___________________________________________________________________________

CAUGHT IN THE NET 177 -  POETRY  BY ALAN PRICE

Series Editor - Jim Bennett for The Poetry Kit - www.poetrykit.org
___________________________________________________________________________

You can join the CITN mailing list at - http://www.poetrykit.org/pkl/index.htm and following the links for Caught in the Net.

Submissions for this series of Featured poets is open, please see instruction in afterword at the foot of this mail.
 

 _________________________________________________________________

________________________________________________________________

CONTENTS

1 - BIOGRAPHY
2 – POETRY 

3 - PUBLISHING HISTORY

4 - AFTERWORD
___________________________________________________________________________


1 – BIOGRAPHY:  Alan Price

ALAN PRICE was born in Liverpool and now lives in London.

He is an ex-librarian, poet, scriptwriter, short story writer, film critic for the online 'Filmuforia' blogger at  alanprice69.wordpress.com. and Alan's debut collection of poetry 'Outfoxing Hyenas' was published by Indigo Dreans in 2012. His pamphlet of prose poems 'Angels at the Edge' (Tuba Press) appeared in 2016. The chapbook 'Mahler's Hut' was published in 2017. And his new book of poetry, 'Wardrobe Blues for a Japanese Lady' (The High Window Press) came out in May 2018.

 ______________________________________________________________

2 - POETRY 

PRETENCE OF A WAITRESS

Thick black hair. Sheen pitched

to raven feather caught

in early morning.

Sleep hiding in a young woman’s

eye. Rubbing her tiredness

with sunburnt knuckle of hand.

Pensive. Stretching, yawning

at the long hot work day ahead.

Grey green her cautious eyes.

Jeans for thin, kept busy, legs.

Half unbuttoned white shirt

shielding her small breasts.

Precise, yet luminous body.

A woman clearing the tables

by the harbour at Corfu.

Distracted by children, she spilt

my breakfast coffee. Bread

and omelette fell into the sand.

Ferry boat filling up. Sipping

a re-fill of bitter coffee.

I left her small change. 

HITCHCOCK IN REHEARSAL

He is seated, gripping his chair,

ready to pounce on his shadow.

The eyes in the back of the head

of the shadow belong to wood grain

swirling on the raised lid of a trunk.

Two men, eager for their cocktails,

have strangled an actor with a rope.

They’re impatient to hide the body,

head drooping with a hand on the lid,

welcoming death or maybe the party.

Playing at murder is such hard work.

It’s all being siphoned from his brain

for the camera, editor and more eyes

in the dark. He will admit to no guilt

as killers and corpse drink on the set.

THEIR WORDS ARE HERE FOR YOU TO TAKE

Mournful tone of a trumpet. Jewelled phrasing of piano.

Purple brown smoke miles away from duet.

Clouds regrouping into more smoked clouds.

Pretending to be ominous, as they pattern like a tornado.

Tiny insect police helicopter flying into a clearing.

Lights come on. Deflecting all these sunset entered rooms.

Houses, flats, hotels prepare themselves for evening.

Traffic begins to flow quicker. A road tinted by destinations.

Trumpet binds piano to ruminate downwards into night.

This twilight of droning music and passing moments.

A playful sense of a day’s completeness.

I could die, just now. Fulfilled. Content.

Who else can ever receive this properly?

Really see or hear what these things couldn’t express?

Their words are here for you to take.

HOW MANY STORIES OF RIVERS

Once there was a grandfather

who died at the docks riveting

cabin holes into a ferry boat,

till an idiot chain knocked him

acrobatically into the Mersey.

Once there was a girl, my mother,

who juggled grief with two sisters

by watching very hard a silent film

set at night on the river Thames.

Pregnant, with me, she dreamt of both

rivers overlapping all face of family.

I left her face for a Sussex coast.

Home fracturing all my voyages.

Drinking beer by the Ganges or Danube.

More stories carried on burning.

