Three Poems by Grant Tarbard

The Song of the Mean Eyed Cat and the One Eyed Fox
 

Cat was a gypsy of his street,

a loose tooth vagabond
with nimble ballerina feet.

 

The neighbours wouldn't know this
due to his sagging old linen belly
woven threadbare from the loom,
tattered but strong and ready.

Cat was the one on the fence
eyeing you with suspicion-
a ready claw, a ready purr
hinging on his disposition.

Fox was an old soldier
medals clung to his chest
along with dirt, leaves and all the rest.

He may of had a folding limp
when the air was hung with damp
but when the sun shone fiercely
he was an acrobat.

Fox was the eyes you felt
on your back from within the trees,
he was the uneasy chill
that made you pick up speed.

 

Cat, the one claw killer

(perfected over time)

of the starling napping 

on the washing line.

 

A giver of gifts left behind

on doorsteps cold at 5 am,

the prize winning fish-

a dissected corpse with a dangling eye.

 

Fox, the seventh cub of a seventh cub

intimate between the mists,

hands shook with comeuppance,

just another ration over chewed.

 

Dashing in red beret,

captain of those midnight raids

on dustbins laden with enemy supplies

destined for the home stomach.

 

Both roamed the bi-ways of the town

and had a paw in all things devious,

for the work of the Devil lies

not just in idle hands

but in all clean clawed creatures.

Below the Feather

 

Cuckoo agrees that

the guts of a pig

would make fine compost

in the garden of

Eden. His blatant

 

attempts to deflect

the butchering hoe

of Adam didn't work, 

cuckoo's hot bowels 

would be plucked below

 

the feather and placed

reverently on

the flush leaf mold, his

blush blood would be sprayed

as fertiliser.

Luka and the Spider

 

Luka was a poet and the Spider ate him.

He traveled through his innards with a box of swans

That he would open to go and fetch light.

 

Spider was an aching willows branch spindling downward,

Spider was black as a wordless night,

Spider was always moving about the terraces of the gardens.

 

Luka had pepper in his pocket, he always kept it there for he had lost the salt.

He clambered up to Spider's sinuses and blew the pepper,

With a hand of fine powder he sent out urgent letters of help, sequinned on the dewdrops thread.

Spider was sickly, he would scrape the paint off of saintly statues and serve it as medicine,

Spider used icons as godparents for his seven thousand children,

Spider watched the pontiff from the alcove murmuring funeral rites.

 

Luka had set up home in the spider's spleen,

He looked up from these rooms of wayward moments 

And uttered; "We all are just layers of masks". 

 

Spider was quite content with his lot, he bought his suits from a well respected tailors,

Spider was quite content with his full belly, nothing wriggled to trouble him,

Spider was quite content with his lot, he played the fiddle to entertain the children.

 

Luka opened the box of swans and tied their beaks together;

"Sometimes I miss where I am from".

He unleashed the entangled arrow of beaks into the sputtering inside of Spider's scented bare chest.

 

Spider's sacred heart pierced and broke up the day of the giants onlooking.

Spider's bewailing woke up the beak-less swans and they flew out of his chest, four and twenty.

Spider whimpered; "Oh pity! Cry for me when the tide comes". 

 

Luka was spat out of a storm of granite from Spider's gullet,

He looked back at his foe with his legs curled, jigging with St. Vitus' dance and the death twitch

And felt a great pity for a creature so powerful that it could swallow whole a poet of his fame.

 

uka had been low down in the blue dark for such a time he couldn't remember the swells of colour,

He had to be weaned of the murk a blink at a time for the sky was anchored by a titanic golden chain.

The other poets had no faces now and Luka spent his time around the arachnid enclosure of London Zoo.

 

 

 

 

Grant Tarbard has worked as a journalist, a contributor to magazines, an editor, a reviewer and an interviewer. He is now the editor of The Screech Owl and co-founder of Resurgant Press with Bethany W. Pope.  His work can be seen in such magazines as The Rialto, Ink, Sweat & Tears, Bone Orchard Poetry, BLAZE, The Journal, Southlight, Sarasvati, Earth Love, Mood Swing, Puff Puff Prose Poetry & Prose, Postcards Poetry and Prose, Playerist 2, Lake City Lights, Medusa's Kitchen, The Open Mouse, Weyfarers, Miracle, Poetry Cornwall, I-70, South Florida Review, Stare's Nest, Zymbol, Synchronized Chaos, BLUEPEPPER, Every Day Poetry, Tribe, Verse-Virtual and Decanto.