FIRE OF DRIFTWOOD
I slip another worm-bored plank to fire's core and rest by ashes held in by rocks I am safe enough with light reveries but other gamers bring to my dreams insecurity and flavours of treacherousness an atmosphere of bleak insincerity and chewing it over I have to say hostility because yes I am not completely guiltless – by habit thinking one thing and uttering another script in this ramshackle film my bit-part co-stars in but nor am I gullible stirring charcoal chucking on some mixture of materials including I notice ubiquitous flip-flops and a child's shoe laced trying not to dwell on all the owners or toxic fumes I drift off again oblivious like wave-jostled wood but too many voices so many selves and I shudder awake shaking to sound of surf and popping fuel truly weary now ghost-wisps of white float I huddle in my sandy sacking gazing at a flame thrust another shoe child's laced eyes widely staring into the embers not remembering
MY BIT OF JIGSAW
I have contributed to the jigsaw, offered to the structure, my shape, with no consideration of a box-lid picture, much less scruples of aesthetic judgement or naïve notions of free choice, for who divided us? Who ordained this cutting line, the random, wandering, pattern divine? So curious, I gaze upward, seeking answers in sky and as the haze solidifies; the golden man, the trumpet, etcetera, I find it, boundless in a cloud: the hidden ingredient lacing the matrix, the silver charm hidden deep in the duff. And now come wild neutrinos spinning, abandoning their parent suns... that they to find their place, it is enough.
Clive Donovan devotes himself full-time to poetry and has published in a wide variety of magazines including Acumen, Agenda, Prole, Sentinel and Stand. He lives in Totnes, Devon, UK. He is a Pushcart and Forward Prize nominee for this year’s best individual poems and his first collection, The Taste of Glass, is recently published by Cinnamon Press.
Flight of the dragonfly 