Tony Jolley Poems

It’s heavy.
The kind of heavy you can’t carry,
Aching dull down deep to your marrow,
Weighing against all your good intentions and better inclinations,
...

Touch: Our first kiss: light, lingering and yet so explicit and explosive
I can still feel the reverberations behind my smile.

Taste: You, so sweet on the tip of my tongue I didn’t dare drink for a week
...

What eternities have these small fingers fashioned
From the realms of the spirit
And made the living folio of a life:
Love watermarking all your learning -
...

The Old One stood,
Stock still and staring,
Somewhere between
In-depth contemplation
...

Me, I’m in Bournemouth,
You, you’re in Bruebach:
Only just got here;
Can’t wait to get back.
...

Against the elegant, if ageing, shuttered façades of Old France,
Sweeping their stylish, nineteenth century architecture in voluptuous curves
Along the avenue
Toward the high-glazed garishness of the new concrete city,
...

Think of all the ungainly gaits you've ever seen:

Mr Hobson in his polio callipers
Clomping his exo-skeletal, leg ironwork
...

A nine-year-old, for God's sake,
[yes, for God's sake]
Even less than a slip of a 'slip of a girl'
Reportedly, repeatedly raped
...

I knew them.
Knew them as well as one can know two names engraved,
Side by side in granite, lead inlaid:
Henry and William Alfred, a brace of Edgington boys
...

They say you'll love it or hate it and there isn't much room in-between.
I was sure I was going to squeeze into that slightly grudging middle ground:
Appreciative of training, skill, strength, grace, movement and artistic interpretation,
But left slightly untouched because I've two left feet and little affinity with the dancefloor
...