To Bethena

I missed your love and kindness,
your soul of souls,
but beauty with its assorted delinquents and trinkets
never fades or wilts,
and 'tho I nest amongst adders in the dawn
I am at the gentle mercy of you always.
Those eyes, that smile,
a face which had all the answers
and hangs forever, a portrait in my chest.
Oh to have known you darling Bethena!
To have held your hand
and walked with you, both poets on fire,
a furious blaze all together smothering the page.

I gaze into your eyes, those chessnut pools
and know what might have been
is happening now in the emerald garden
where your delicate touch is freezing the furies.
Bethena! Gone before your time
but time itself will be your tribute
as those you Love remember you,
and this ode, testament of your inspiration
which reshaped the horizons of a distant hand.
Oh to have known you!
But content am I to know that you live on,
triumphed over crocodiles
and sending Love in butterflies...

@Steven Francis poems 2010

If It Was Cyanide

If that button over there
were cyanide,
I would pop it on my tongue
and go out with the tide.

Or if my nails were as sharp
as an icy cutlass,
I could draw them down my veins
to disappear like gas.

I want beans and everything
to simply be cyanide,
lethal edging
for my earthy hide...

@Steven Francis poems 2010

Sin & Danger

Clock hands shaped like sniper rifles
clicked soundly to futures
where vandals tresspass shilling malls
and rictus grins increase mania.
We are drowning families,
family drowned,
animals in weakened packs
hunting jams and spirits,
spirit jam.

Bruised cheeks bold as the rising sun
turn to face bottles and daggers
as Jewy nosed crooks run their creepy show,
make no mistake in dangerous dens.
In riots and order,
ordered riots
we rampage through electric cities,
city rampage.

And pearl handled razors are shelved pretty;
blades polished by mortuary wax
prepared for the shredding,
stood in saluted awe to misery.
The mad love crazes
crazy mad,
revving engines of violence,
violent revs.

New dawns arise from volcanic dents,
tiny sequels to the sunshine monsters
who ravage knitted bosoms
in liveries of spangled gore.
The smiles of infants
infant smile,
born alive and dying
dead alive...

@Steven Francis poems 2010