hooligan street poetry

Me & Cisco

Ransom notes

There is a cloud shape about your face

We are slow as Sunday horses

Regretful in return

But with almost no other choice

The sky deep and acrylic cruel


Listen, she said

In that disarming way

The name intruding

A scratching, insect bore

Against the inner ear

I was not then (nor now)

Anyone to defy


Mother made me

In determined excavations

The remnants thin as salve

Cut off the crusts

Jam the colour

Of imperfect blue


I have that swollen satchel brow

Opening like the serape

Of arroyos in cowboy shows p

Cisco laughing

Devil-may-care

Bull-ant swell

Red dust tongue

The sudden looming

I will jump across

That shadow’s narrow shrive

Always evaporating

Swelling once again

How the hell did I get here

Where the precipice is veinous blue

And coins thrown for luck

Falling almost for ever

Almost never kill

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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.