by Paul Balfe

What an expression:
“He doesn’t suffer fools”
And now I’d met the archetype.
Invincible, or so he thought,
Referred by his doctor for ‘tests’.
An irksome inconvenience,
His failure to attend unsurprising.

There’s no softening the blow
When it comes — except, maybe
At the edges.
I got to know him,
Laid bare,
Over the six months
Before he passed
As he battled with Kubler Ross.
At the end, the very end,
He called for his mother.

by Paul Balfe

. . . . . . . and I didn’t know it until
Missing clenched me in its steely grip,
Gnawing at my very soul and sanity.
Your laughter, infectious as it was,
Breached the fortress of my heart
and I defied gravity — for a while at least.
There was sunshine everyday
Or so it seemed, but I was blind
To the treasure that was, no . . . . is you.

And now the ethereal mists of silence
Envelop my shriveling world
Moulding a straitjacket of my grief.
Oh Mr. Shelley, how I cling to those words
“If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?”

by Paul Balfe

It’s Oxford
Between Christmas and New Year.
I’m twenty and in love with
An English rose.
Never a thrall of fashion,
My army surplus coat
Is drenched through in the
Relentless rain which somehow
Bestows magic on the
Already enchanted city —
The festive lights reflected in the
Gleaming streets.

C.S. Lewis’ old haunt welcomes
The soaked duo,
A pint or two quaffed in his honour.
My coat, slung over a high stool
Emits a plume of steam
Much to the landlord’s amusement.
And it dawned on me what
Louis MacNeice meant
When he described Christmas as
‘A coral island in time’
And how true it was for a twenty year old
On a rainy Christmas in Oxford, long ago.

by Elliot Cardinaux

You cavemouthed,
crumbling distance

Swallowed these
shadows.

Audiating dust,
singing
holy mercury

Who cast up
signs

Behind different
walls

In
the muses’
chatter

Beyond
space
& this

Gapingness

Whose
maw said
mew

//

I ask
Who is lost in this body
repeat the spell

Throw more change
into the wick

Deposit your
departure
here

Drawn up
from a swell

I say
there’s room for you

There’s energy

Because of you
there’s magic
in this tone

Vibration
in these long shadows

Tuned to so many
an analog flame

//

A shadow’s
turbine

Grips
the light

The extended
nerve

Signals
the wave-
end

Havens

The thriving
bulb

Deletes you

Crawling
on hands
of thought

Through
the shining
furrow

//

Storm
this
toxin

Deepness
from
the weakness–well

Our breath
within it