The World’s Worst Jail Break

There I am, hanging from my tonsils
over the dark pit shaft of my open throat.

If I drop, I will submerge, stiff backed and
saluting, in the acidic pacific of my roaring
gut, dissolve with pride intact into the
mindless needs of my own body
…whatever they may be;

Then my unconscious will be king, to come
and take me, wide eyed and bearded, into
fashionable shops to have me shouting
inscrutable instructions to the invisible,
to scare old ladies in provincial tea rooms
with my alarming piss satins that will
move like vast armies from the trenches
of my worryingly mismatched and food
splattered clothing and to make me lose
my job after failing to impress my colleagues
with a startlingly unfortunate outburst
of embarrassing honesty and bring
me to the attention of the authorities
to end my days sweeping leaves in a
long term institution, all medication
and milky tea, and be back to where
I started from, hanging on to my tonsils
and fearing the drop.

Picked By Blackberries

She is heavily pregnant and
with the disinterested wave of a minor
royal bats away the dabbling parries
of the incompetent young thorns.

A woman above them, solid,
hardly able to contain the heavy
weighting of the life she holds.

She is pressing the tiny lamps of berry
flesh in to her mouth, pinching the
summer into a tongue- less hush,
entering the tidal , form free,
pleasure, of the thoughtless fruit.

I envy what it is they give,
their map-ways that unfold her
in a careless, easy, laugh,
the power that they hold me in
that leaves me, scurrying at her
back, hacking through the
bushes with an empty bowl.

Playing The Trick

Living is mailing me back,
posting me in grubby manila
folds that have been
wrongly stamped and
send to childhood and then
further back, hurtling, special
delivery, towards my birth;

Finally, to drop me on the
dusty doormats of the dead
as i grow backwards as I am
panting on the stairs and
combing over graying hair;

My body now my Father’s,
and then slipping back again
in to the grandfather I hardly knew,
but who is here now and living
through my clotting limbs as
50 years ago he held me as a baby
at his death as the unsent letter
of his body creased and turned
upon its self and he
sealed me upon his chest.

I was his future and he
cradled me in mummifying
hands into his empire of
fading faun and grey and
tartan robe, knowing, that
now, he would continue to survive.

An Illogical Remembrance

If exactly 90 years ago today, my
grandfather had not pissed himself
with fear on the Somme and not
lived to watch the pulling and the
mashing of his friends and fellow
Welshmen back into the earth,
he would not have joined the union,
who in turn would not have paid to
send him to the university and who
would not have helped him get that job.

He would not have met his social
climbing wife and they in turn have gifted
on the world that timid regimented son
who diligently went to Grammar school
to grease the wheels on the gun rails
of our upward class mobility and
he in turn would not have fossilized
and pressed his body flat into the middle
English rock and I in turn not
have had the anvil face on which
to smash my head in teenage pride
and loss, equip me with the knives and
wires to tool escape and plan to emigrate.

I would not be here now, in Vancouver,
on this empty beach to watch an eagle
roll itself and dive into the trenches of an
broken sky and on into the grinding
wheel of the sun’s eternal milling
of a separation of the earth and air.

Alan Hill originates from the English/Welsh border area of the UK and came as a landed immigrant to Canada three years ago after some years working in a non-profit agency in Southern Africa. His ideal poetry would be a cross between the poetics of space of English poet Charles Tomlinson and the thought provoking surrealism of Charles Simic. He is still working on it! He has been previously published in a number of UK Print magazines (South, The Wolf) and by Poetry Scotland. He lives in Burnaby BC with his wife, Frances, and Young daughter, Charlotte, to whom these poems are dedicated.

Email: Alan Hill

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