Tag Archives: poetry

Shark Woods

by Chris Buchanan
Poetry, 2014

—

I want to go to that shark infested forest –

you know the one?  The shark forest?

It’s in Guam or darkest Peru
or Vietnam or somewhere like that – the one
where stray knocked-off branches canopy the floor
like so many chopped-off bones and they’re covered
in shredded leaves and shark sweat and chipped teeth –
the one where thick finned beasts slink through trees
looking sideways like tigers and hammerheads wait
in the bits of the blue to sink quick onto your head,
split your cheeks and rip you from eye to chin and say
Smile you son of a bitch! and mash your pulp to
mist with the same serrated paper shredders they
use to say it. You know,

the woods where you look up and the sky’s sliding
with fat-middled bodies and lithe grey lumps with
empty eyes, a spring in their slide and nothing
in their mouths and I don’t know how they got up there
you know? Suppose they just push their way up through
the green-wreathed pale oxygen like human beings climb
into coral when their eyes slip back and their teeth are wet
you know the way I mean? The kind of feeling that
makes you jump backwards into the black and seeth,
I exist to eat smaller fish and mammals if I have to-
and you make your voice cut through the blue sap
inch by inch until you’re in — until you’re swimming in air,
breathing without thinking,

probably something like that.

I don’t know. But you know there’s no time to
work it out down there, deep in the reddening midst
of it, lost in the shark woods down where the bears
daren’t have their picanick, no bleeding body dare risk it,
and everyone knows the sharks don’t share their
splintered wood – if you step inside you’re after your
own hot blood, you’ll be tasting it in the great white’s
slipstream breeze – it’ll rush right through you,
tear you to pieces and scatter your scraps in the bracken
bits of stripped ribs and hands and knees on the muddy bed
below you, you’ll look like a lifeless mermaid lying
sidelong in an indoor fish tank, the paint licked off your
matt-black skin, and buried.

That’s where I want to go. The shark infested forest.

I want to sleep with the dead and live with the big fishes,
make people scream when they see my head crop up, chopped up
loose and changed, fleshy, hanging like languid meat in the
shallows, open like a doll’s eyes, like a dogfish flies – slack
maw, gulping gasps of air like water backed up to the stomach
and bounding up and down and every way through it just spitting
and swimming and chewing whatever I want. That’s what I want,
I want to meet the maneaters in no-man’s land and catch their eyes-
taking sick red chum in my hands and snow white flakes in my
fingers, and grind, like a mad Captain Birdseye who’s dived through
their table and shattered it, upturned the surface and wrecked it,
come to Hell with high water and sucked it in and sunk it down dry,
let it settle. And circled.

I want that. I want to feel as full as this and never have to talk.
I want to breathe in my sides and never see the tops of trees.
I want to swallow
deep and smooth
cool as a copse
and not have to stop.

Dirt

by Chris Buchanan
Poetry, 2014

—

The man tying the bag over his head,
the small of his back sore against a stair,
his lips gone numb and white, waiting to spread,
his legs tight like a mystic’s crossed in prayer,
his words like pulses wrapped in too much wool,
his neck that sometimes nicks him when he swallows,
his past like something catching on his skull,
his train of thought too stop-and-start to follow –
this wet-nosed ass who can’t quite tie the strings
is going to do a really selfish thing.
Before he goes he’ll guess at what you’ll say.
He’ll try to count your grief in weeks and days.
He’ll scare you half to death. This one will hurt.
You’ll drop and look for answers in his dirt.

Yin Yang Man

by Chris Buchanan
Poetry, 2014

—

Peering, I hold her like an alien,
trying to do that two become one, reunited
and it feels so good, perfect circle
made of cushioned angles kind of thing
in the dark.

A foreign nipple presses my front
and my cut wire hairs raise the silent alarm,
I uncoil, tense my thighs, black out my pupils
and stiffen like Juliet and think of Trojans,
not moving

until a breeze soothes my feet-skin
and hers, presumably. Her body – her small,
not mine, not brother, not male species –
willowy, pet, pettish, baby, honeyed, celestial,
prods at me.

She gives me a look I don’t know
and we laugh and kiss, shove our half-moons
back in, redouble our impression on the bed,
cover our mismatched colours, relax,
slip
away.

Zoe in Me

by Chris Buchanan
Poetry, 2014

—

I used to gaze into my navel all the time. It’s deep
and big, and clever and quiet. It seemed
like I could never get enough, all warm guts
and playful, static fluff and special smells
that seemed to tell of things you could only see
from the inside of a t-shirt, sized XXXL.
It was the navel of a poet.

Some poets have holes in their hearts, empty
and sucking like wounds, lonely, hungry
and down in the dumps of their chests,
but my blood pumps fine. It’s just red wine
and pasta and pies that sluice through tubes
and patter on my breast ’til I come to rest
an eye on my belly.

But Zoe is stuck in the button. Five years
it’s been now, and I curl up and tell her,
get out! You’re the girl that got away, yeah?
So get the fuck away and get out my curly hair.
She’s cluttering up my space, living in my place
and lately every pissing poem’s still about her.
It’s just embarrassing.

I want my navel back, blissfully empty, mysterious,
black with the absence of certain knowledge –
serious, studious, moody as fuck and bleak
as an ink blot period – a great big belt line firmly
buckled under it and locked up. I want to look
under my skin, get wise, see it all, from A to Y
and write about that.

Let me gaze into eternity,
feel empty,
mutter wisdom and musty skin
again.

