Karen Downs-Barton
Your Penitence
Your house intoned antiphons
dolorous, Gregorian, resonated within
wattle and daub ribs and writ in slow
creeping script of mould
on parchment soft walls.
Your rattled response, coughed
out of sync,
troubled tar-thrumbed lungs
and nightly pilgrimage over
wall-sloughed plaster dermis.
Your dust-peppered path
encrusted knees and hands like drifting
hourglass sands, while heady incense
from a thousand yesterdays wallpaper stored
crawled with you, heavenwards,
over hurdles of wooden steps, or pews.
Your labored ascent, rent
by cartilage creak from hips and knees,
cantilated pious admonitions to genuflection,
penitent lamentations. Wept saline sorrows
puddled in your wake, seeped through your
door anointing passing feet, absolving sins
you or they had yet to commit.
Your Space Sonnet & Refills
Love
She is cotton crispness, ozone scented
by summer mornings with rose tinged
borders. I will slip into her
cool caress, the refrigerated exterior that
warms to the touch. We’ll count her threads,
five hundred, Egyptian; I’ll listen
to our folded voices meet
between fingers, join
and fold again, a bundle too tight
to be divided. I’ll shut us in
a scented drawer, paper lined
and strewn with herbs, a pot-pourris
of petals and aromatic gum
preserving young love.
I’ll call her Meadow Sweet
and sew a name tape on her heart,
a token of my affection
A Manchester Pietà
He is stigmata stained
the impassive features of Manchester’s
Naked to the waist
His chest a crinoline cage of static ribs
encasing a silent heart. He is artfully draped across
A homily from metropolitan lives, coexisted
Karen (Downs-) Barton is a neurodiverse poet studying The History of Art with Creative Writing BA at the Open University. She lives in Wiltshire, close to Stonehenge in a quarryman's cottage held together with mud and hair mortar. Her non-poetic occupations include magician’s assistant and dance teacher (Middle Eastern and tango). She is combining her love of poetry with interests in female-centric art studies in a chapbook of found poetry, stretching the boundaries of form and genre. Karen is founder and co-editor of Matryoshka Poetry and has been published in Alyss, The Goose, The Curly Mind, Three Drops From A Cauldron, I Am Not A Silent Poet, Poetry WTF, Thank You For Swallowing, Wicked Banshee, Unlost, *82 and The Fem Lit’ amongst others.
You can find her at: http://thepapercutpoet.blogspot.co.uk.
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Your Penitence
Your house intoned antiphons
dolorous, Gregorian, resonated within
wattle and daub ribs and writ in slow
creeping script of mould
on parchment soft walls.
Your rattled response, coughed
out of sync,
troubled tar-thrumbed lungs
and nightly pilgrimage over
wall-sloughed plaster dermis.
Your dust-peppered path
encrusted knees and hands like drifting
hourglass sands, while heady incense
from a thousand yesterdays wallpaper stored
crawled with you, heavenwards,
over hurdles of wooden steps, or pews.
Your labored ascent, rent
by cartilage creak from hips and knees,
cantilated pious admonitions to genuflection,
penitent lamentations. Wept saline sorrows
puddled in your wake, seeped through your
door anointing passing feet, absolving sins
you or they had yet to commit.
Your Space Sonnet & Refills
After Space Sonnet & Polyfilla
by Edwin Morgan
Your Space Sonnet
So much disappeared or became entwined
small pieces of you stuck within a mess
of cobweb threads spun from your spider mind.
We teased back facts, people, the slow process
of disentanglement from filaments
sticky and fragile. Some clung to random
chromatic memory flies; some strands, rent
by over coaxing, let through gray phantom
words that never returned. Places, loved ones
fluttered off unnoticed till, alarmed by
blank spaces, each day contained short reruns
of what went before, dwindling over time.
Drifting on silk chords your escapees found
new ears, ether whispered, airborne, unbound.
Refills
So much disappeared or became entwined
small pieces of you stuck within a mess
of cobweb threads spun from your spider mind.
We teased back facts, people, the slow process
of disentanglement from filaments
sticky and fragile. Some clung to random
chromatic memory flies; some strands, rent
by over coaxing, let through gray phantom
words that never returned. Places, loved ones
fluttered off unnoticed till, alarmed by
blank spaces, each day contained short reruns
of what went before, dwindling over time.
Drifting on silk chords your escapees found
new ears ether whispered, airborne, unbound.
Love
She is cotton crispness, ozone scented
by summer mornings with rose tinged
borders. I will slip into her
cool caress, the refrigerated exterior that
warms to the touch. We’ll count her threads,
five hundred, Egyptian; I’ll listen
to our folded voices meet
between fingers, join
and fold again, a bundle too tight
to be divided. I’ll shut us in
a scented drawer, paper lined
and strewn with herbs, a pot-pourris
of petals and aromatic gum
preserving young love.
I’ll call her Meadow Sweet
and sew a name tape on her heart,
a token of my affection
Within sanctified walls wisps of canticles catch the air, pendulum buffeted by musted incense; scented clouds for the evening’s litany. | Benedictory mizzle rides the trams vortices to fairground sounds and stale perfume leaked from fustered pub doorways in the evenings littered city. |
by smouldering tapers bleeding light, blending ensanguined tinctures with shafts of gem bright glass to polychrome stony skin. Immutable within his altar Christ is a sculptural metaphor; cuneiform messages, sacrificially etched, spell ‘atonement’ in seven languages incised across | by crack pipe burns, crusted wounds illumined by a smouldering stogie limp between finger and thumb like an impotent poets pen. He is a sepia study, blended against industrial brick, graffitied slow-strobe neon; tear tinged devotions lit from commercial altars declaring Always Open and 24/7 etching |
marble pietà. | paroled junky. |
His chest a crinoline cage of static ribs
encasing a silent heart. He is artfully draped across
the virgins knees, gazed upon by ageless angels in mute eternal vigil. All hope resides in His frame, encased within thin veils of skin. Pathos fed by Christ’s wafer thin vulnerability and enduring maternal love immortalised in stone. Reanimation on the systole surge of vespers sung by those who fear to die alone | black sack reliquaries a life’s accumulated debris, junkyard mizzens of soiled memories remain constant as sentience slips away, Loosed, his soul seeks a resting place, shadows in the wake of commuters their eyes averted, talking in whispers. |
the collection plates revolve in cacophonous rounds of metal on metal, born hand to hand on communal hopes: absolution for the deserving, renovation for the church. | in isolation. The leitmotif of ‘Spare some change?’ ceased, his cap gathers a tithe of dust to dust and a soul drifts in the city undertow. Hope and future were his no-show in the rounds of release without rehabilitation |
Karen (Downs-) Barton is a neurodiverse poet studying The History of Art with Creative Writing BA at the Open University. She lives in Wiltshire, close to Stonehenge in a quarryman's cottage held together with mud and hair mortar. Her non-poetic occupations include magician’s assistant and dance teacher (Middle Eastern and tango). She is combining her love of poetry with interests in female-centric art studies in a chapbook of found poetry, stretching the boundaries of form and genre. Karen is founder and co-editor of Matryoshka Poetry and has been published in Alyss, The Goose, The Curly Mind, Three Drops From A Cauldron, I Am Not A Silent Poet, Poetry WTF, Thank You For Swallowing, Wicked Banshee, Unlost, *82 and The Fem Lit’ amongst others.
You can find her at: http://thepapercutpoet.blogspot.co.uk.
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