Bert Bell

they
found
his little
body
...

as frail as a wishbone, she
sits at the table by the window,
sipping her sherry in a haze
...

The promise of summer was everywhere
this morning, even in the rivers that
fell out of the sky during the night
...

.

To the angry sea that tosses freighters
round like bits of fluff, the ruddy-skinned
...

I met her at Strawberry Fields
one day on my lunch
break.
She was sitting on a bench
...

Dawn has just
broken and
I’m sitting reading
the early morning
...

October brings both beauty and dread;
And when it first arrives, it feels
Like something has already been lost.
Before all its radiant spectra have fluttered free
...

This happens to us all and we all learn far too late
that the years have streaked past like wind through city streets
stirring up in its wake whirlwinds of debris and dust
that burn the eyes and fill the pores with dirt
...

outside my bedroom
window
on a sheet of ebony,
the moon sits,
...

A fog settled over the park last night,
so thick, it transformed the moon
into a ghost high above the trees,
and it was quiet, with only the muffled
...

on monday mornings a wretched
woman trudges out onto
her back porch under a cloud
of gloom and struggles
...

In revision
...

I brought my bag of words to the park this morning; it's cold, but refreshing; so cold that I'm the only one sitting at a picnic table. I open a blank page of my notebook, ready to serve it its long-awaited breakfast of tasty nouns and verbs, flavoured with a few juicy adjectives and adverbs.

The first manna of winter is parachuting down, and at this temperature, it should last. I see my neighbour, Tom, coming with his Frisbee-chasing black Lab; my trusty notepad will have to wait awhile longer. I'll just throw a Frisbee or two, and explain that I have work to do.
...

It’s been raining non-stop
since ten o’clock
this morning; what a
day to forget my umbrella.
...

after you bring the storm clouds, mighty
wind— where do you go? do you seek quiescence,
or do you return with more rain,
...

sometimes, if I stand here long
enough in the monsoon
of alphabet rain, my muse for whom I wait
...

she disquiets
me with the imagined
tenderness
of an ever so faint smile
...

daffodils broke ground today
like rockets lifting
off for outer space, and they brought
...

I come here on cobalt blue days
to remember suzie− this
is the exact spot where her horse
...

It happened at a roadside
quarry near Pyongyang― some
of the dead were bloodied,
...