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Tuesday 31 January 2012

Christopher Barnes-

Strapped
 
Unfetted power
Is not drawled,
Cryptic as sanctioned.  Liar dice have sounded –
Nowadays you’re ‘The Appellant’
In this fixture of the departed.
A flash squirms copper cables.
Grimness summons its ghosts;
Duress evaporates
As light knocks-for-six the eye.
 
(from the Electric Chair poems)
 
Unpardonable
 
From corpse to executioner
Sparks are zeroed, skirting the brain
Across the eyeball, hanging the gut.
 
Subject?  Life-ditching by legal prod.
Who does this hoodlum have a conviction to be?
Bundy?  Boston strangler?
 
Merciless barb-pixels strike.
The screen stamps itself
Into a lachrymal nerve,
Shivers.
 
(from the Electric Chair poems)
 
 Bird
 
As the eye fathoms
Lumpishness has vanquished;
Down aisle to lock-up
You’ll stomp no more.
 
The stir of disintegration,
Bodied in the black-out
Will knot, fizzling out
The unanswerable sparks
In a singed brain.
 
Bessie Smith’s bawl
‘Send Me To The ‘Lectric Chair’
And this Google portrait
Will survive.
 
(from the Electric Chair poems)
 
Christopher Barnes' first collection LOVEBITES is published by Chanticleer Press.  He is a participant for www.stemistry.com and has just had an art review published by Peels Magazine, UK
 

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