Issue 9 - Gold Dust magazine

Poems
I CAN'T STOP THINKING ABOUT YOU
BEEP BEEP wake up, car bombs.
The happiest day in my life
Pirate blood rushes in café doors
and where are we? La la la
*Excuse me, can I*
I'm five years ahead of my time.
A bird call to your armsthe
piers fell into the sea with the punches we never
pulled,
we talked in kites,
then the museum trains broke free Oh run
to this day through Bracken Grass
and the dummies run with the scarecrows on the
Downs
Their cigarettes came undone
robbing houses and caught in the wrong way.
Reading comics on the train down
and fishing between stops.
*Show off*
*For him*
We dodged the dust on the sofa in our underwear
*Boy*
Mean shadows on wall maps.
Comfy accents planning anti-dates.
I WISH
Mining underneath buildings, a phone call to arms
Mapping 3D circuits between pubs
like stadiums full of people.
The clouds were drawn like curtains
hanging over their curly hair.
*Can I have one of them for him please?*
You were mistaken for treasure hunters
weren't you
While we were seen with hands in each other's pockets
lover,
Sparks wet in freedom fighters' fists
Pin ups on answer phone fuzz
The old carpets in the rooms you left wide open
are irreplaceable maps.
THE VANISHINGS
First it's pennies: a last glimpse
of bronze in a cool well
I never visited, whose water is heavy
as mirror glass.
Pens scatter under floorboards
with the accounts they signed. Keys
for the loft or shed clink around every corner,
materialising into windchimes or broken glass
or gravel or nothing.
Tonight I find
a wardrobe bulking the living room.
And inside:
pennies, biros, keys,
ancestors hung up like coats.
Barnaby Tidman
James Al Midgley
44 www.golddustmagazine.co.uk - Issue 9 - Winter 2007