Reuben Woolley

exercises of crazy

between somewheres
a certain stretch
& wrong

                  reflect
me in other skin i’m wearing the still
projections of distance lost
patterns of corporate today
give them alms my
friendly beggars lest a black
plague enter this seat of fat

indifference the church of lonely aisles
such cinemas are these the continuous
performance of poor
actors & black
cloth a very reverend
procession i don’t believe



knot you theory you tasted & hopeless

i’m string me story
skinstretched &
thinning i
tie a picture
           tight like
james dean now
hit a gaze my
frayed thread of stray
occurrence a
a life you don’t know boy
you’re star you burnt a forest fire



tell me a river

my hard desert
highway i burn my
blood in you laugh my sweet
syria my children play
a tank in c major like
our french lady &

                dance
a flame a 
loop of air & breathing & this
is my left-bank
ulysses & the seine
flows in dublin a younger town

rip them up where
those children run not yet
the tyrant heat i see the twin rivers
this ground we might walk still
in shatterings the sand old stone



frontier they do they halt

            (after a print by Jan Stead)

trees like exiles
wait

           a long
rusty mile you
cannot count & crooked
do they
              in fields of barely

here a rough
one /
     / let her paint
your faces anonymous i’ll go
bye bye /
            / leave
your lines of dirty gold



molly’s talking

i heard him we did
                                say
no entry all you crazies
a time the

empty spaces of

                            this poor
hand &
where the ladies walk the
closed road maybe
something resembles an answer

& that’s enough in calypso’s head
come sing a man to stay
& a sad wife i pretend
to be another face
& a life away you
shouldn’t believe not me
my sweet & precious
i was never ulysses

Reuben Woolley has been published in quite a few magazines such as Tears in the Fence, Lighthouse, The Interpreter's House, the anthology, The Dizziness of Freedom, Ink Sweat & Tears, Proletarian Poetry, And Other Poems, Otoliths, and The Poet's Shed. He has five books to his name, the latest being some time we are heroes, published by The Corrupt Press (2018). He has a book forthcoming, this hall of several tortures, to be published by Knives Forks and Spoons Press (September 2019). He edits the online magazines, I am not a silent poet and The Curly Mind.
 
 
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