22. Bruce Barnes

An off-comed-un from North London to Bradford who has a way with words.

Bruce Barnes is a Bradford based poet, an off-comed-un from North London since 1996, a past winner of the Ilkley Literature Festival Poetry Prize, and a runner-up in others. His first collection, 'The lovelife of the absent minded', was published by Phoenix Press in 1993, and his latest collection, 'Somewhere Else' was published by the Utistugu Press in 2003. In 2016 Otley Word Feast published the poetry pamphlet 'Israel-Palestine' and the Utistugu Press published an interpretation of the poems of the Japanese socialist poet Kosuke Shirasu, under the joint editorship of Jun Shirasu and Bruce Barnes. His poems have appeared in Pennine Platform, Strix, the Yorkshire Journal, and Krax.

He is a member of Otley Stanza and Beehive Poets,

---

Poems

A meeting with Paul Erdós?
The Mouse in the Kitchen
For Beautiful Poets
Expletive Deleted
Acupuncture and Lapis Lazuli
Closing time at the British Museum

---

A meeting with Paul Erdὄs?

It’s ‘In Our Time’ and with Melyvn Bragg’s drone
comes synchronicity. Spoon and muesli bowl chime
with my father’s time and place: 1938,
at the University of Manchester. I guess
he and the famed mathmetician, Erdὄs are
breakfasting together, not speaking ;
Dad wiggles his toast into the rack
perhaps testing a Theory of  Structures
while Erdὄs  toys with sugar cubes.
He’s trying to improve on the Ramsey theorem-
that one about parties of six people, and how
at least three of them pairwise must be mutual strangers
or mutual.acquaintances. But save for these two
wandering Jews, bereft of  family
and country, the refectory is empty,
so not enough folk to test the theory-

I tune out from Mr Bragg, and join them,
a mathematics failure best employed
in musing. The pedant, or is it the heart,
that asks what separates an acquaintance
from a stranger- I duck beneath the physical,
that’s Dad’s impatient swipe at my algebra.

<<<

‘The mouse in the kitchen’- a jig tune

( from Mike McGoldrick’s flute playing at Victoria Hall, Saltaire)

I may as well catch his breath, 
snatch notes, as the music 
tickles fingers tips, and tit-like,
skitters off, on jittery  paths

with silvery flashes   
and back then, before the flute 
passed  his lips, during the craic    
with the second- fiddle guitarist, 

he went through the names
of  tunes in the next set, 
and set this one flying again
doing its damnedest
  
to towel the sweat off floodlights,
and shift towards a fuzz of  turf light,
quitting the Hall of its marching feet
to trip lightly into the kitchen:

she is up on the Windsor  
that has a dicky leg- feet shifting-
clapping her hands-as others do- 
out of sync with the gusting wind.

 A voice whoops. She squeals, 
 ‘Oh get it, Mike; don’t kill it’.
The Pied Piper asks that they mind      
 the mug on the dresser.

The house mouse flies the stone floor 
slips under the range, and at a hole 
concentrates; checking his furry fit
against disproportionate ears.

<<<

For Beautiful Poets

Eyes shut, but still she recites her way nimbly  
out of my grey paper bag, determined to flesh 
her invisible beauty.  I am slowly
losing touch with the poet, but find another 
smiling and bright eyed, rustling in the bag 
who writes of staring… ‘it must be like flies 
on the face’.  Maybe Hume has arrived  
with that spurt of anywhere’s street noise, and the author
fits like a considerate door click.  It would be 
a coincidence, more other worldly 
than the startled coffee machine, that they’re friends, 
and after the reading, he will introduce us,
cram us into the poem’s world we weren’t meant    
to wake to; her hand extends and I’m lost for words. 

<<<

Expletive Deleted

Expletive repeated, profanities leaking
more slowly, acceptance staunching them,
the brain’s  back catalogue singing less
'effing and blinding’- more of a sweeter song,
such as ‘God’s teeth for that dentist in Heaven !’
As the molars wear, the subconscious gets
strange fillings of oaths that snag propriety :
drat, dad-sizzle it, and cripes.  
my gran went on toothless, and when I swore
she would say : ’wash your mouth out with soap
and water’, then she would twist stiff fingers around lips,
to make that imaginative bubble.

<<<

Acupuncture and Lapis Lazuli

I danced beneath the heads of Dr Zheng Han’s pins,
but woke too quickly to a ‘where the hell am I?'
-slowly prickling toes go to their cramped room
with its white walls, and a remote sensation
of his needles pushed into my pin cushion.
The flute plays from a hidden source, a melody
as mournful as back pain in Keighley and the slow return
to Dr Zheng Han’s couch. He leaves the room to-
the imagined musician, one of three Chinamen,
 climbing to a half-way house sweetened by
cherry blossom.  His tune sounds a poem from Yeats…   
‘All things fall and are built again
And those that build them again are gay.’
<<<

Closing time at the British Museum

Warders with outstretched arms move them along 
from the upper and lower floors of Greek 
and Roman life, more stragglers are eased  
from side galleries, and as the herd reaches 
the Great Court there’s triumphal drumming on its roof -  
the victors’ laurels go to those who can 
manipulate the many- but the final push 
to the South entrance revives the crowd’s wonder. 
The babel does have to say: ‘it’s raining’;    
not the rain of the ‘useful phrase’, more that 
it’s sheeting as if the outdoors were behind glass. 
The clatter matches biblical hail, restraining 
its deadly force, still a torrent bounces back
as the flood that chides a sea  of paving. 
The hubbub shelters on the front steps, 
quietening as it views the last of days. 
<<<

---