Issue 33: Joseph Long

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.