hooligan street poetry

Long way round

Ransom notes

Rode a thousand thousand miles

front wheel limping

with that shopping cart demand

to cry and turn sideways

til the cicadas warned

of unwarranted invasive

in unfamiliar silences

the petrol smell of ugly trees

leaves maggot soft, the underbelly gleam

of a sky all burning til, only stars remained

turned almost around

the wind’s cool hand against my brow

as if an owl were flying

with soft rapprochement against my face

sides now dinghy heaving

a stitch as sharp as love

warm with moon glow and

on the rise

in quiet parallelograms

the yellow lights of home 

C S Hughes

C S Hughes grew up by the bellow and stink of cattle yards, and the hollow and roar of dunes. He says he was a hobo in his youth, and later worked as a spice seller, a book dealer, and a trader in junk and detritus. More recently he has been a writer and editor of poetry books, editing From The Ashes – Poetry In Support Of Bushfire Relief, The Poetry Of John Ashdown-Hill and Somnia Blue, amongst others.He has been published online and in print in Blue Pepper, Five 2 One, Weird Tales, Sampietrino, The Blue Nib and various others. He has published several collections of his own work, including, The Little Book Of Funerals, The Book Of Whimsies, Sound Never Dies & Other Poems, the short story collection The Book Of Fables, and the novella in verse, COVID-22. He currently lives in the Gippsland Lakes region of Victoria with a cat and an historian, where he (still) studies and dabbles in photography, poetry and story writing, but claims, with a nearly straight face, to mostly being a hobo.