"We've Never Been Normal (as our over-enthusiastic gunman will prove" and "Starving for My Art"

by Bradford Middleton

We've Never Been Normal (as our over-enthusiastic gunman will prove)

Big city violence
Came to cordon off
Our street of ill-repute
The other day and
All those slam poets
Convinced we live in
A ghetto by the sea
Must have been dreaming
All their south-central lives
Had jumped right off
Their tongues down here
In this town by the sea.
 
But alas as we are always
Told: Brighton isn’t normal
And never will be as
Long as a man faced
With a gun decides to defend
Himself with a traffic cone
And it’s inevitable our
Over-enthusiastic gunman
Ran off as the police
Descended en-mass only
To lose him as they
Cordoned off our street of fun.

 

 

Starving for My Art

Today closes in on me as the words
Come tumbling out and all I want is
To sit here and do this.  Right now,
With lunchtime calling all I can think
To have is another smoke, another mug
Of tea and the rest of those biscuits.

 

 

Bradford Middleton lives in Brighton, UK.  Recent poems have featured at Mad Swirl, Fixator Press, Stink Eye Magazine, Beatnik Cowboy and in the ‘Rebel Anthology’ from Back Room Poetry.  His most recent chapbook, ‘The Whiskey Stings Good Tonight…’ was published early 2023 by the Alien Buddha Press.  

 

Edited for Unlikely by Jonathan Penton, Editor-in-Chief
Last revised on Thursday, February 17, 2022 - 09:33