Perfect

by Chris Buchanan
Poetry, 2014

—

I roll to his side,
to my elbow.
He warms the space
with some breathy
moment’s compliment:
he just now noticed
my eyes, my smile,
my place in his life.
He can barely mouth it.
I laugh
like a proud mother:
not a giggle, heavier,
more assured, assuring,
kiss his lips shut.
He mumbles a grunt,
token resistance,
exhales. His palm
touches some part
of me, his chest gives,
folds in, lets a scorecard
stick out from the skin,
halogen hot and tanned,
the muscle holds it up:
a ten.
I did this right.
He’s pleased.
Very good for me.

Some People

by Chris Buchanan
Poetry, 2014
Published in The Bolton Review, issue 1

—

This is a gay marriage poem and yes
we are shoving it down your throat.
Some people

are making a stink, yelling at you to think
and cringe. We’re on our knees, begging you to vote,
nudging you and slipping you the ballot for legalised
fudging and lady-things with fingering that
you don’t want to learn, just yet, and
asking you to tick it,
shoving it in your Facebook page, picketing
your inbox and sticking it in your head.

And we know you’re okay with the gays. You’ve no fear
if we’re here and queer, and everyone’s used to it
now but now we want you to thumbs-up our petitions.
We’re rubbing our issues on your television
screen, wiping your politics clean with Vaseline
and all because we want some dumb special day,
a ticker-tape parade with our balls and chains
and lips smacked all over it – ruin our lives, as you say,
be our guests, some of us want that, want you to
shake our ring-fingered hands, eat up our cakes
and just say live and let live. Say it’s okay

because it’s you that has to. At the end of the day
it’s still up to you to give us away, to give it up and
let us have our way, leave us free to do
whatever it is we really do behind closed doors,

without your eyes and tuts and paws and more
all over us.

That’s in your hands
and we don’t like it.
We don’t know where they’ve been!
It creeps us right out.

Some people want to get married.

Bubblegum Pop

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

—

I want to pipe bubblegum pop through white headphones,
to you in one earbud and me in the other
then drop it on the tarmac as a permanent reminder
when your phone rings and I have to be off.

I want to spend more time in your mouth than crisps
and cling to your teeth at the back, out of sight
and make you crave unhealthy cravings
that your body was never meant to feel so much for.

I want us laminated. Shiny and bright, preserved
with a sun-bleached best-of date that doesn’t matter,
like the empty bag of sweets in your garden by the conifers
with only an out-of-fashion logo to show its age.

We can always see that bag there in the undergrowth,
past its best. Pale, plasticky rubbish wraps look ugly
in the soil, refusing to rot, but you still
don’t want to chuck ‘em.

The Right Thing

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

—

Doing the right thing is easy,
but it isn’t much of a thing.
You get a little bold, a little brave,
but then, oh, you have to do the thing
and it’s done.

Nobody says a thing about it
or cries or stares or anything.
No-one shouts about how you’re strong or smart:
they just get back to their everyday nothing
and feel good.

But you don’t feel a thing.
Maybe just a sort of itching
like a tingling telling you something boring
as people forget whatever kind of right thing
you just did.

The worst thing is
when even you don’t notice.
You just did it on instinct, smiling, whistling,
twiddling your thumbs and not thinking anything
really at all.

That’s why I do the wrong thing.

Coloured pottery lid, Egyptology

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

—

A big blue circle drawn
with long, wavy arches,
uneven edges all round,
faded and dull.

The curves are sunbeams,
painted for Ra by hands
that couldn’t keep
inside the chunky lines.

The piece is shaped
horribly. Fat fingers
have left lumps
on its buckled edges

and it lags here
behind old museum glass,
not wasting a speck
of static, rough pot.

The ancient who made it
couldn’t be proud of this.
But we’ve kept the exhibit
as long as I remember.

Pale people in factory
cotton and plastic
come see it every day.
Squinting, thinking.

Someone like me glued
together these cracks,
chose where to stick it,
this thing that we made,

like your kid’s drawing
held by fridge magnets.
A still stick-man family
and a big yellow sun.

Slug Guts, or Entosthia Gymnosalianga

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

—

A boy spread strawberry jam on his toast, his father watched
and they stood a minute.
How come strawberries taste wet and bitter, he asked,
but jam is good and sticky?

The father looked over the tinged brown glasses he kept
from another century.
Because strawberry jam, he brass-rasped, nearly wept,
is raw slug slurry.

The stuff of ground, slain slugs is just too delicious,
so we call it squashed berries.
We grown-ups say it’s jam, tar our lives complicit
in sweet, shared atrocity.

Slugs’ organs are too tasty not to eat, the boy heard
and stale nose-breath eased onto him.
Strawberry jam is a clever word, lad. An old word.
A good word. A euphemism.

The father’s rusty eyes, round, brown, rested
and the boy glanced about.
His fingers stuck to the jar’s surface
where the juice had gotten out.

His flecked red tongue firmed in his mouth, clinging
at stained teeth like a prisoner.
The residue in his throat sucked, unreasoning,
begging for slime and moisture.

The father said, they bury the skins in the mud. His eyes
seemed heavy on his skull.
Each speck is scraped from flesh, slid off knives
’til the jam men’s pits are full.

The father’s iron, scratched hands scooped the toast
and the jaws did their lifework.
There are always good words, groaned his hard throat
with pip cracks and red slurps.

The boy reeled, reading ingredients, his father fed
and they stood a minute.
There were clever words in the kitchen and there was bread.
The jam was good and sticky.