hooligan street poetry

Pray for rain

Ransom notes

Placed the still cool cancer tests

in the child-sized esky

thought of

raw meat and the frogspawn of spilled beer

wondering why the waiting room’s

cloy of heavy iodine 

is sometimes cold and sometimes warm

the smoke outside thick as Christmas

come too soon this year

the decimated blue of tattoo ink

hispering stick-figure saints

in gimcrack calligraphy 

at home the hills’ hoist’s scarecrow shape

in the stillness’s desultory turning

loops its half-hung threats

the breeze disingenuous 

weak as denouement’s fever 

pray for rain in that disbelieving way

where hope and memory fade

to a sunset bloody-eyed 

thin as charcoal yearnings

Tags:

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.