hooligan street poetry

Looking for Yuri Gagarin

Ransom notes

Broken bottles on the ground 

At every alley mouth

I ask for Yuri Gagarin

Space is what is left

When we are hollowed out

By need sharp as stars

This is just his misnomer

I reply, to the swish of butterfly knives 

You will know him by

The darkness in his visor

The shirt he wears blood red

Marked in giant leaps

Like slowly moving weapons

The orbit all too brief

The ricochet

A spray of glass

As if these springtide petals 

Bludgeoning your squinted face

Were cast in the wind

The grit and garbage soughing

Of another voiceless cry

The fishbowl beneath his arm

That I think we live inside

Almost empty 

You know I have, he says

Pockets full of sand

Leaking out like time

Through the holes and veils

Leaving shore thin strands

So if you chase the wind

You can find me

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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.