John Wilkinson Poems

A treatise divides between its several heads, yellow
safe as its green is matter-of-fact, ladies-mantle
bunched lustrous jar, converges & is close to oceanic -
No more no more. The earth bread, the millet, maize,
...

In summer
in country places
it's the custom yet
to fill
hearth or grate
...

They bash their fists on the asphalt playground, as if
they could crush the stone below; soft fists splinter
A) ache, B) pale white secure, C) deep white safeline
Sparks from the mica fan into veins, & tar-thick milk
...

If I let myself
freely to spill,
here is a wolf
amidst forest petals
...

The ubiquitous now come home to roost
Who'd went without space to occupy,

but eat the loving hearts & the tinned
wallpaper, pressing on the lonely beds.
...

bayoneted. If any will hear the truth must cling best
avoid blow dragonflies, cling on by nail-feasance
over a cataract which scours a giant curtain wall,
or was it short-of-time shrunk the unseeming aimless
...

So to test the water. Folded-wing hippogriffs
crowd the paved shadows, they'll be realised

lake from rill to shingle to humpback bridge
to this world, whose cinematic stiff, jewelled
...

Water glasses in and glass waters like an eye glasses over
To outstare : so waters rush down the glassy eye

Rolls behind the lustre it apportions, the eyes' armada
Bristling with quivers-full, ruddying like time-lapse orbits,
...

For Andrea Brady
As though the overcast might tweak
an airman's maps, his foretelling — 
as though in chains of stop-start
...

In memory of Sara Wilkinson and for Liz Miles
Eyelids, fall softly, from their gritted corners
chalk, let it drizzle,
let the streams flow
...