The Writer Aged by Martin Porter

His life flows like ink from his fountain pen, The type that sucks up the blackness by capillary action Effortlessly, until one day A blockage might occur in the feed Or the sac begins to perish And decay. He wears his hat at a more jaunty angle But fails to conceal the less distinct nature Of his hairline, the smudged boundary Between lip and chin, the creased parafiltrum And the lines on his face drawn With time’s fine nib. He knows he is in the wrong stanza Of a poem he writes, but It is his readers who create the character, He has lost control, is not who he imagines himself to be And nor are we, drifting along his script, And he is aged.

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shell by Martin Porter

his father unfolded the concertina map, laying it in dunes on the table he googled it, name in box, click of a button, eyes on the screen and zoomed in to see every grain of sand, a hermit crab caught, mid- scuttle, the met report told them it was comfortable yesterday comfortable today and it will be… i gently rest my finger on the sand, raise it to my face, observe the Single Fragment of Shell adhered and rub it, abrasively, across my open palm

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The Host among the Crowd by Martin Porter

“As soon as I arrived I made an attempt to find my host, but the two or three people of whom I asked his whereabouts stared at me in such an amazed way, and denied so vehemently any knowledge of his movements, that I slunk off in the direction of the cocktail table—the only place in the garden where a single man could linger without looking purposeless and alone.” — F Scott Fitzgerald He has the show of power. Stopping to share a word, he Barely eats As if he had fed prior, Forgetting his invite. Some say his riches Are as illicit as Brandy on his cocktail bar, Not old as the label claims, Or as proof. Some say He lives on a little poker here, Or bar-room brawls, And some say worse. He wanders ever hopeful, With watchful eyes. Maybe he’s Simply guarding his back, but He seems to be searching For the one thing he has lost. You might get the impression Life does not like him, But I admire him and my girl, She adores him.

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How to Grow Avocado by Martin Porter

“I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do” O Pioneers – Willa Cather Choose your sapling carefully. If planting bare rooted, Ensure the roots can spread In an elegant fan, else Dig a pit just deep enough, But not too deep, To take the root ball, Gently guide The root tips downward to ensure A good, firm anchor. They say it takes Seven summers For this tender tree To mature. That’s not Too long to wait. Rich, oily fleshed and puckered Dark skinned fruit Worth waiting for Weigh down its broad leaved Reaching branches, So vigorous I have to prune it To perhaps three Or four times my own height, Or reduce it by the Careful grafting of its leg Onto another foot. And at its centre The polished nut, Seems almost systole, pumping Future sap in woody veins to Wrinkled skin on sunburnt lips, or Palms of a gardener’s hands. I lean on one leg on my spade And wonder “Should I Dig this pit through The midpoint of the Earth And out the other side? But here, the air Is much too warm, The soil too rich, To lose, by just one Careless footfall Slipping gently To cold winter, Rotting windfalls.

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Garden tombs by Martin Porter

“When our hearts are saddened, grieving or in pain, By Your touch You call us back to life again; Fields of our hearts that dead and bare have been: Love is come again, like wheat that springs up green.” – Martin F Shaw (Oxford Book of Carols, 1928) lamina thin the green leaves of freesia are already risen hidden in the trowel deep trenches are the baby-corpse and the congealed lump of the deathly unborn waiting for the passing of winter in this land of no winter life springs at seeming random spontaneous from the ground enriched by dung the coloured frocked bells ring out the heaving seasons autumnal Easter or the occasional july frost, the hope of a sultry christmas in this a foreigner land here is an alien digging trowel deep placing corms and layered bulbs embryonic folded adult in a different soil waiting for the everyday to return resurrected

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Lambs to the Slaughter by Martin Porter

1. To test the system God sent forth His wish That Abram, who loved his son so deeply, should love his God to death And slay his own beloved, his only boy, So Abram took his knife up, to love his God and kill his joy. But on the mountain, God repented of His command And trapped a lamb for Abram, to fulfill His demand. Yet Abram, being honest, insisted on his son’s life And promised God his loved one would perish by his knife. So God offered the lamb, and spoke, “Slay it and we will be as one”, And Abram took up the knife and slew the lamb. 2. To test the system God sent forth His wish That Abram, who loved his son so deeply, should love his God to death And slay his own beloved, his only boy, So Abram took his knife up, to love his God and kill his joy. But on the mountain, God repented of His command And trapped a lamb for Abram, to fulfill His demand. Yet Abram, being honest, insisted on his son’s life And promised God his loved one would perish by his knife. So God offered the lamb, and spoke, “Slay it and we will be as one”, And Abram took up the knife and slew his son.

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Disregarding 12 O 2 by Martin Porter

(Sea of Tranquility, 20:17 UT, July 20, 1969) 30 seconds. Twelve o two is crying for attention. Overloaded, the god in the machine Is in a state of panic And demands that you stop. But down below, the surface Where you are going Looks so interesting, so dangerous, Grey, pored with sharp edged holes, Tempting in the blandness, But each block a risk of irreversible Landing. Dust fans out In long white streaks And the shadow of the spider legs Meet the spider legs. The guys about to turn blue Breathe again, the guys up there Simply breathe.

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Skin by Martin Porter

In the beginning was the word Stretched across the frontier like a hide Between creation and the void. Vapid, she approaches, a wall of face powder Held in place by skin, stretched so tight A push of a pin might tear her apart, Dilated pupils flashing inside a shell of cosmetic, Countenance with the dreary glow of the brand. You cannot tell if she is angry, absent, or just bored, She is her own existence. She knows the words That describe her are what really count, Not her false biology, And she knows that the search for ultimate meaning Is pseudoscience, fake knowledge and empty, With the boundary stretched either Between something and something Or her make-up and some unstable vacuum Waiting to collapse, but she knows not which. She knows not which. She positions herself on some edge And a single prick explodes her into the world To promulgate knowledge like the black hole.

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