Knife Fork Spoon

My spoon a shank. My shank a spoon. Sharpened. Honed sweet honed. Spoon as knife. Feel protected now. Able to cut any lairy fucker who tries it on. Funny how something that feeds you becomes a deliverer of death. I am nourished on into further life by striking blood. Stick 'em good to their guts. Yank it back out still with organs attached, then spoon-knife becomes a fork also. The full set. Prison wares. For eating your porridge. No honey or sugar to sweeten it. No salt to season. Just a blood glaze. For eating in the trough.

Declaration - Friday Flash

I stand in your courtroom accused

Arraigned in the dock abused

By a pack of jurisprudent hacks

Non-cognisant of the possibility

Of artistry, denied dead in its tracks

Chiding it unholy blasphemy

Condemning me to years on the rack

Of prison locks and visceral fears

Well I don't recognise your pedantry

Nor your arid linguistic savagery

Your juris-diction is a legal fiction

Plodding plotlines prefiguring the conclusion

Of my inevitable conviction

For being a person of conviction

Forked tongue and serrated diction

Mauling and maiming rids you of me

Constricts my corpus of poetry and simile

Makes you sole practitioners of larceny

Carving simulacra of language so moralistic

Hollow statues and statutes so autistic

They cannot support your glass ceilings

Shrouding our citizens' surging feelings

You bring the Philistine pediment down

Shattering your own bewigged crowns

To support truth one has to be free

You can inject limitless penthanol into me

I still continue to compose verities

As an artist striving for complex sublimities

My rhyme take wing and soars

Beyond the clutches of you prosaic whores

I shall never be coeval with your version

Chockfull of inane and vitiating assertions

Piloting my own dauntless latitude instead

Remaining unbowed inside my head

While you lexigraphic manglers

With strangler's hands around language's windpipe

Bearing along angular longitudinal meanderings

Overlook language's rich shading of meanings

Not just two sides to every story

But a relative veritable potpourri

Of parallax perspectival points of view

Tear up you law codex, start anew

Doubtless you will deny me pen and ink

Intending for me to baste in my own stink

Yet I will utilise my own parings

Collocating couplets from insect husks

Finger stylus to impress the dust

Communing with those others sat here trussed

As they too in the past were confined unjust

Yet established our proud literary tradition

From the inequities in the underbelly of a prison

Sentenced, I will pour out my sentences

Venesect the soul of our people's transcendences

In this shed skin I will quarry veins of feeling

Arm them with verbal ordnance to send our foes reeling

See how they will dance upon your ordinance

Ergo I deny the authority of this court

So I readily permit you to transport

Me to the cells for some welcome solitude

In order to ferment my rhymes brewed

For fomenting an organic uprising from lowly mold

A storming of our own Bastille with me in the hold

Restoring words to their full free expression

Reclaim their regressive compression

From beneath your Judge's hammer

Drumbeat accompaniment into the slammer

Where I will compose a new liberating grammar

To sustain the reverberation of our clamour

I tender this tribunal my tribune declaration

May it engender the rebirth of our nation

Russian punk band Pussy Riot jailed for "Blasphemy" in Russia. This poem is dedicated to them.

***

Don't forget to go to My Xmas Pressie for you, which starts today Friday 21st December. With your prompts, I'll write you your own flash story here on my blog.

Hard Time - Friday Flash

Lights out.

Stipulated sleep. Designated dormancy. Medicated soporifics.

No longer able to see your fist in front of a whipping boy's punchbag face. No warning glint off the barrel of an improvised shank.

Yet there is plenty defiance of circumscription and the circadian all around. Both conscious and unconscious.

Calloused hands cradle listless cocks, in order to foment some warm milk to carry them over into languor. The darkness matches their own played out inner visions.

Denied both sun and dial, junky horologists listen to the whirring of their body's broken cogs. Trying to calibrate for their midnight feast. The nodding gateway into the land of nod.

Even among those who have succumbed to bromidic conformity, an ease of repose is far from reached. Cavernous shouts gouged from deep within sleep. Sonorous screams wrung from nightmares. Moans rent from all sorts of involuntary persecutions. One-sided catechisms with demons and incubi (a distinct lack of succubi for this benighted company. Least of all the spectres of those women they rendered into ghosts by gun or fleshy garrote).

The most serene may in fact be the psychopaths evenly poised in the slumber of both the just and the unjust. Or those schizophrenics restful in their dreamscapes, where any extraneous voices blend in unobtrusively.

Those superficially at peace, still subconsciously suck their thumbs. Reach out for their mothers in their stupor. These hardened men, off guard and off the clock. For eight hours they can sleep secure that they don't have to plant their backs anywhere more unforgiving than a lumpy mattress. That these eclipsed of society, at least for the duration of the moon's lazy eyed winking around the earth, can rest easy from the indignity of being preyed upon by one of their own kind.

Except me. For I am a nocturnal animal. I need to be abroad when it's dark. Rather than a caged tiger. My keen senses itching for some external movement to latch on to. To snuff out and extinguish. Mentally I pace my cell from the confinement of my bed. I do have a cell mate snoring in the bunk above me. Gulping insufflation of his nightly dose of guilt; absolved with his glottal expulsion. Movement of a sort.

Only I determine when the lights go out.