Alan Kissane
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the poet
Alan Kissane is an English teacher in the Midlands, UK, whose poems have appeared in Allegro, Dissonance Magazine, Dust Poetry, Emerge Literary Journal, Epoch, Fahmidan, Kindling and Neologism. He contributed to Acid Bath Publishing’s printed volume, Wage Slaves, and is currently finishing an as-yet-unnamed collection of poems on politics and the self.
the poems
Bonfire of Inanities
I want to build the walls of a house I don’t intend
to live in,
just to use my hands.
I want to breathe free and easy, all of the time.
It’s not much of a dream
but it’s mine.
I want time to guide me forward, again. I’ve had
enough of circles, curves. I don’t
understand geometry.
I want to see
what’s in front of me. To have
a ‘no surprises here’ sign
tattooed on my eyelid door, in my clear light
vision,
like a worthwhile political slogan.
I don’t want to be alone. I’m afraid
of being given time to think, to feel.
I want to read
and consume
words grown in fields of azure light.
But
I’m jealous of words;
the way they connect and spark like I can’t,
with people, resonating within.
I don’t want to be crooked anymore,
hunched over
the weight of my own life.
I just want to burn the unnecessary in me,
like Savaronola.
In a Glass Case
Footsteps, like fingertips, trace
lines across this worn face,
back and forth, sometimes
lost, sometimes not,
always crisscrossing,
back and forth,
like moments or thoughts, sometimes
lost, sometimes not,
like butterflies pinned to a board
in a glass case
in a museum, beautiful
yet lonely, untouched, unfree,
and gazed upon
in awe before being forgotten.
Up Here With
the Rooks and Ravens
She sits in fury,
her eyes torn from blindness,
her robe rotten, a reminder of the so-called
glorious resolution.
Here the scales have truly fallen
from her hands, the sword heavy,
bowed, rusted and bitten
by the querulous blood of backs slain in the name of
something
below, a war
over numbers and paper:
nothing and everything.
This is this land now,
a stain on a vast leaf of aged parchment
floating on a lake of unbelief,
with no way off.
Publishing credits
All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb