-grey streamers
And a man sublimated with ink lions
Held up his arms – like a pitchfork
Whirling
And I’d seen Punk’s dispersal in the outer boroughs
Filtered through the crannies of roads and houses
The way music heard over the phone’s controlled
By the stories of the men who fit the pylons
And the beer I drink’s in the fingerprint
Of the finger I see through beer and glass across the room,
Synaesthetic.
In that Chiltern Hills club, this had achieved a person
Perfectly demure and greasy
Holding a photo
Of the present
And saying “I’m here”.
Miguel Cullen is a freelance journalist and poet. He is arts editor for the Catholic Herald, and has published poems and prose in various UK literary magazines, including Magma Poetry. His first collection, Wave Caps, is out in March.
