When the Dogs Bite

Wednesday, 12 March 2025

12th March 2025

sickly-sweet scent

is it the hyacinths in bloom?

or a rotting corpse

I would be remiss if I did not state

the irony of a four lane highway

cut through the Amazon forest of late

for climate speakers to have their say.

The COP30 conference in Belém

cuts through the former Amazon floor

paving over wetland, causing mayhem

an eight-mile long and festering sore.

Rainforest towers on either side

of fresh-cleared land and piles of logs

opening the region for business to slide

in former carbon-devouring bogs.

World leaders will neither know nor care

for the forest that once was in their care.

Tuesday, 11 March 2025

11th March 2025

Tanker full of jet fuel

rammed by cargo ship full of strychnine

North Sea dead sea

II.III

Her bedroom window sealed with plastic sheet

prevents her look out on Heathen Town

or escape that way if fire has broken out

although from six stories high she would fall down.

She heads instead into the living room

where from the stand she stole the TV set

and looks outside through cloud-filled snowfall gloom

at silent streets with no traffic as of yet.

The block of flats behind has open shades

where families do their very best to cheer

though poor, the people there are undismayed

with home-made decorations and cheap beer.

Monday, 10 March 2025

10th March 2025

solar lights

welcoming the dusk

winter's end

II.III

No gifts are placed beneath her Christmas tree

nor has she a tree or decorations placed

to celebrate the birth of God-to-be

for the criticism that her life has faced.

No love for Christianity she bears;

the degradation her father faced the day

when, after Mum traversed the wooden stairs

in just one step, the neighbours turned away.

For though she had not yet discovered sex

at twelve years old she was a wild child

whom her dad could not control, and they were vexed

by her rejection of religion now reviled

Sunday, 9 March 2025

9th March 2025

busy day

all the outside jobs

mounting up

II.II

Has it been two weeks since the college closure

for winter celebrations of the year?

What time she lost to viral germ exposure

with no other home to enjoy Christmas cheer.

For today, she learns, is time of celebration,

of gifts received below a tinselled tree;

Her family are lost to condemnation

of the life and style she chose to follow free.

"Art is no career for a daughter,"

her father told her when she had applied,

"Look you for a husband for you ought-a

continue propagation of our line."

Saturday, 8 March 2025

8th March 2025

York trip

Suffrajitsu workshop

beautiful Queers

II.I

In morning light her head is mostly clear

although her breath is visible in freezing air

gone at last delirium and fear

the sky outside the window bright and clear.

She switches on the TV for a glimpse

of what the world has done while she has slept

she's lost count of the days that passed her since

she caught the bug that left her body wrecked.

Between the static and the twisted dials

she passes kid's cartoons and Aussie soaps

but on the BBC comes plastered smiles

broadcast from gilded church with Godly tropes.

Friday, 7 March 2025

7th March 2025

bad doggy dreams

makes him look for comfort

nuzzled awake

I.X

All the same to her are hours of day and night

as she toils with pigments made things at hand

with shuttered windows and fluorescent light

she recognises not the hourly sand.

If sleep she takes (and surely must) she dreams

of toiling with the image on the board

'till neither wake no sleep delay the schemes

the image forms as if by own accord.

Eventually, the work is done at last

and leaves her free to sleep for many hours

and wakes only when hunger gnaws her fast

to marvel at her fever-induced powers.

Thursday, 6 March 2025

6th March 2025

Facebook notification:

"We're increasing your security"

by monitoring your messages

I.IX

A coat of white emulsion serves as base

once the council's pale blue gloss is sanded down

but she has little left to put in place

to depict a nightmare of such great renown.

Her flatmate's spider plant provides a hoard

of soil, mixed with water from the tap

and daubed upon the six-foot wooden board;

ideas intersect, merge, overlap.

Home-made charcoal, mixed with ash and spit

a drawing of her nightmare is revealed

the feminine divine in blood and shit

delirium emboldened, unconcealed.