FILLING_A_SPACE

No Room Through this sludge-week before your lit Yuletide – this path of slopped rain sucks hard on my boots as I traipse in my circles of the dog-dug conditions – through which I'm set fast by your barked-out orders – Only return home with a well-cut one – which will not then tip – not ’til the twelfth day – Such held superstitions – erected by lost Popes – were claims on short nights over our pagan ways – I'd rather keep cold gods from the warm living room – I hold no love for your desiccated tree

Stair Well - written & read by Mike Bell Music composed & played by David Sangster https://mikebellpoems.com/2018/12/03/stair-well/

STAIR WELL I tipped myself into half of an escape to sit alone on the in-laws' stairs - tilted there by my uneven troubles from imbalances set by disconnections I was taking myself off my thumped legs and away from my sucks of short-fix air - which set me to stand for a brief parade among partly-heard party conversations of drunk relatives - spiked by marriage vows - loosened by the briefest of infidelities - those with a younger man whose wife stood up to beauty's allure - she was there for measure I put up too - with the racist uncle's drunk ideas for less than five minutes - not quite a cure - but enough to get me to stand up again and to leave him staring at an empty step

Royalty He is there – again – the ageless barfly sat like a sore king at the wet-ringed table where he fondles his tide-marked pint of beer in the rooted grip of his right hand and with each sup he plans to swallow time – kept to Greenwich by his amber hour-glass – well drunk – but he is still able to command the Queen’s English – words not troops that is! He is the cliché – the grounded boozer who wills his wide-smiled laughter and loud intrusions upon more innocent patrons – virgins in his game – those who do not know how he plays the room .. Don’t take the adjacent seat – don’t be fooled by his schemes – of words and winks .. For them he prepares to over-deliver .. it is so well-known that he never listens by dint of his loudness and eyebrow animations .. And a woman – and a man – scrape chairs out to sit across from him at his stained table – and he now turns – with his sips of time to take – and soon she is giggling at his crude stories whilst her silent man stares at his glass After half an hour they stand to leave the scene – the man with a shoved handshake for the barfly – to quietly let the pub’s royal drunkard know that he is not wanting to fight – not tonight – and the well-pissed king is left to drink on his own

Egon Schiele's quickened passing at twenty-eight years of age - just days after his wife's death and his pillow-propped sketch of her looking back into him - was more shocking to you than his egregious unfurling of women - than his use of cadaver colours - than his fists of cherry red knuckles and brush-heightened nipples in rude ochre brightness His death scene was art - like his eroticised life where his place in it was at the centre of sex which he kept in twists of love - of girls in their pulled-up stockings - lifted tight - but not as high as their dog-dark fleeces on their ridged pubis regions - which they pointed at - and into - with their gnarled finger touches - There above the not-quite contrite cock-spaced curves - which he sculpted in paint over yet another stretched canvas - there in the air between their swayed thighs - there lay those air-kissing sex-salted lips - all his undressings pre-dating porn's artless forms - there to feed others' sexual pleasures - those of the greedy male collectors