Poetry by Minnie Stacey
HERE'S A SELECTION OF MY POEMS:
THE SUM OF TREES
Sweet push
the plush of Spring,
dizzying doer
delicate with liquorice and victory free,
as the sky delves without diving
buzzing us intrepid
for wounds of blaze.
To share a face
with the space that looks back at being,
this verve - the gist which comes through seeing
is edible with air and bounding in.
And we are vivid creatures
sticky for bonding
while all around the foray stuff,
the mage amid the flighted hive,
makes the honey slip collective.
Free Verse by Minnie Stacey
THE SADO-MONETARY PARADOX AND THE GREATER PART
For Capital - you are the one per cent,
a means to get your sordid ends away.
Already privileged you won’t repent,
you violate the rest of us each day.
Colluding with a media that pitches
your prevalence, the cull by which we’re stung,
possess what's priceless, slobbering for riches,
as in your branding furnace we are flung.
By brazen compound interest you will hunt
and bang us up to be your fuel for gain,
the kleptocratic climaxes you grunt
rent by a scoffing chivalry of pain.
A splinter group of sadists screw us over.
Is masochism keeping them in clover?
Shakespearean Sonnet by Minnie Stacey
CLOTHO AND THE CHRYSALIS WELLS
(i) Fettle Spokes.
The flight around a bird inhabiting a mind
is wide and catching wormholes of ideas.
conductive space, the open eye-light
coaxes curving speed
to lay its frisson on a birr of nerves.
Unfastening tender relish,
poesy’s buttonhole arranges frisk
as cluster-notes of squeaky clime.
And where existence came
it leaves imagination’s livery,
like laurel gyres,
alfresco routes of dextrous prize
unfurled about a circlet.
(ii) Facing Blueprints.
Where energy glittered for a flit of land,
feeders come to gaze:
eyeing-sleuths ‘fessed up close
in life as soft as breath,
fastidious at sheets and sucking feature.
From time’s whey, the lips of
deft ferries open leafy looks,
as sweet bays attracting focus.
States of presence, shored-up
to moonstruck reeds, the fugue-canoes
that filled with sight on mirror-air
come arcing atmosphere from folios.
Sun-nursed silver rushes of revealed sense,
raw love, turbulent dreams,
describe the freedom in ventricles of flesh.
Free Verse by Minnie Stacey
THE KEISER REPORT
Controlled by vicious minds who never tend
the chaos-mannequins kept in their clutch,
Casino Gulags fake a dividend
to spend orgasmic sums on nothing much.
The brash arcades are mafioso-grand,
sexed-up by feudalistic billionaires,
and flashy debts are pumped out as a brand
that scapegoats unemployment in its snares.
When wages cover pornographic stains
as companies rent bargain basement kids,
it’s time to wash the population’s brains
with guilt-edged belts to pull in private bids.
Financial terrorists are now the bosses
who kill for greed by socialising losses.
Shakespearean Sonnet by Minnie Stacey
BEYOND THE CALL OF DUTY
Here, trenchant in the field of self-abuse,
a broken soldier grinds his guts with drink,
deserted by the army - out of use.
That stench of mass graves, even through the sluice,
keeps him its prisoner at death’s dark brink,
here, trenchant in the field of self-abuse.
The sniper fire, the lives that he cut loose,
drown him in guilt and leave his heart to sink,
deserted by the army - out of use.
When he lay down his arms there was no truce,
three years of painting coal, then to his clink:
here, trenchant in the field of self-abuse.
And when he jumped the rope snapped at the noose,
left him to hate the oil-wars’ double-think,
deserted by the army - out of use.
Nailed to a table - punished on the juice,
and still well-worn religion hoods his wink:
here, trenchant in the field of self-abuse,
deserted by the army - out of use.
A Villanelle by: Minnie Stacey
It's also a work of journalism about an ex soldier (Balkan Wars) who was keeping warm in a laundrette -
he said he'd like me to write a poem about what he told me.
BANK VERSE (Buying Skylarks)
Sincerity, a heart’s appreciation,
when based in phoney money, is usurped,
and human interest ruthlessly replaced,
laid bankrupt by the usury of stock.
This prostitution masses painful piles
of non-conductive plastic, swipes to sting
our passage with a sense of static time.
Here shattered hours are shards of cutting curses,
our repetitious seconds, where, as slaves,
we wish, but can’t afford to buy the self
that’s mortgaged to its sell-by-date of death.
With packages of care priced out of reach,
we’re rifled by a prophesy of goods,
consumers in the quagmire of a range,
beguiled by bosses, spirit-sapping shapes
who optimise the carriage of their rank,
personifying theft, a first class race
to riches, so expensive for the rest.
