Category Archives: Blog Posts

Inkphrastica: City Of Promise by Nicola Hulme (Words) Mark Sheeky (Oil Painting)

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City of Promise
(by Nicola Hulme)

Gleaming city of sleek dreams;
sky-scraping arks, housing bright sparks
in power suits who contribute,
custodians for generations to come.

Grime and greed crept up the towers
polluted minds, killed Hope’s flowers.
A scarcity mentality ordered more,
politicians decreed more, nations demanded more.

Green mould envy infiltrated, penetrated
poisoned the air, rotted all Lust touched.
populations flocked to the City Of Promise, only to find
the gates locked, leaving barbed-wire-strangled aspirations.

Children homeless, helpless, starving for acceptance
eyed classrooms where obese pupils consumed
knowledge and technology whilst spitting venom at teachers,
blind to opportunities squandered by their sense of entitlement.

Those who had, threw their arms around it.
Those without, schemed how they might take it.
Depressed buildings crumbled, anxious highways collapsed.
Fires burned, acid rain fell, darkness descended and all was ash.

Yet, amongst ruins the red rose bloomed.
Beating hearts, replaced by flashing cursors
in single occupancy cubicles, tapped keys, professed love
to pouting profiles; edited, filtered, cropped.

Planned futures together, anticipated red-blooded
pulsating embraces from days of old.
Romeo found Juliet in Cyberspace.
He offered a virtual rose.

Without nourishment of tender loving hands
the rose faded and drooped,
hanging its sterile head
in a cold world of desolation.

Juliet was infected by a virus.
Romeo watched from behind his firewall.
Her account flickered and died.
Their connection forever lost.

Mark Sheeky’s Oil Painting: Triumph Of The Mechnauts (available for purchase)

Inkphrastica: Step This Way: Deborah Edgeley (Words): Mark Sheeky (Oil Painting) Part 3 of an Ingmar Bergman Triptych

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As flesh turns to crêpe
As sky fades to yesterday
As the rose powders
The Eye pulls out the past

There’s the house where we made moments
it glows under a moonlit stage
empty for new blood
repeat of chances
promises
dreams
love
life

Fading flag of time
one last chance to mast

Step this way to death
Hang your stash of moments on its branches
Jigsaw in haphazard un-order-juggle-throw-sway
Step back, forward, back
Link you-to me-to-them-to that-to them-to it-to they-to who-to there-to why?

Understood backwards
Checkmate
Curtain

Deborah Edgeley

Mark Sheeky’s Oil painting: The Shore Of Forever (available for purchase)

Inkphrastica: Dream Tiger: Maggie Waker (Words): Mark Sheeky (Oil Painting)

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I dreamed of striped creature
Ochre. Black.

Fading and breaking with lightening fear
Claws ready to scrape cheese from
Fine sunlit moon.

Followed by hidden eyes
Strangely striped scarlet
Growing from thick tendrils.

Two or more tiny humanistic figures
Ventured from cold stone with their pins
Ready to slay said creature

Pins no more the size of a single hair of their foe
Whilst The Bishop of Accra was contacted
That very same day.

In a flash of lightening. Above pin spears held high
Striped fearless tiger leaps
Across green sky.

Maggie Waker: Write Out Loud

Mark Sheeky’s Oil Painting: Tiger Moving Nowhere At All (available for sale)

Inkphrastica: Nigel Astell—Martin Elder—Maggie Waker—Randall Horton—Poems inspired by Mark Sheeky’s Oil Painting

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Till Death Do Us Part
(by Nigel Astell)

Bride was unfaithful
murdered by Groom
white wedding dress
soaking blood red
death sentence passed
lifeless hanging corpse
devil lovers whisper
honeymoon in hell
this ghost marriage
can now begin.

Look At Me
(by Martin Elder)

Is this how you really see me
Is this how you want to see me
Daubed here
Hung here for the whole world to see me
This nervous wisp of a sprite
In all her pasty glory
Look at me
LOOK AT ME
Please…please look at me
I am trying to smile
I really am

Are my eyes really that colour?
Are you sure
My skin is so beautiful
Don’t say just like me
It’s so crass
So obvious
So sad like the look in my eyes
Look at me
Tell me this is a lie
That this is just a cheap imitation
That I am something more than this
I have arms and legs
A whole body to
I have a mind
Ears that hear everything
Every last drop of gossamer breath
I see
I see you now
I see you yesterday
And the day before
And the day before that when you are moaning
And yet you just see today
Looking back at me
Am I a trophy
Your badge of honour
For a job well done
Look at me
No don’t look away
Look at me…please
O.K. I will be here
Waiting…
Until you come again to look at me

Last Picture
(by Randall Horton)

Last Picture

A girl

         Or a boy

Looks at the illusion of time

                        And imagines a future

Free from space.

                       A continuum breaks.

A smile, too.

Woman
(by Maggie Waker)

Some say she’s scary
I say she’s scared

Some say she’s pale
I say she’s poorly.

Some say she’s tired
I say she’s trapped

Some say she’s thin
I say she’s slim

Some say she’s delicate
I say she’s ethereal

Some say she’s plain
I say she’s ill – favoured

Some say she stares
I say she cares.

Some say they connect
I say I bond.

