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Editor's Note

Guidelines

SNR's Writers

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Chart-Topping

We’re riding a BA jetstream,
It’s a first class discipline.
To the gay kinship and moist girls
We’re blanket studies,
Mimers of ditties on stage.

To his Royal Highness we’re a vertigo
Of riches, or plastic flowers
Grinning amongst swathes of Armani,
Gucci shades, Versace strides.

A rent boy band whose sugar daddy
Is a rough and tumble of one night stands
Where incident lags behind episode.
This is the meat rack, returning groins
And half-clad routines.

For the hatchet hacks
We’re gnawed product,
Each storyline of our copy
Goes from rise to rise.
We know nothing of music
But the beat goes on.

The English slate a name in lights
-         we’re runway babes,
Paparazzi cheekbones, flashbulb smiles
Or shoulder-shrugging subordinates
To our management.

We’re a deception, plastic poseurs
On a pretty boy assembly line,
Aphrodisiac on rubber.

But really
All we ever were
Dazzles behind the silver-white mirror
Of a cheap CD.

Children Of Venus

They scramble for a Baptism
In zoom-rayed lights.
We’ the pick-bait ones,
Sift The Alien Abduction Survival Guide –
Blind faith’s a vortex flash
Or lightning in a Pluto-gas sky.

Pilgrims run against
Roswell, New Mexico
Where Delta Force makes Phoenixes
From freak-spread grit.

Chinese Honey-Bun

Your thing my love
I love your thing
It, it and me
The it of it
The thing of me
Your me is here
Here is me

Chip

When love was over
He staggered a snippet of gravel
Chipped from the fusty milieu
Of broker and shipbuilding berths
Tumbling it past a crushing tusk
War memorial
Bucket-bulked with loam.

He fetched it up,
Lobbed it at the hatch
That Joost Van der Vodel* concierged
-         a stain fell upon it,
an utterance.

He furled it into the cat sanctuary
Bobbing the canal
Bothering crank hairs,
Ammonia, bice-green moss;
Surfacing it became a mog’s eye
Glinting like mispickel.

In the mattness of Carel’s Café
He fumbled it, spun it with a chirr,
Flung it grim to Westerkerk,
Up bluff walls to the gradient tower.

There it was swiped by Bill and Bob
Who passed it in the air,
Soon tired they ran it across a waterway
Which switched the gale to grey.

In a sooty cemetery it docked
(the cling of leopard lilies in moonlight)
It felt the night upon its back,
Died in a bed of scree.

*famous Dutch poet

from the Amsterdam poems.

Chirp

“As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from
uneasy dreams he found himself transformed
in his bed into a gigantic insect.” – Kafka

1
Thousand catches,
Cicada’s legs
Coming on apace
Hairy tips dirling incandescence.

2
Huge armoured chest crust,
Hollow feeling to the core.
Unfelt cat’s paw breeze
Transporting scent,
Changing seasons
From sea by open loop-light.
Tilt with shadows.
Mechanical twitching.

3
Varieties of straining.
7.30 am
Desiccating motes of grit,
Residual palpitations.

4
Crick of loneliness,
Shame, hunger.
A long wait
For the knock upon the door.

5
Little John
To the side of the bed.  Pitied & pitier
                                        Big-eyed, twitchy,
                                        One.

6
An instinct
Clear through fading consciousness,
Snap of jaws
Finding their counterbalance.

Chute

Ripcorded
     Into a stir-of-air
  Shush
To case these well-fixed subjects.

A crouched night-fallen lane
And the star-locking crick
Of your trigger’s spring.