by Alexandra Ran

It's a difficult tread, finding foot as a published writer; for being a writer is in itself an easy hash to brown. (Not to mention the mercurial process of gaining merit, where any received reaction less than the reader falling to their knees, claiming epiphany and hailing taxis to heaven is a concrete veto.)
This could be due to the perceptions that readers might still have regarding what poetry is. It's not that it has remained unchallenged and unmoved as a form, but that the most interesting works stay unpublished or 'unpopular', as compared to the literature sold by the frozen peas.
I believe that I have something to offer, maybe not frozen peas, but I think it would be an interesting limb to add to your creation.

(Most of the time, response fails- it is usually just me talking to myself (luckily today's youth love mirrors), even though success is sometimes squelched; my hope now is to cook my writing until it is fully fluid. Perhaps for my next incarnation I should better choose to come back a sweet potato.)

My dada-scented anti-poems (tattling on tact), might serve to give readers, and frozen peas alike, a bit of a spook (who perhaps then bemoan the state of public education, the steady diminution of craftsmanship in well constructed poems with metres and feet, epics that should be chocolate malt shaped and sinking in contrived (dis)comfort, pimped with logic).
So I stand before it, or after it, if more convenient, a legless artist whose poetry is broken. And to them I say but:

Boo .

Blackpool On a Park Bench

(An unrequited love poem of sorts. -a day in the life of- Written in real time, if not an abstraction of space.)

The cavalry arrived...With bells on...

Cowboy-shaped and camel-humped, open it up with another case of the laughing fit boy,
Walking like a carrier bag without the receipt,
Holding stale air in his hands and choking his fists,

Yesterdays news running down his leg
Star struck as a black hole, and just as keen, eyeing up the empty wrappers in the alleyway,
Flicking the lashes of his cigarette into the black eye of the sun

Window shopping milk cartons, mumbling their spilt incontinence to the push of the margin,
Churning chalky tails about the state of the high heeled training wheels and curly haired aftershave behaving like a bargain apocalypse
Two deckchair minded snails, sweating along the strand, leading the trail of beady-eyed silver surfers in a fevered search of 'the Britain', like the one seen in imported crumpets and black and white
Dyslexic sunglasses with borrowed Washington, dressed in Statue of Liberty,
Heading up the Eiffel with a fanny pack

Moody shoes holding ground, compulsively, in a glittering gutter next to a decapitated Polo,
Skylined castle buckets, dreaming of more, or less,
Shedding evaporated air aimed for the beached ball with jealous humour

Tear-full raindrops resting on the uneven head of a newly divorced cabbie standing on superstition and gum,
Chewed up spotted dicks passing around town with cocksure belief,
Spitting sultanas at the protruding tourists in between combing their custard with battered teeth

Shopping trolleys and empty tea trays still swinging for a free bite,
The first of many doilies, curtsied on the roof of a tabletop laced with bourgeoisie,
Playing house with a custard slice and lilac sensibility,
Drawn in by evergreen admonition and handing out revelation
That the word of God smelt of pastel pink iced biscuits and instant coffee

The no frills charged champagne night sky, pouring into plastic tumblers, watching the sand change its face,
Overseeing the football and the frisbee fumble under the powdered pier with a nomadic fiver hiding her majestys blushes

Sunburnt and legless, the Daily Star carousing around the carousel dressed round-a-bout,
With a tired and emotional bottle of blue wkd, running on empty,
Slurring 'I fucking love marzipan'

Karaoke tempered dancing nuns, twice removed, fettered in skin and shimmering with sin, waving feather-framed vigils for a dying innocense,
A posse of chips gliding over the surface of the moon,
plastered and spent on weathered wages,
Sandgrown electric footprints wired with midnight, trying to distance themselves from a seashore foaming at the mouth 'for tourists only',
Shining silver and black and orange plastic bags

Milk floats, lactating sleepy-eyed under the streetlights twitching net curtains and God,
Two sugars and not a prayer in sight for the recycled spool of de ja vu

Blackpool on a park bench, legs crossed accordingly,
Relaxed in opaque belonging, musing on a fag break
'They'll be bloody gone by morning'

The banana poem - built when I was 18; a neurotic lonely crumb with a pain that no-one can see. Trying not to turn into my own melts, like Icarus' biblical-sized dreams, with my waxy candle shaped wings, I am in fade. Curtained with fate, confessing like a Catholic without a cause. Sibling rivalry as well, my brother was the 'smart' one before I came and birthed up on his solitude. The great and powerful (child)poet is revealed as fiction, substituting gold stars for universal knowledge and watching my childhood melt as I devour all evidence. What a world, what a world.


My Banana is Smiling at Me


Ataxia !
To be sure
I'm dying in a microcosm next to a history gathering dust and gold stars

Beriberi !
Don't look at me like that
I'm not a fool
I didn't eat your birthday cake
It was the candles that melted your childishness into winged splats of waxed memories

Embolus !
Ok, I did have a bit
I'm sorry, I'm a fool, but we were both six once
Don't chide me, I'm just a kid
I ate too much
I feel sick

Atrophy !
My room smells of salt water and Cleopatras
I knew it would come back to me
I drink out the carton
I think numbers are a lie
I don't use energy saving light bulbs
I talk in bold italics and I'm getting to my point

Gibbus !
My cat wants to eat me
She thinks I gave her astigmatism
And refuses to walk in a straight line
I plan her meals around the instability

Hypertrophy !
Don't hate me because I stole your blood
I don't know anything about science or intent
Let's reason with due care and caution
No, I'm dying, I don't want a TicTac

Ketosis ! And eclampsia !
I'm tired of all this foreign change
I want a glass of soya milk that I can be fluent in
You're not my mother
Don't look at me

Paroxysm !
Bonjour
I don't really speak French, I'm a fraud
My vibes are elastic
Bending in a latex cosmos
I've still got the sub-titles on, my Scrabble is broke

Trachoma ! This is it...

And that was the revised edition

Nobody likes me
Except my banana
My banana is smiling at me