And pins punched at spent fingertips inject
the marketing, the wash we won’t resist,
that stuffs our dreams and makes us into herds.
Via voodoo evolution comes to shop,
for beads, made from the sweat that’s freshly squeezed.
If minds are wastelands, synapses sucked dry,
By Capital the birds and bees will die.
Blank Verse with Iambic Pentameter by: Minnie Stacey
THE CHAOS MONGER
(on Blair...)
On Shock and Awe’s payroll,
business-brained and body-guarded,
a brass necked billionaire to be
goes about glibly on evolution’s black bile,
bellicose in grabbing buying power.
Deploying god-greased destiny,
his dark arts get blabbed and blared
to beef up wars:
a fire rush of feeding,
where populations bullied,
droned, bomb-broken and bleeding,
is richness toned.
To profit from dying breaths,
spitting t’s onto planned error,
his well of white teeth
plug phoney foundations,
giving the old frazzle-dazzle
as grief goes begging
in the Fahrenheit of fury.
Free Verse by: Minnie Stacey
THE BORED GAME
As history plays out its plight of time,
a heap of snakes and ladders repetition,
our doggerel, the business of bad mime,
religiously the same, is a tradition
of shit-for-brains forgetting recognition.
We're humans looking forwards, backwardly,
with weapons standing in for our contrition.
Peer pressure grooms our personality,
unleashing missiles full of: me me me!
With self-esteem pumped up on bad advice,
the gate-crashed globe shows greed as pedigree.
We should be looking through a fear of ice.
Poor psyche's in a motorway of glue,
the patient shows no signs of pulling through.
Spenserian Sonnet: by Minnie Stacey
GENERAL MALPRACTICE
We’re definite, refined, and filthy rich
from servants digging ditches in their health,
lulls desperate for dreams and where we pitch
our advertising, hacking in with stealth.
Our pixelated teeth pick at their eyes
with ciphers, zero content irrigation,
like proxy Draculas our charm belies
the cybernetics of our intimation.
A population bitten by abuse
is cannon fodder in financial war,
re-branding theft we con them out of use,
thus bringing forward funerals for the poor.
Mind-numbing on demand is what they crave,
mud sticks and covers up an early grave.
Shakespearean Sonnet by: Minnie Stacey
COMPELLING SENTINEL
A pond of human silver is resolving
its two-way seeing, sweet reflective core,
the shine of mirror constantly evolving,
where ventricles are pumping looking’s ore.
Always, the warrior heart who is defining
their nature in a compass full of chance,
is stepping into life as a divining,
attentively in views of wide expanse.
This cytoplasmic genius-connective,
the bur of circuitry, the gelignite
that moves a creature mass, is so effective:
a bather, coming through electrolyte.
As moments buckaroo, a lightning-fast
sustains ignition to regard the blast.
Shakespearean Sonnet by Minnie Stacey
THE FETCH OF A WICK
In the firework dark,
an idea richness, pitched in nutrients
and guarded from echoes,
is sparked alight from easy soil.
Mind, running over
like a lighter-fluid lean,
is fired bright,
eyeing us a river-clean,
experiencing scenes,
generating dreams,
in a wake rubbed up by genes.
And all the while the earthworms
are at our feet,
letting birds take them flying,
making fish jump,
refreshing food to lift the stalk
of thought.
Free Verse by Minnie Stacey
SIMPLICITY’S COMPLEXION
The play of music,
flicked in a figured pitch,
is stuff that scores through skin.
Those smelled overtures to tender goals
in how a body feels,
they turn on texture,
tracing shocks through velveteen
like mirrored skating spangled into sense.
Unfixed, this shine from staves
breaks into flavours
with a fizz that peppers souls
to tactile springs.
Hence emotion, in a way of syncopation,
waves to here, between reflection,
beside a mind’s dew,
where you come skywards
as a clearing.
Free Verse by Minnie Stacey
SUNBIRDS
To kiss with you would be to cross our brink
and let the wet word, sex’s edict, live,
as declaration opened flirting’s chink
to land the lexicon that bodies give.
Marshmallow touches lit in creamy flesh
are fingers sending rings through bells of skin,
when, hidden in the night we'd see afresh,
we’d lick each other’s brains and feel our win.
The loosed excitement of connecting minds
carouses chance’s easy concentration,
like flames in moonbeams we’d be sprung as finds,
our darkness would be pure collaboration.
Electric presence - serious with power,
unfolding wings, would rose us in a bower.
Shakespearean Sonnet by Minnie Stacey
ODE TO LIFE
Happy on you,
my heart's percussive with bells,
electric beats that sing atmosphere.
Permissive cups, we're eating air,
light on cachet's care
in a weightless up.
Engagement's join, an easy place
aced on hot ice,
is skin in-situ - opening eyes inside,
plush blushed sutures on a vibe
where somewhere always is.
