Baylis
Barnes
Kirby
Hyder
Shirley
Hullo there,
I am posting this from a train, wondering if people can read the words “erotic pond” over my shoulder. Hopefully they can and are enjoying them, and you will too
Chrissy
PERVERSE editor
PS It may be best to view these poems on a larger-than-phone-sized screen, or else a phone turned sideways.
Charlie Baylis
las vegas love poem
you are lucky
i will propose a white wedding after the clubs close
& give up my prettiest vampires
have you met the devil on your mindfulness course?
felt nostalgia for a mouth you’ve never kissed?
stared through the want of poets,
the pang of promise, um…
the land is a mirror of our terrible beauty, um…
rich, calm & voluptuous, um…
beside an ugly car park in las vegas we marry,
quickly,
after the clubs burn down,
in silence,
i will give up licking out pretty vampires
there is no reason for us to live,
there is no reason for us to die.
the air is golden honey & opium.
“i shall go on shining
as a brilliantly meaningless figure
in a meaningless world.”
i have ripped the best bits from your culture and spoilt them, o my
time wasted on beautiful whores
i can’t breathe here,
i can’t breathe here,
but i will never be unkind to you
i promise to stay up all night reading you love poetry
& gaze gently into paintings of the internet,
the glitching pink-lips of porn stars, or through the glass fabric of the moon
& good lifestyle brands,
i don’t care if you’re mean
i don’t care if you cheat
free market capitalism: i will always love you
internet symbol of a wave,
peach emoji, plum emoji, pear emoji,
will you not listen to me mirror my best analogy?
won’t you tattoo a tattoo to my back immediately?
black coffee lifestyle brands, good ones,
& when you wash your tourmaline body in holy water,
lonely,
close your eyes,
give me your hand, darling
do you feel my heart beating?
do you feel the same?
Barbara Barnes
I start a boxset while waiting for a delivery
I’m watching from inside my 2-hour window
the Outback is a sun-parched canvas
January, Streatham Hill, it’s dark by 4
one officer shoots another officer at point blank
the laundry lies in heaps, too drunk to recall
if I didn’t care, more than words can say–
the Inkspots soften my head
what happened between us last night Elliot?
did we finally do it? I strip the bed
bag the sheets, separate lights from darks
the officer’s still down, there’s a lot of blood
I need that washing machine asap, stat
understand? I realise it’s plenty to take in
but believe me the situation is bad
some guy phones back, blames a roadblock
high-speed cable laying, LTN cameras, I check–
it’s only a head wound, try not to panic
the back door of the honeymoon suite bangs
I’m on my knees behind the curtain–
a Currys van cratered in the street opposite
I may just be a rooky cop but it’s clear okay
someone laced the water bottle with LSD–
this delivery is not going to happen
it’s now or never, time to make a run for it–
across the parking lot to those rusty oil cans
a crack and the heavens open
Elliot!!! look me in the eye
tell me what the fuck is going on
Angela Kirby
Since You Ask
I lost it sixty years ago on Putney Heath
in the back of his Hillman pick-up truck
the night before the wedding when
he said he couldn’t wait any longer.
I don’t remember much about it,
just flapping wet canvas overhead,
the starting handle digging into my hips,
a feeling of nothing-much-at-all afterward
and how the next day was sharp and bright
as the arch of swords held over us
when we came out from the church. Oh,
occasionally I wonder where it went,
if perhaps there is a Refuge somewhere
for battered Virginities where they
can be safe, bond, boast, gossip, giggle
and swop all those near misses.
but no, I never bothered to look for it,
being far too busy, digging myself free
from the big heap of shit which I soon found
I’d walked into so blithely.
Amaan Hyder
I bear witness
I loved reading and so I wrote versions of the books I had read.
It took a long time until I realised that I needed to live a life to write something novel. I met Tom East London whose real name was David. He was an audiotician
who knew how sounds travelled through buildings. Before we went into his house
he greeted his neighbour and I worried whether what we said in bed would fly
out the window of his room down to the ears of the neighbour. We needed privacy and air. Afterwards I saw the small dampnesses, the tinged stains I’d/we’d made
on the bedsheet. Rise O Days from your fathomless depths, Whitman writes.
At school once, a boy larger than me sat in my lap, made sounds as a pornstar would
sitting on a man’s lap. He did it for the crowd around us who laughed. I couldn’t get the boy off. Could only get him off by grabbing at his crotch. The weight of that boy: a lug, a log. I walked off. I don’t remember where. The memory drops off.
Often me and my sisters went with my mother to a halal butchers on the other side
of town from where we lived. I would never see my schoolmates there.
At the back of the shop the owner’s nephew cut meat using the electric saw.
At the front of the shop there were crates of vegetables and fruits.
The owner handed me and my sisters lollipops which we chewed and swallowed.
We would then suck the sticks and leave them in our pockets, in the grooves
of the armrests of the car. My mother would find them, these secrets. I couldn’t hide from her. She could look at me and say You are unwell and I would nod.
I went to hospital to get my tonsils removed. When was that: 1988, 1989?
I was a child of the eighties. I was getting to know songs in the charts.
What is the depth at which knowing ends and fathoming starts?
