Giant whispering and coughing machines,
But the Quietus shaped by thieves
Broadcasts from a churchyard sleeved
With coats that serve as muscle:
The wavebands glowing overpower
The rabid storms of chording where
Your child hands clap against the air.
Beautifully devout before a spent
Cascade of money pours from out
A vast resettling of drums. Thence
Begins the mental struggles of arcane
Girls, who may not dance upon a floor
Nor faces inside faces prick music.
Vast Sundays and organ-frowned spaces
Leave dark emptied trees behind
Seas, where sotto voce tames the race
Of gaoled men; and the sureness of
Faith will dive into the bays and quays
Which seem too straight or still-born.
The light of rock attunes to sound
But this noise contests the altar-lit
Grounds of life’s lurch, groomed with
Minds which govern sadness from ground
Teas, but still the coffees of the earth
Grind to dust the magmas of bent birth.
This Glass of Water
This glass of water is engrained
With rivers, dowsed by man-rills
And the coitus of the seas must wrench
Cockles from the winkles near dread
Dreaming. Or else, the spinning seas
Of shells made real must swim death
Or the lights of oceans spiel away
The milky dancing spurning of bays
The lotus of the salts inflames hordes
And the swiftness of sailing prove
That girl kind may not despise shores
Nor the genus of sandcastles smooth
Sirens from spars
Thence, the oared
Homes of drinking waters dive down
Against the drowning peoples of
Love’s heartfelt pools The shadowed
Depths of art refine their current where
Lies slip their lake-rivalry when
The sucking fish of dying death sprays
Sea-Pay?
Jim Bellamy was born in a storm in 1972. He studied at Oxford University. He has written thousands of poems and won three awards for his poetry. He tends to write in a bit of a fine frenzy. He adores prosody.