Boys At Play With Dark Undertones

Is it cheeky
to want a sweetie?
All the gang love a sweetie,
is it cheeky?
Is it sweetly sickly cheeky
that all the gang
love a sweetie?
Its a tricky manouvre
the boys pop like a hoover,
is it cheeky
for a fizzy sweetie?
Is the fizzy
in the cheeky sweetie
what makes the boys sickly?
Its a gothic stunt
on dizzy hunts,
is a sweetie that is cheeky
making the greedy gang sickly?
It is cheeky
to take a sweetie
and drop from the fizzy…

@Steven Francis poems 2009

Things That Go Bump In The Day

Rotting pulp at a busy roadside
like a grim bouqet growing from grit;
smashed bone like petals
scattered over
rosy entrails
lavender tinted kidneys,
orange muscle
and curls of wet sinew.

Rest in pieces
furry thing with no head,
as cars and buses dance past
onward into life.
Few passers by will mourn
leaving oil to mix with drying blood
and hairy swarms.
Cheery pip our mangled friend
departed by hurrying engines
into eternal hedgerows...

@Steven Francis poems 2009

My Name Chainsaw, The Others Blood

Beautiful lettering
in coral spotlights;
names splash across fountains
and eyeliner,
big words become messiah
the showbiz funnel web is back.
Noble carcasses streak the sky
as dust shatter the trails.
Life tattoo
strangled by pin stripes;
this name
my name,
alight in curls
but Strange to me.
An ugly motif...

@Steven Francis poems 2009

Whales Blood In Honeycomb

In sharp licks of tile,
peppered with soap splinters
I wallow in lavender toxic scum;
stomach breaking through the foam surface
creating a goose pimpled island,
as whiskers,
grey and fragile like elderly limbs
cling to my throat as if to strangle me,
and bed my skin into a watery casket.
I rest blistering kidneys
on the bullet smooth bottom;
hovering in shallow ripples,
steamed cadaver in cast iron frame.
Suddenly I let go
of a pinch lurking beneath
and copper coloured twirls
rise in the cooling water;
clouded and relieved,
whale is happy now...

@Steven Francis poems 2009