Category Archives: Poetry

To Die Would Be an Awfully Big Adventure

by Chris Buchanan
Poetry, 2013
From the collection Growing Up Too Fast

—

Peter says you’re growing up too fast.
Says you’re getting too big for your tree
and we can’t let you stay here forever.
You’ve had your time. You have to fly.
Maybe someone somewhere else will
come in the night for you?

Your stay on the island is finished.
Tink says you’d better run, you silly ass,
because Pan thins us out when we grow,
tells the rest we got away or got lost,
to the pirates or the redskins or the beast
with the clock in its gut.

The sun’s going down on the mainland
and the windows are barred back home.
Slightly says Tootles thinks you could swim
to Hook’s ship, if they don’t drown you.
Go build a new home in your dreams
boy. You’ll never come back.

It Happens All at Once

by Chris Buchanan
Poetry, 2013
From the collection Growing Up Too Fast

—

It happens all at once. One day
you’ll wake up, wash and dress and say-
I really must do all that work
then make things neat and meet some jerk
for bitter drinks and uncooked meals
and flat, black suits and needled heels.
Then when the fateful day is done
and some old mate calls up, someone
will fart or tell a sweary joke
and you’ll say, well I don’t think that’s funny.

Third Date

by Chris Buchanan
Poetry, 2013

—

I took Mark to the old reservoir,
put him in the water
and looked for something beautiful.

He powered across the surface
like a Sea World seal
and smiled and made wide ripples.

The view reflected itself and the sun,
playfully shimmered
and it was fine for a few minutes.

His muscles swelled up, cut through.
He flashed and glanced
and tried to remind me he was handsome.

I’d seen it all from dogs and ducks,
diving and flapping
and following men on the bank.

The place was full of my childhood
until I was hungry
and Mark emerged on his own.

We got out some butties and pottered
in through the trees
and I almost forgot to look back.

Then he took me to some secret spot,
sipped at my coffee.
When he caught my eyes I stopped.

MOTHER OF SNAILS (catfish)

by Chris Buchanan
Poetry, 2013

—

See the big black one?
It lives in tropical South American rivers
and floodplain lakes and it says here
it’s called the MOTHER OF SNAILS
(catfish).

She’s a TITAN in her tank!
Plated powder-black, sat still,
watching with a milky filmed eye,
obscured to protect your sanity
for what good it may do.
You have come to the basement aquarium
and you have seen the LEVIATHAN.

The base of this glass is like the depths
of the Earth. The MOTHER OF SNAILS
(catfish) waits, observing the darting,
open-mouthed wretches before her, weird
like a darker Pluto under water (or a catfish).

oxydoras_niger11

She is CREATOR
of snails
(catfish)
sifting the sands for detritus
and life and spitting it out
with her sort of

funny, Poirot mustache, a-
it’s a catfish.

The Man Behind the Curtain

by Chris Buchanan
Poetry, 2013
Published in The Bolton Review, issue 1

—

My father used to tell me that your brain is sat behind you
pulling strings laced through your fingers and your eyes,
itching you and twitching at your lips to make you say things
to distract your curiosity and keep you satisfied.

Your brain needs you to think that it’s not there until you use it
and it gets you to forget you ever do.
It grows a little bigger every time you feel it working
but that makes it wrinkle up against itself to hide from you.

It tells you that you use your skin to touch, your tongue to taste,
and something called your soul for something else.
It’s told you not to ask what makes them work and you believe it ’cause you don’t want to ask how it knows what you don’t know yourself.

Your brain just lets you rest and lifts you up and puts you down.
It’s your creator but it hates to spoil the show.
Don’t look too long or cut beneath the surface ‘cause it hurts.
Your brain knows what it’s doing and that’s all you need to know.

Man

by Chris Buchanan
Poetry, 2013

—

When God saw the face of man
He thought the man had made the sun.
He knew better, but He swears He thought so
in that moment. He always remembers.

When God saw the man’s hands build
He thought it was magic and He gasped.
He thought there were wonders He couldn’t touch
and He thought He would reach forever.

When God saw the man’s eyes up close
He thought they were windows to paradise.
He saw a halo and the light of colour
and mused about what might be in the black.

One day God heard the man speak to Him
and He thought He would never be happier.
He waited to hear the secrets of everything
until He slept, and smiled, and it died.

Spider Spiding

by Chris Buchanan
Poetry, 2012

—

I saw a spider spiding
and you know it saw me too.
You’re not supposed to see them spide.
They always know when you do.

You’ve seen them spinning thinning
wettened strands of flattened flax
and standing, guarding statue-still
like soldiers by their cracks,

those black cracks in your paint-peeling ceiling,
the ones that used to be yours
until the spiders came and stayed
and spided and left you the doors.

You know what spiding is to spiders
and you know you’d never admit it.
We all pretend they’re just trappers and catchers and
crawlers and creepers and nothing else in it

but they’re spiders. Voracious with it, traitorous,
pernicious and vicious inhuman little
blighters with their spiding, biding their time,
day and night as they wait, saving their spittle,

saving their flies, slavering hideous bile on their smiles,
disguising the spindle sharpened taloned legs they’re hiding
behind their manifold red eyes and fangs and other rattling swords,
there just to dampen the sickening silence of spiding.

If you see a spider spiding,
they’ll always see you too.
You know they like their spiding secret.
You won’t know what to do.

Old Muse

by Chris Buchanan
Poetry, 2012

—

Lately you’ve been on my mind.
I’ve been thinking of you
the way old speakers think of great speeches
and hold a smile at the wall, surface satisfied.

The kind of thoughts that start with smells
and grow with every thinking,
blue or bronze flat skies that grow beautiful
by what’s in front of them

and meals that become favourites,
films filed down as hidden gems,
mistakes maturing into tragedies
and memories murmuring to bits.

Do I get on your mind like that?
Do you talk about me as though I were
funny, and romantic or something,
and thoughtful and not

the kind of guy who’d talk to you
when you weren’t listening
and would paint you onto vases, later,
with silhouette arms that are just too

long, and really, you could be anyone,
anyone special?

Dead Pigeon

by Chris Buchanan
Poetry, 2012

—

Dear dead pigeon in the Longfield car park,
you’re not looking so good.
You’re spread-eagle, your neck to one side,
your deft little wings mechanically unveiled,
your collar cracked over, your beak barely perched
on the tarmac it scratched

I don’t want to move you.
It’s cold.
I

‘m worried about touching
your treadmarked breast, the rubber that stamped out
your pretty-in-miniature pastel painted entrails,
your swan-song, dashed through and sputtered beside
your squat, etched icon body.
Dead, bleached, ugly and unremarkable.

—

—

I don’t want to go on.
I just came to see if
Iceland was open at night.

Dream Serial

by Chris Buchanan
Poetry, 2011

—

If we’d never left Eden, dreams wouldn’t be
what they are: teasing and muzzy little clips
out of David Lynch films, clumsily halting and cut
as sarcastic parental warnings,
elastic metaphorical taunting from a part
of our minds too dumb or too scared to impart
what it wants to, to us.

They’d be serials. Flashy and marvelous
chunks of adventure, no more ethereal visions,
conjecture, departure, just cliffhangered,
thrilling big-budget six-parters, beginning
on Monday and taking a rest for cartoons,
cheering us up, making us laugh until
in the morning we take a cold bath and complain,
‘Aw, dad. Pirates again! I wanted cowboys this week.’