Hot rivets, with voices, that I never allowed

to be cooled in the waters.

How many stories of rivers can we allow.

Do they take us to or away from ourselves.

Have we shed a dependable river god

and dislocated Homer’s journey?

WHAT DID THOUGHT DO FOR PIETER BRUEGHEL THE ELDER AND ANY OF US?

One hundred and twelve Netherland proverbs

turned into country folk. Stomping on what sense they have.

Out it escapes. See it. Catch it. Taste it. Throw it back.

Curse breathing in such idiot Dutch air.

A village of asylum antics.

Breughel’s colossal explosion.

When a rich merchant tiles a roof with baked tarts,

a peasant in a dark room gnaws a bone,

some fellow’s banging his head against a wall

and people keep falling, from an ox

onto the rear end of an ass, we’ve had enough.

Yet mad times keep braying back.

More proverbs spew out like devils.

This is the world turned upside down.

At the edge of God’s table (far from this land)

lie crumbs of reason. Brush them into your beer. 

Swig down that soggy Dutch and Flemish nous.

But would a thinking of things through follow?

You know what thought did, don’t you?

It went and followed a muck cart

and thought it was a wedding.

MOON VIOLENCE, A DREAM IN THREE PARTS.

(1) 

La Luna perspiring, beckoning.

Entering the lift shaft, ascending.

Moon full. Horrifically bright.

Sprung from tarot card to sky.

Pressing soft each crack and crevice.

Desiring a watcher at three am.

My fate caught on the twentieth floor.

Light coating my skin and schema.

(2)

Child’s silver house bolted tight.

Can a father actually howl at the moon?

Doctor, with husky voice, prescribing.

Warning a mother. Sub-normal man.

Leave and you’ll get next to nothing.

Stay. Just don’t ask for the moon.

A mother’s fury. Pitched to illuminate.

Striking, with poker, her husband’s knee.

Cowering white on his moaning chair.

See, her lunacy approaching.

Running to the shade of outside toilet.

Peeing afraid. The white light comes.

 (3)

I waver in my sleep, silver collecting.

Stumbling through an empty corridor.

Nobody over bed. Nobody in lift.

No dream. Moon simply trying to hang.

COMMUNION

Bark of varnished brown tree arms.

Snaking. Hugging a concrete trunk.

An immensity of tree. Sheltering

a restaurant cashier.

Fidgety woman impatient

for the devout man to pin,

a little faster, his credit card.

Too vacant. Too exact. Too innocent

to have tracked

her own disappearance

in this self-service

eating wood.

The tree branches are invading a trellis.

Leaves appear to entwine, prosper.

Is the ceiling supported by the tree

or does it always press down?

Still the pin escapes him.

She looks up to the spreading foliage

as if asking acorns to drop.

Deliver up the urgent host.

Four anxious digits.

Ineluctably the sale passes. The tray moves on.

Forlorn, come others holding their meals,

watched by the forest’s eye.

Always the pin is lost, found,

lost again, then found.

She kneels down in prayer.

Opens the till.

Mouths it for succour.

TO LIFT THE VOICES

Blind, he listens to a shellac disc of lieder.

Nuances the ear to catch inflections on the wing.

A pause. A breath. The pattern secreted before the note.

All that furthers music calmly engineered.

Restorer accompanies the daunting tread of singer,

doleful pianist and Schubert on their winter’s day.

Cylinder, shellac, vinyl, tape. Containers of baritione.

Leaving each imperfect vessel. Winterreise pounds the ear.

Gloom of an organ grinder, trapped by technical blemish.

Unbroken Schubert seeds his progress of despair.

Enthusing each measured step. Joyful of our outcome.

With dark precision, an engineer cleans artefact.

Snowflakes, real and mind like, blow into his room.

White formatted. On his desk, freezing the headphones.

Another’s winter intrudes on songs’ journey.

He cannot picture, only feel the cold of heartbreak.

The window’s shut. In solitude he rests assured.

