Driving

Nick Monks J

You drive all night. There is a hotel. The receptionist checks you in. How much you ask. Its free she says. The room is z shaped. There is a brochure on the famous waterfalls. A print of chrysanthemums. By Dan Gough from Warrington. You are so tired. You press a switch but it is not the light. It is the juke box now illuminated. And a list of rules on the wall says there is nothing permitted. You still can’t find the bed or the light switch.

You call room service on a non existent phone. The voice over says welcome to the house of poetry you have four options. None includes sleep or bed or location of light switch. You light a cigarette which ignites the fountains from the ceiling. And sleep in a boat. In the black cave of the world famous waterfalls. Electric eels instead of sharks after all it is a hotel not a cruise liner. In the morning the receptionist bills you £150 for bursting the water bed.

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Lordington Lavender Field by Curtis Tappenden

Hills

Nick Monks

The hills above the town
Have seventeen valleys
Eighteen hills
Then a plateau of 150 miles

Orchid red. Anemone, clover with five leafs
Butterfly with blue wings. Dragon flies. Ladybirds with nineteen spots

There are no ruined crofts or follies
Nobody has ever lived here or walked here
Apart from me. Every day from 8am till 11pm

Hobbies, Merlin, Red Backed Shrike, Pied Flycatchers
Kites of yellow crepe paper and bamboo. Marzipan mini helicopters

It is as cascading here as a stream. As still as a pool
We are swept here by naught and the rough bleak towns

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Five haiku poems 2

Nick Monks

1

A blissful meadow of grasses
With thousands of geese feeding on seeds
Is the outside wrapper of a city

2

Floor of wood, plaster walls, tile roof
A bed is a train, a plane ticket, a car seat
Where we travel to stay still

3

If it snows for 600 days on suburbia land
Then where tasting the baptism, the first
Wine snow, cinnamon snow, sap snow. The new

4

A light bulb is an imposter sun
A sink an imposter ocean
We like tidying up and making coffee

5

The people wandered the plain
Looking for a home, in the wilderness
One man got lost and wandered alone

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Sabre Toothed Tiger

Nick Monks

I am alone

My teeth are curious, only seven left

I try not to see the others on other side of walls

But hear them sometimes swearing

At midnight I start my work, poetry work

I smoke dried banana skin, rose petals, newspaper, bed mattress dust
In rizlas with natural gum from sustainable forests

I accept Marx’s ideas on the illegality of all utopias

Believe in being born as often as possible, through baths, poems, books, new clothes, other celebrations, marked by roll ups and pepsi in plastic disposable glasses

Adorno and Baudrillard are my personal acquaintances

I don’t play rock music. Get real this is suburbia!
Not Glastonbury or Woodstock

I am realistic and see mortality daily

I leave the fly sticky paper dangling from the ceiling up all winter to save time in August

If they come to get me, they may conclude I am not in

And the rain the screech owls call the harmonic tinnitus

 

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