TEXT poetry

Stuart Barnes

Cradle of a mountain, coolly cocooned
In a hollow

Worthless as a church
In this drift of snow,

Blackening fingers and toes, words
Deformed, like embryos

Pickled in thalidomide:
Deathblow. Frostbite, this mind

Glutted with the black, the red,
The yellow of night,

Never again will these hands write.

Stuart Barnes writes in a green Melbourne suburb. He's recently completed A Cold Decade, a memoir, surviving male-on-male rape, drug & alcohol abuse and bipolar disorder, and is currently editing Songs to the Sphinx, his first collection of poetry, and plotting An Octopus's Garden, his first novel. He is content.

stuart barnes sstu808@yahoo.com