Tag Archives: poetry

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.

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?