Poetry

By

Harry Mills

Green

Pale softening green husks

one, by one waiting to kiss the morning’s paint box

swaying, gossiping as old ladies in straw bonnets

liking the pastel hue, clean as a kitten’s kiss

And, my dying pen, coughing up it’s last clotted deposit of crushed grass juice from the sweet spring meadow to die a death, flourishing a last quotable quip across the white lady, in waiting

Very regal, very Oscarish, in flared copperplate script

that time will fade to a toasted sepia, as invisible ink

then, thinking green, drinking peat seeped whiskey

and memories of mushy peas, dyed florescent green

Below The Bridge

Dawn’s pungency and wet grass

by river rats tunneled along the Border Esk

and sea trout with fresh lice in pink gills

move slowly upstream, below the bridge

and I watched him select the gaudy killing fly

resting on his down-turned waders

steel studded with his name in neat capitals Biro

and, wondering if this information is important

to the fish, to know the name of the executioner

or, the next day’s boatman, with mooring hook

searching for the drowned fisherman, below the bridge

Salvadores

Saturday, sat in Salvadore’s ice cream parlor

Bored, watching the broken neon stuttering

on it’s repetitive argon gas cycle along

the fat tubular Italian name

rolling back and forth like a slithering plate of spaghetti

Watching Mrs Salvadore’s gold rings

cutting into her podgy sausage fingers, like tightened wire around a sapling that strangulated in growth,

as she slid the kid’s knickerbockerglorys past the sticky fingered laminated menu, ousing with raspberry syrup, abseiling down the concoction like red volcanic lava

Observing the old codger, depositing his dissolving vanilla into a toothless open skip with weathered leather hands of purple veins below his brown paper skin, patterned like the hard sand’s ripple at low tide, before the spiraling sand worms deposit their conical turret lookouts

And, she leaves us sitting at the emerald green ripped leatherette seats to window shop, with wobbly wanting lips, at the jeweler’s black velvet

trays of dead ladies rings, leaving me motionless as a toby jug counting the victims enticed into the blueish pink circular fly zapper that cracks and crinkles the inquisitive, that lie dead

like black raisins

Potting Shed

Many long, lost war winters past

where his brother’s initials scratched in the thin Victorian Glass

come alive from the trenches, painted by Jack Frost

and, I sit on the up-turned zinc bucket, with half-moon indents

unfolding and washing the dripping fezz hats without tassels

dipped into baking soda, watching the brick-red terracotta change

as the water seeps into the porous clinking clay

releasing the awakening ginger earwig,

to the awaiting line of deadly lime or his hob-nails

below the flaking boarded wall of ‘best in show’

old silk faded rosettes, as a forgotten matador’s suite of lights

impaled by horns of rusted drawing-pins

Constellation

Once in a lifetime

a very beautiful, short lifetime

of insecurities and it’s uncertainties

there comes a special soul

to grieve

that reaches for a magic star

and rides the black unknown

Imperfection is beauty

madness is genius

fear is stupid, so are regrets

Harry Mills

Born 1944 in North Manchester, England.. failed every exam in the world, went to Art School (with Tony Prince), ran ad agencies as creative director or owner…divorced, kids, divorced, kids… divorced four times… lived in China, now in Philippines where I drink too much and write too little.

Harry’s vast array of poetic wisdom can be found at his Facebook page or via his blog.