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UNDERGROUND VOICES: POETRY - 06/2012
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BOB TOWEY Cruelty To Animals (Automat by Edward Hopper) You sit in your coat with the tea at the table and legs crossed and lips drawn and lights eating light while the teeth set inside and don’t bite, I could be at the next table watching a world avoid your gaze and watching the space before me unfold its blank I think God spent as much time on the fruit bowl and radiator as he did you and me. Suited When you need someone to set the fires I’ll be there in my button-down shirt and tie with a smile and blue eyes that have seen a fair and telling range of the humans- Humans. We’re the only ones who ‘get it’ but so many of us have ‘forgot’ or don’t believe or disagree or think we’re God on holiday or just... don’t get it. Now I don’t get it either but I know there’s something missing. Common sense led us to this, the button, the warheads with no mothers prepare their pseudo-act of God So I will tell you that my degree is unrelated but taught a certain grim efficiency, little tricks, formatting, the occasional regard for silence. And you will understand that I have my eccentricities. I won’t pretend to see every face, can you even see one? I’m not sure I’d know my own, in the end. Afterwards I’ll tuck my children in and put my arms around my wife, watch TV, her breathing is my anchor, happiness, a face whose outline I’ll trace when this fades. No contradiction. I was born with a smile, one you’ll never be able to see. I’m warm when the nights draw in. There might be billions of you but there’s one of me. Silent Treatment I do not deserve the silent treatment, the shrill tick of my beat. I want to sleep in the slow strobe light of nurse's patrols, know I'm someone's job. I exist, at least. It's not fair to leave it to those who love, who need love, with their touch only so deep but their sense of essence, coiling and cold like steel springs, tensed, one snapped barb from the beast. It fears the dark, its shadow, what it allows, the clean break, the blood stain on the sheets. The throat, kissed better, or closed, then the pause- Your turn, it carries on, on, on. Your peace. I do not deserve the silent treatment and it's thick... dreamless... sleep. But you do deserve mine. Robert Sneezum, who occasionally writes under the pen name Bob Towey, is a 29 year old human being from Cambridge, England. |
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© 2004-2012 Underground Voices |
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