Peached as voices of the presence kiss,
we're sticky with the drench of this,
starlight's piercing slidden fingers
wet with the whisper of knowing bliss.
Like gloss that's seeing,
me and you are gills for space's paint,
in a lifted alive and blasted on being.
Free Verse by: Minnie Stacey
HAIKU EIGHT.
V’s in fond branches
widen hearts to catapult
capacious surprise.
PAUSE FOR ENLIGHTENMENT
With Beckett orthodoxy,
mouths like flippers on bantams,
mean and meant,
our light yells.
In one of Samuel's hells,
gazumping each other
with garish, graceless truculence,
we're tethered dogs
whose stymied pasteurised barks
are bite-blown words in stares of staginess,
going nowhere for too long:
foibles waiting,
idiosyncratic sores with serves of
bat - volley - bat - volley - bat!
The corn of snared mesh,
fixed in a box of endgame,
we're a stricken match
fit to be good and over,
a brink of living urged by sneers,
spitting in a spurt...
...then thrust in laughter's sights,
our overview - is bicker free:
those rabbit warren blinkers
rebuffed by an eff on ire.
Free Verse by: Minnie Stacey
CHANTER CLER
The smile of chance imbued in you that would
be melting ice, expectant with surprise,
intent to guess itself to happen could
invite the sky’s expanse to bid your eyes
watch at the swan whose flying will expand.
You'd see its feathers finding at the blue
and qualify your glance to understand
the definition pierced by the view.
Attentive steering, levelling with funk,
lit as a language consonant with charge,
the magnet-soft which permeates that spunk
could quicken comprehension and enlarge
the seeing-glide to realise, to near,
then over there is consequently here.
Shakespearean Sonnet by Minnie Stacey
THE UPPER CIRCLE'S CARRY-ON
Branded by cheap cuts,
mind-scrubbed by the jiff of a world’s ‘ifs’,
souls die down to being marks,
unflown but doing bird for no offence.
And the profit above
gets shared around by plutocrats,
satellite slave masters
directing butchery below,
hard-wiring workers into batteries,
palming them off with a pittance.
Dismembered by this union of fences,
a tragic irony carries its own cancer:
scapegoats white-feathered
in cell-like homes
by an orbit of war.
Free Verse by: Minnie Stacey
A NEEDLE’S LOOP
Unbuttoned guru,
you’re cloaked around the paradox
of an inverted bird,
pursuing light with flight that levels,
licking you clean to the big eye.
Free Verse by Minnie Stacey
HAIKU FIFTEEN
Survival’s extra,
flown-up feathers, woken dream,
we’re the doubled birds.
A Haiku by: Minnie Stacey
THE HIRED GROUND.
Once upon a time, at the age of six,
she was fixed on decorations,
stood there, dying to be good,
dangling dreams on wasted branches.
While the grown-ups peddled lines,
telling her to make big wishes,
be that fairy with the swishes,
she was full of pines.
Twinkling stars,
friendly stallions,
cosy reflections,
chocolate medallions,
filled her up
like sugar injections.
Hungry for the festive spike,
she rushed to get older for that perch:
as a princess, she’d be higher,
gazing down from wonder’s spire.
But the birthday strikes came slowly
till she striped the long haul of her hair
and wandered like a jangled star,
unwitting as a bar code in a wood of men,
straying onto paths where fakers,
sallow takers, crossed her gifts
from spunky lists.
Now the unicorn grins,
stabbing her skin with syrupy pins,
she’s on brown needles, lost her way
topped out by darkness in the day.
The horse, whose main she used to comb,
kicks in her head, and, as his flunky,
she’ll unwind the advent of an angel’s face,
her features, smacked into a junk of space.
In the end,
the little life
that she mistook,
hangs on this hook.
Free Verse by: Minnie Stacey
OWED TO A BURIAL: THE ARMOUR OF A CRAB
(after Hamlet, Caliban and Prospero)
A skull bestride some bones with flesh to bear,
I’m mortal, yet recoiled from readiness,
below an arrow pointing from above,
which, like a headstone, fastens up my aim.
This weight that’s lying on a life still breathing,
is where a heavy metal’s quota dived
on gravity, and, as a grave, this burden
bangs up a spark that struggles to be big.
As if a pin prick had deflated me,
a lead balloon is pressing on my limbs.
Without elastic, from this hammock sling,
though light, I’m hard to haul, a castaway
beneath a rock no double overturns.
This cavity that galvanises gleams
belies the inkling of a corpse to be:
beyond is something further than enough.
To live, but be bestowed upon a steep,
my stuff is troubled, difficult and deep.
Blank Verse with Iambic Pentameter, by: Minnie Stacey