Issue 33: Howard Wright

The Memory Clinic

I don’t know why anything can exist

There must be cause if this is the measure

Every day is worse than the last

red pills for worrying about the blanks

*

I think nothing should exist

In this life we couldn’t have done more

Every day is the same as the last

yellow pills for adding to the blanks

*

I don’t remember why we exist

Not for humanity’s sake that’s for sure

Every day is better than the last

green pills for filling in the blanks

*

I want to forget you exist

Thinking of you always opens the door

Every day feels like the last

blue pills for accepting the blanks

The Excavation

Before the creepy-crawly mean machines

from a Schwarzenegger wet dream paw

the stumps of family trees, ripping up roots,

the people in charge arrive in voluminous vests

and luminous boots to flaunt measuring tapes

of the finest Chinese steel yelping and flashing

metal centimetres and inches that stutter

and kick back into their small plastic cases.

Women and men are all over the foundations

in the pliant earth with sturdy theodolite

and urgent spadework, clipboards ready

for diagrams and numbers, breast-pocket

biros colour-coded as, crouched with trowel

and fluffy brush, the team scoop mucky

childhoods and belt-and-braces marriages

that only exist in this boxing-ring of ribbon,

sides drawn up foursquare on a trench-plan.

Such is the inspectorate hunkered low

in parlour and bedroom, cellar and yard,

before the inevitable absolute destruction.

Instances of windows, stairwells and plumbing

are made to fit reality like bad shoes

or a hard hat; lives put in a cardboard box

with rules and routine explaining them all away.

The Headboard

The voices from the street are very real,

but the radio spreads rumours all night;

it is background with nobody important.

Wide awake, you poke my stomach and nip

your waist for further signs of depredation,

the radiator tut-tutting from the other side

of the room. Books, bookmarked,

lie on the floor, and between us the scent

of rain on skin and alcohol lipstick.

This is what it is to be beside ourselves.

You whip off the duvet and sense

above you the weight of the headboard,

a cheap gravestone, shouldered, blank.

I snore and boil and can’t be moved.

Howard wright's first poetry collection, ‘King of Country’, was published by Blackstaff Press in 2010 and was shortlisted for the New London Fringe Poetry Prize; it was followed by a pamphlet, ‘Blue Murder’ from Templar Press (Derby), in 2011.He has won the The Frogmore Poetry Prize twice, and in 2012 w on the Bedford Open Poetry Competition. In 2011 and 2012 Howard was longlisted in the National Poetry Competition. include The Fiddlehead and The Antigonish Review (both Canada), Five Dials, The Atlantic Review, Harper’s (all USA); Abridged, Poetry Ireland Review and Poetry Wales, Arete (Oxford), Poetry London, Poetry Review and Times Literary Supplement.

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