Who knows what time is A cold distant relative who's left you behind
copyright Francis Barker 2020
Haiku: A Friend In Time
Tag: old
Tanka: Special
The child was special
The teenager even more
What have I become?
Some reach their apogee late
This is my blaze of glory
copyright Francis Barker 2019
Poem: Ballad of 2019
I may talk of philosophy
I might say there’s some relevance
in the movements of stars
spinning round in this canopy above – but
I don’t have an answer, really I don’t.
I’m getting older but not wiser
The information age confuses me
subsumes me in a sea of mediocrity
where what is real and fake
feather into an ambiguous morass
where what humanity remains slowly drowns. Yes
that’s the thing
I can still remember what it was like
to be a human being
to have hope and belief but all that
is gone
replaced by some vague notion
that this can’t be the real world
merely a joke and a sick one too
And what lies beyond
is an ever increasing irrelevance
though the sense of that dawning oblivion
does not cause panic or fear anymore –
merely the weary acceptance of release
and what peace might be
copyright Francis Barker 2019
Poem: ‘England’s Glory’
He taps the roll up on his weathered
seat, strikes the match
towards him as an old man should, a box
of ‘England’s Glory’ and tobacco bag
thrown at me, as if they weren’t
all his worldly goods.
“No thanks, I don’t.”
He shrugs as if it’s my loss,
cups the yellow light with
the nonchalance of a friend, his hands
raw and dirty. He draws, a near
toothless mouth collapsing
like worn bellows;
he exhales, deftly aiming a spit
of spare flake to his right, while knotty
fingers wipe wet lips— the sound
of sandpaper on wood. And so
the coughing starts. There’s little else
to fill the new day.
* ‘England’s Glory’ is a brand of match
copyright Leofwine Tanner 2019
Ciscography 