Closing down the sounds that never fade within.

Pianist and singer stalk the shifting journey. Each shock

cleaning interpretation. Restorer drinks a warming wine.

Small each gesture for the anxious archive. Larger perhaps

his sense of consolation. Master, of the sonic, lifts the voices

PHILOSOPHY GRADUATE / A FINAL DATE

She’d met him on campus

in the eighties,

turned on by grey green eyes

and erudition.

A killingly bright nineteen years,

with a head of blonde hair,

badly hurling a Frisbee.

She slept with his ideas

more than his body.

Sorry to quit

the Foucault debate

and dress. Pulled back

by the booze and a mind

of wonderful retention.

She has a husband now,

not as clever,

more a solid

core of attachment,

undreamt of through

the long semesters

with her ironic animal.

The partner lives

for his work.

The lover’s dead.

She ignores these strangers

drinking at his wake;

remembering frenzied days

of letting go.

THE CURE

If only you’d befriend the stuttering, overcome the dot-

dot-dotting, stretching of a word, its breakdown and the silence.

That was the daydream of a boy who listened and suffered.

Not some frustrated tearing out of the father’s tongue,

more a trial by tolerance told by a cunning Scheherazade.

Not a story to save a life, but maintain a halting anecdote,

incomplete and in suspense that wanted to go on and on.

Prolong. Repeat. Prolong. Repeat. Its drawn-out rhythm

needing to dazzle the waiting audience, deflect the executioner.

Once, philosophers tried stuffing pebbles into their mouths.

Better to recite the daffodils of an old poet, fluttering

and dancing, breaking through the host, the hill, the dale,

the sun, bypassing clouds…daffo…daffo…daffo…daffo…

becoming a rapture in the voice for those who listened well.

PRETENCE OF A WAITRESS - published by Soaring Penguin for the anthology, A Shadow on the Wall (May 2011) and by Indigo Dreams for my collection Outfoxing Hyenas (2012)

HITCHCOCK IN REHEARSAL - published by The Interpreter's House magazine (2016) and by The High Window Press for my collection, Wardrobe Blues for a Japanese Lady(2018)

THEIR WORDS ARE HERE FOR YOU TO TAKE - published by London Grip magazine(2016) and by The High Window Press for my collection, Wardrobe Blues for a Japanese Lady (2018)

HOW MANY STORIES OF RIVERS - published by Indigo Dreams for my collection Outfoxing Hyenas (2012)

WHAT DID THOUGHT DO FOR PETER BRUEGHEL THE ELDER OR ANY OF US? - published by Envoi magazine (2016) and by The High Window Press for my collection, Wardrobe Blues for a Japanese Lady (2018)

MOON VIOLENCE - published by The Interpreter's House magazine (2010) and by Indigo Dreams for my collection Outfoxing Hyenas (2012)

COMMUNION - published by The Recusant magazine (2015) and The High Window Press for my collection, Wardrobe Blues for a Japanese Lady (2018)

TO LIFT THE VOICES - published by Cinnamon Press for the anthology Seeking Refuge (2010) and by Indigo Dreams for my collection Outfoxing Hyenas (2012)

PHILOSOPHY GRADUATE / A FINAL DATE - published by The Wednesday magazine(2018) and by The High Window Press for my collection Wardrobe Blues for a Japanese Lady (2018)

THE CURE - published by Limerick Arts Office in The Stony Thursday Book (2016) and by Original Plus Chapbooks for my chapbook Mahler's Hut (2017)

______________________________________________
 

4 - Afterword

Email Poetry Kit - info@poetrykit.org    - if you would like to tell us what you think. 

We are looking for other poets to feature in this series, and are open to submissions.  Please send one poem and a short bio to - info@poetrykit.org

Thank you for taking the time to read Caught in the Net.  Our other magazine s are Transparent Words ands Poetry Kit Magazine, which are webzines on the Poetry Kit site and this can be found at - http://www.poetrykit.org/