Mark Sheeky’s Oil Painting: Miss X (available for sale)

Inkphrastica: Spume: Andy Millican (Words) & Mark Sheeky (Oil Painting)

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Even the hardest rock succumbs to time,
its unrelenting elements. Now spume
casts white blankets atop their home, a chime

unheard announces their collective doom.
No bee is an island. A paradigm
as much for them as man. And as their tomb

envelopes them a hundred bees will hum.
Ask not for whom the bees hum; it is them.
For this is their communal kingdom come
and as the sea becomes them, say Amen.

Andy Millican: Write Out Loud

Mark Sheeky’s Oil Painting: A Tower of Bees Hit by Forces Beyond Their Control (available for purchase)

Inkphrastica: The Fairy-Feller’s Systems Failure: John Keane (Words) & Mark Sheeky (Oil Painting)

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A fairy-feller hides in emerald shades
While feathered faces dance the perfect dance
Evading hope in pale, despondent glades
Where shadows stumble on a wild mischance:
And all of this beyond the edge of sleep
Where dreamers kill the things they care to keep.

A wedge of futuristic steel observes
And coolly calibrates this elfin scene
Kissed by a savage sun along its curve,
No form more dread than this has ever been:
It brings the future and the end of days
To wayward dreams and errant human ways.

Who knows if at some cold and vast remove
The wedge will raise again these faerie lands
Within its clouded circuits? Dreaming groves
Of rusting trees where still the gnomon stands:
Where robot birds hail corrugated skies
And elves of chrome kiss iron butterflies.

John Keane: Write Out Loud

Mark Sheeky’s Oil Painting: The Paranoid Schizophrenia Of Richard Dadd (available for purchase)

Poetry Drawer: Love in the Time of Cold by Laura Potts

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Before the dawn that walks the northern morning from the moors;
before the swans sing winter on and cough the fog upon the ponds,
we ask that through the Christmas mist and bells that bring December in
you pause and long-remember this: ever through the blizzard lives

the hospice on the hill, sleeping in the heart of dark beneath the stars
and still. How that leaping garden laughs; how that wind will never gasp away
the ashes of our past that live until the last; how those staff with candle-eyes
will guard our sleepers through the night. And as the nurses lull the light

the sentry sets above and bright-as-life upon the skies: ever does that crust
of moon push a light into those rooms, and pull away the dusk and gloom.
Oh how soon the seasons turn, and how the folk will come and go and once
will leave to not return, and how that tree will never know defeat against

the snow. Know only that the flowers grow and show their Sunday best,
and bow towards that sleeping house, and death is that much less

This poem was first published on The Poetry Society’s Young Poets Network and was commended in the Wish List challenge in 2018.

Poetry Drawer: Flight by Laura Minning

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Dreams
are meant to be fulfilled,
and dreams
are meant to be shared.

That’s what he thought.
That’s what he
always wanted.

He was so full of life.
His soul was free,
but his body
was weighted
with illness.

His heart grew heavy
with each passing day,
but he never gave up,
and he never lost sight
of his dreams.

I respected him for that.
I respected him
for who he was,
and I was grateful for
for the time
that we did have.

And every time
I think of him,
I will smile
because I know
that he
would have
wanted it that way.

Inky Interview: Author and Visual Artist Laura Minning

Books From The Pantry: Isn’t Forever by Amy Key: Reviewed by Claire Faulkner

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Amy Key’s new collection, Isn’t Forever, published by Bloodaxe Books, is hypnotic and addictive. I became intoxicated by the verse. It’s full of poems that have a beautiful, almost dream like quality to them. They’re unique, strong and inspiring at the same time.

I particularly enjoyed the use of language in this collection. Sometimes harsh, sometimes with humour, but always with remarkable depth and insight.

‘Baby, wait a lifetime before you love somebody’ took my breath away. It has the lines:

Today I woke wishing for a baby.
I woke thinking – next year I will be married.
Strange since I’m not a mascot for such things.

It finishes with:

Starlight tastes less like snow than you might think
and I woke with a temporary sense of what love is,
like getting away with a good lie.
I am watching my breath mist up the windows
thinking – I made this.

The poem, ‘She lacks confidence, she craves admiration insatiably. She lives on the reflections of herself in the eyes of others. She does not dare to be herself’ is collaged from self help and agony aunt websites, and I adore the lines which give the reader advice:

Take a self-appreciation holiday.
Build a fortress
around your best self.
When you hear your worst
selves yelling from the ornamental moat of your
self-esteem. Ghost them.

Beauty, love and the female body are recurring themes throughout the collection. ‘No one should be scared of pleats’ is an amazing cento based on the words of Coco Chanel. It has the wonderful lines:

I don’t have to explain my creations; they have explained themselves

and

If I built aeroplanes, I would begin by making one that was too beautiful.

In ‘Two cats’, one of my favourites in the collection, Key demonstrates an elegant nature of vulnerability with the lines:

I whispered love to both cats
and tried to pay them equal attention. The vet prescribed
a hormone diffuser to take the edge off their fretfulness
and I worried about its effect on me. I had trouble both
sleeping and waking and was often in tears.

Hauntingly beautiful are the lines from ‘The Garden’:

I encountered a surface that was not safe to stand on
it was between me and the garden.
The garden said take as much time as you need.
It said you don’t even have to tell me.

I find myself intrigued by Amy Key’s style and words. The poems felt real to me, and one more than one occasion they made me pause for breath. I was delighted and surprised by them. It’s a stunning collection.

 

Photography by Jamie Drew

Get your copy of Isn’t Forever by Amy Key