Embedded Files
On the Mardyke Way
Before skies turn acetylene, before
I am discovered by rod and lineman,
I will lie here in creeping bent and rye.
I will lie here, looking up at the crown
shyness of conifer, desperation
of stunted oak. Up at the withered wire
of dried cows’ parsley – in a silhouette
akin to chair-a-planes. Up, at thistle
florets; today, playing at being spider.
Looking up – up past the frilled blackstrap
underside of toadstools. Who watch with me
from their splitted-lip caps topped with iris
or cornea (or a dying nebulae).
It is here I will consider my place
in the universe, for those last few minutes.
Dreaming, beside the drainage ditch. Dreaming
in my shade’s body – that the sun might dance
upon my name once more. Before the rod,
lineman both reach my meadow grass and find
me leached and already on my way.
Down to crust, to core. Down to the mantle.
The Lads of the Village
Kohl eyed and still quarter cut, I am pulsed
by proper coffee from out of fallout shelters.
To feel my way through the black mile
of back rooms and bonded warehouses
on my way back to the Baize or the Stow.
Treading out entrails and patting down
the still smoking embers of yesterday,
with cabbage leaf or column – a carpet
courtesy of Barkers counting bunce
from the barrows. Putting down markers
in those words of local value – patter,
Polari, the cant and costerslang.
Out into the culinary memories
of my post imperial childhood.
The true epic poetry (long buried),
courtesy of the plongeurs and commis,
of mercer, cooper and the mender.
Courtesy of the lads of the village.
The spider and I (taken Gravesend, Oct ’24)
We are closer than we have ever been
the spider and I.
Back then, I could not bear to touch – to pick
through my textbook pages (with nerves bated),
knowing she waited inside broken bindings.
I lost many years over her. No more.
Now I am taking back hours. Now I am
making up time (since our uneasy truce).
Understand my shift, understand my life,
she said; two backs tight in a southpaw stance.
I tried, and can now put my face to her glass.
Marvelling, as she divvys up my space,
engraving the thermals with chinagraph.
Winning the air grab amidst wind and spit.
Smithing Queens Highways with pugilist mits.
Those stays spun from Kevlar, rebar; up, down
the compass rose – gleaming; sunlit or naught.
Increasing a portfolio which she
tirelessly maintains – every nodal point
on the conurbation; Ville to Zona.
Those distant lock-ups of feather, spread seed,
leaf litter tethered to the dragnet –
until the sunlight begins to pale.
Then, I see the slumlord and the heavy
in one. Visiting the commonweal glommed
in the gleaming corridors of her scheme.
I watch her do the rounds, processing all –
inner ring to treble twenty. Carried
on the first edition winds we get up here.
For arrears? I shall refer you to the sill
she says – one borne with bushmeat. A boneyard
for former tenants. Missed final warnings.
Joseph Long lives and works on the Medway as a father and Engineer, writing poetry between shifts. He has a passion for works which reflect working class life & culture and his main influences are John Cooper Clarke, T.S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Don Paterson, Paul Muldoon & Seamus Heaney. Joseph has been published by Stand, The Brussels Review, The Rumen and ingénu/e, and he was also highly commended in the Erbacce Prize for Poetry in 2024.
Copyright © 2025 by Joseph Long, all rights reserved. This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of Copyright law. Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the notification of the journal and consent of the author.
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