The wound is healed, new skin
grown and you cannot see
the join, where the ribs were exposed
to the harsh light of the surgeon’s eye
in the centre of his forehead, bones
but no muscles, convulsing, pumping,
in and out, in and out
watered down blood
now coursing through proper veins
and on time, you cannot see the join,
but I can, I still feel the tick
of the open pulse, I see the pain
of open heart surgery before me
and left exposed for a month,
Society’s thoughts on writers are wrong,
and shown to be flawed
when celebration
is seen, waving the Dollar
the pound and the Yen
around like confetti
at a bride’s sixth wedding,
when a letter in an author’s handwriting
is sold
at auction
for more money than society
allowed him to live on
as he began to close his eyes.
Ian D. Hall 2018
Some people will slit their tongue
in half
to prove that they have something to say,
that they can be different, entertaining,
shock value
express, a picture in which they defy
even the unconventional
and the actively irregular, slit tongue,
twice the lies, double the truth
with saliva dripping forked tongue.
Some will manage this feat
without even resorting to surgery.
Ian D. Hall 2018
I would call you shallow
but I fear
You would think
it was
a compliment
and that you
would try to walk
on water.
Ian D. Hall 2018
The face was smashed, cracked
and damaged from where
it had hit the floor with a mighty,
sickening thud, it still held life though,
radiating through the near dark
of the stairs where it lay, though how long
before it drained out,
private phone numbers
mixing and congealing
with internet browsing history
and flirty text messages
to her husband, the see you later hun’s
and the inevitable three xxxs,
the phone had fallen
or had it been pushed,
as the face drained of its icons
I am a coward
and your opinion of me
matters,
I wish it wasn’t so,
I wish I could just
forget
and erase, expunge with ease
all those times
I wanted to make you proud
to know me,
to have once raised a glass in my honour
when I wasn’t there
to defend myself
from your toast
and despite
it all,
see me not as bruised, vanity tinged
and needing an occasional memory
of what I meant to you.
What if she wasn’t dead,
found floating down river,
bathed in fallen leaves,
a dead man’s finger on her pulse
as her face turns grey, to draw
out a murderer, clever
hero, a feminine trope
dashed, thrown to her love
in England, a false sign of madness
spreading, in him melancholia,
in her a wailing of the emotions…
all lies, she drew the murderer out
and paid for it with her love,
as he lay poisoned by the touch of foil,
dead as she had thought to be
Seen
through the afterglow
and embers
of your love for me,
my face is burnt,
my eyes streaked with pain
and my heart broken,
a final beat,
a minute later
one more sign of life,
clouds over, the sun which once
streamed through the window
and gave a mystery to the room
now has been replaced by the stillness
of thunderstorms, and in that flash
of weightless lightning, my face is illuminated
one final time, killed
by the love you had
for me.
It is hard not to rate yourself,
compare your existence
to that of the smashed avocado
when wondering how you fit in
a world that gave you a voice,
you see that green filling
spread all over a piece of toast
and you wonder first
whatever happened to the black pudding,
when did the mug of builders’ tea
and the steam covering the waitress’s face
give way to a coffee that costs more
than you ever paid for your first piece of vinyl,
when did it become O.K. to have your name
Emerging from the spotlight glare,
I watched, enraptured, spooked by the divine,
the whispering ghost of poetry, of words
teased out and song like, capturing the mood,
capturing the daylight pulse, sweetly tempered
by a trumpet which plays in the ether
and calls to the angels, they have to find room
somewhere, for here on Earth, it seems one
has escaped and sinks her blush free lips into
a mortal man’s vision, tasting it in her mouth,
tasting it go round and round, sideways
she chews it over, relishing the genius