Featured Poet - John Moody

HOSPITAL

At the traffic lights

in a car

on the way to hospital, he 

shouts: 

WAIT

buttery but intrusive,

as the anti 

septic cream 

applied to his anus

as he starfishes, face down on

the bed

weak in piteous light

he tries for a lilt

chords pianissimo shivers

while shitting his childhood

bed with the incontinence

of fear

of fabric finger-rubbed 

flakey, when it dries

gold-pressed with

anger and shame. 

Bitter-ripe of lemons plucked, 

in a sunset going green

with rancour 

ephemeral as a brimstone moth.

Conversely, with flowers of sulfur,

she’s a healer, anoints skin disease. 

Primrose wax and saffron,

for flesh inflamed the colour of gall,

settles skin to straw-pale as wine

as she soothes away a childhood spasm 

she declines to ochre, curdles cream.

FEAR

Grasp how it feels to be scared

as the indulgence of security

is chasing the frisson you feel when 

an apocalypse has no substance,

but fills your head all the same.

Scared of that state of safety

you reel away from accepting 

all the fear under the surface.

In terror you stumble from that 

chaos under the crust

of existence. 

TARN

Life’s a deep dark tarn 

rainwater brimmed, brackish 

still, brown and chilly. 

When I’m scared and lonely 

crouching tense upon the shore, 

I slap the water’s surface 

in my agitation. 

Provoking chaos

of cream and ochre scum.

I stare — the ripples losing force 

dissolving in the depth

of whisky tinted liquid.

Oblivion in alcohol 

dissolution in the darkness

if I choose to — I can

dive the tarn’s abyss

taking me past the scare

to the mud and rotted vegetation

coiling at the bottom of the mountain.