Issue 9 - Gold Dust magazine

Poems [cont’d]
THE SICK MAN
Some nights there would be so much blood on the
walls
he could write his name
with a fingertip.
All the knocked out teeth he found in urinals
he kept in a drawer in his bedroom,
sometimes, on winter nights
he could hear them chattering.
The other people who worked at the club
would never invite him to join them.
While the management flirted with barmaids
and the bouncers bought drinks for the dancers
he would wipe the bathroom mirror
until it gleamed.
On his 30th birthday
he drank his own bodyweight of tequila
and was sick on the train.
He caught it all in a plastic bag
double knotted it
and carried it all the way home
in his pocket.
THE SILVER SURFER
If he's not doubled up in an asteroid's pocket
- more molten trophy cabinet
than man -
he walks among us, his trenchcoat a thicket,
looking ill, his eyes white stones.
Stopping to read a newspaper,
even though the headlines tie an anchor
to his stomach and heart.
Then something escapes
the grassblade lips that could press coins
and his board comes to him
like a waterfall to its pool.
He's upon it, and flying,
faster than a ghost swift,
fainter than a scarecrow in a blizzard.
John Osbourne
Jon Stone
DISORDER
The idea of food
is eating away at you. Corbies
undo the sky in a black line,
voices like the quick unzipping
of a baggy sheepskin.
You dramatise
being swallowed by lions, tigers, bears, a man
with a bone through his nose who makes
kebab skewers of your humeri.
On a mattress of twigs and brambles
bubbling with blackberries – and still
nothing no-one nothing.
Wait a little longer.
A long way off lightning
opens the sky's mouth.
BEFORE THE DENTISTS
James Al Midgley
The car crash and the robbery are still to come
as are the seven visits to the dentists
in three weeks
and the dead Dalmatian.
They will happen in the new year.
Today is the 28th October
and with the carpets almost dry
and the break up behind him
Ashley has started sleeping better at night
and doesn't get so annoyed
during advert breaks
and at the sound of people whistling.
Last night he sat in the garden
trying to find Saturn
through his telescope
and thought that life couldn't get any better.
John Osbourne
46 www.golddustmagazine.co.uk - Issue 9 - Winter 2007