My mother has since told me in a train station car park and quietly while my father is in the next room or when he has gone to bed. Older gay men whose company I seek
have told me with slim-necked glasses in their hands and bloody lips.
When I was born my father whispered to me that There is no god but Allah and Mohammed is his prophet. It was an initiation into memory-making and line-making,
into the betrayal I feel to all the others in my life when I say I love you to one person. Rise O Days, murmured, waved. From what abandoning empires do we,
do we not surface? At school we learned how to save a friend floating in water.
We held onto our partner’s chin, scooped beneath our bodies, tugged them to an end.
When we reached land, we came alive, switched places, began again.
Vik Shirley
Erotic Pond
A play in three acts
ACT ONE
(A pond is still. Reaching over and hovering breathlessly above it, a tree quivers. Water lilies, frogs and fish tingle. Sensing the eroticism, many creatures come out of their burrows and nests to mingle and copulate. They are not concerned with Covid-19 as they are not human, and this is set prior to all this anyway, so will you please stop thinking about that damn virus.)
ACT TWO
(A different pond nearby can sense what is going on at the other pond and is insanely jealous. The trees are quivering, sure, but still there is no eroticism in the air. The pond wonders if it is thinking about it too much, if it could relax a little, perhaps the eroticism would come. But unable to do so, the more it thinks about it, the less erotic the environment feels.)
ACT THREE
(A waterfall in the vicinity wanted in too. It was already highly erotic, I mean, look at it, listen to it, the power, the cascade, the frothing at the bottom. But, alas, the waterfall was so narcissistic and in love with itself, others found it a massive turn-off, and despite the fact that the falls and the plunge pool were already copulating in the frothing process, it was a bit of a non-event.)
Contributor Notes
Charlie Baylis
https://theimportanceofbeingaloof.tumblr.com/
Charlie Baylis is from Nottingham. He is the editor of Anthropocene. His first collection of poetry a fondness for the colour green is published by Broken Sleep Books. He spends his spare time completely adrift of reality.
Note on ‘las vegas love poem’:
“Perversely for Perverse ‘las vegas love poem’ is an ode to being faithful. The poem came from translating Charles Baudelaire for my blog. Some of the lines are simply Baudelaire in English, some dripped from the decadent excess Baudelaire breathes into me. ‘lvlp’ was also influenced by the wounded romanticism of Tiffany Anne Tondut’s mini-masterpiece Floodlights. I should say the biographical details of the poem are true, they just happened in another lifetime.”
Barbara Barnes
https://www.livecanon.co.uk/store/product/hound-mouth-barbara-barnes
Barbara’s poems have appeared in Poetry London, Ambit, Under the Radar, Butcher’s Dog, Brixton Review of Books, Interpreter’s House, Magma, Crooked Jukebox, Arc Poetry Magazine, The Alchemy Spoon, and several times in Perverse; also in For the Silent (Indigo Dreams), and Cry of the Poor (Culture Matters). Her first collection Hound Mouth won the Live Canon collection competition and was published in 2022.
Note on ‘I start a boxset while waiting for a delivery’:
“I was obsessed with watching The Tourist – a thriller set in the Australian Outback. My washing machine broke down. The driver of the Currys delivery van kept phoning me with different reasons why he couldn’t reach my house. Everything seemed to get mashed together and I wrote this poem.”
Angela Kirby
Angela Kirby was born in rural Lancashire in 1932 but now lives in London. She has also lived in France and spent a great deal of time in Spain and the USA. Her widely published poems have won prizes and commendations in major competitions, have appeared on TV, on the buses, been read on the BBC, and translated into Rumanian. They have twice won the BBC Wildlife Poet of the Year prize. Shoestring Press publish her six collections.
Note on ‘Since You Ask’:
“The idea for this poem had been floating around in my brain for one or two years since a friend asked me about my first sexual experience. The memories came back in bits and pieces, and I wrote two or three versions of the poem under different titles before settling on this one.”
Amaan Hyder
https://twitter.com/hyder_amaan
Amaan Hyder is the author of At Hajj (Penned in the Margins, 2017) and Self-Portrait With Family (Nine Arches Press, forthcoming 2024). He is a Ledbury Poetry Critic.
Note on ‘I bear witness’:
“When I was young, my school life and my home life were separate cultures. I spent my time moving between those two distinct places, each with their own languages and histories. This poem is an attempt to register that flickering between cultures – a shifting that continued on into adulthood.”
Vik Shirley
http://vikshirley.com
Vik Shirley’s newest publications are Notes from the Underworld (Sublunary Editions) & Strangers Wave: Joy Division Photo Poems (zimZalla). She has a PhD in Dark Humour and the Surreal from the University of Birmingham. She is from Bristol but now lives in Edinburgh with her partner and their whippet pup, Beckett.
Note on ‘Erotic Pond’:
“I wrote ‘Erotic Pond’ when giving a Zoom workshop on unstageable and mock plays to creative writing students during the pandemic, mainly showing them the work of the Russian Absurdist Daniil Kharms. I joined in on the exercise I’d given them, after showing them some of Kharms’s most hilarious and nonsensical work. I came up with four and ‘Erotic Pond’ was the first of those four and remains my favourite.”
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