National Poetry Day: Henry Normal and Matthew Welton Poems

image: Ali Emm

Photo Bombing God
Henry Normal

A palm is four fingers
A foot is four palms
A cubit is six palms
Four cubits make a man

My son's skin is almost prepubescent perfect
sideburns suggesting maturity awaits

From the sacred to the unanchored
a sequence of genes mutate

geometry
is remapped

I'm resigned to the thinning of grey
a turning stubble hides my scars

Johnny is far cooler in his sunglasses
he wears a straw hat with the ease of a teenager

Nucleic acid replaces architectural design
twenty three chromosome pairs roll

I've shaved my eyebrow in the middle
so as not to resemble a Neandertal

We are a little burnt by the sun
I can't believe my face was once as small as his

The Tree of life twists in a double helix
the canon of proportions spiral

I look into the camera because I know it's expected
and one of us has to

Johnny still displays no compulsion to conform
he has no interest in consequence

Two thousand two hundred hopes disorder
The Archangel's detail is without error

A pace is four cubits
A man is twenty four palms
A man is twenty thousand five hundred proteins coding
A man is three billion pairs of chance

Published in ‘Photo Bombing God’ first published in Staring Directly at the Eclipse, Henry Normal, Five Leaves Publications (2016) £9.99

Construction with phrases
Matthew Welton

Whatever I was thinking it was almost right:–
literature’s for losers; religion makes us weak;
the mind’s a kind of monkey with its teeth all gone.

I’m sitting in the kitchen with a pile of books
I thought I’d read but can’t remember reading and
I’m wondering what’s for supper ’cause I had no lunch

and when the monkey in the mind pulls up outside
and rubs his ribs and sucks his gums and says Aw shucks,
we need to talk – what else am I supposed to do

but give him coke and coffee till his words won’t come?
The insects in the windows fill the air with thoughts.
The clouds are closing in on us. The sun looks lost.

Published in The Number Poems, Matthew Welton, Carcanet (2016), £9.99