Poetry: Selections from Bradford Middleton

I’ll Stay Here Waiting for the End

Yesterday it just became too much

Too much time confined inside my four walls

And i knew i had to do it.  I walked down

To look at the beach and everywhere

I looked there sat people

There were people everywhere despite the

So-called lock-down being on.  I ignored

The street of the dead, knowing the scene

Already down there, a scene of desolation;

The street drinkers drinking the poor and

Addicted begging and all around queues

Outside every single open shop.  I thought

To myself i’ll walk north, towards the

Hills of suburban Hanover and Queens’ Park.

There is no respite as the park overflows

With yet more people and outside some of

The houses people sit.  Some of them sit

Playing cards, others smoke weed whilst

Others just drink their days away and after

Seeing just how crazy its all become i knew

There was nothing for it but to turn back,

Returning home.  The madness on these

Streets beats me but i’ll stay here in my

Room, my tiny cell, just getting drunk

And stoned as we head now into these

End days, the onrushing apocalypse.

Death is the New Normal

The sun melts away the

Unrelenting gloom of lock-down and some

Seem to think that as the

Mercury hits 30 degrees C that life is back

To normal.

 

They crowd on the beach

Red like boiled lobster they’re just desperate to be seen

Just like those fools who

Cluster at the bars each night with no social

Distancing anywhere in sight.

 

Just last week I heard how

Two of those bars, those damnable bars

Who cater for the young and

Beautiful, had to shut as covid came a-calling

As people got positive responses

Hopefully meaning those fools will stop thinking

Their youth

Their wealth and

Privilege will save them this time.

 

Because right now it seems we’re already

Too late to stop another lock-down but I’ll just make sure

I’m not sitting here when it kicks in as the

Bodies pile up high in this here covid

Death camp and soon that is all that’ll be

Left of this damn isolated Brexit island;

Death

Death and

Somehow more death will come to fix all

Our problems a lone civil service drone

Will appear on a screen telling anyone

Listening,

“You’ve never had it so good!”

Gut Punch for Lunch

A shit day can always be improved

By a heavy gut punch as lunchtime

Passes in the haze of a cheeky pint

Whilst waiting on word from my #1

Drug connection whose promised

Some primo gear to kill off another night

Another week

Hell, the rest of this goddamn miserable

Existence of a life lost in a haze of regret.

 

A horror fills me of what this life has

Become as life comes battering me

Into submission with my Dad passing

And last weekend, on the cusp of actually

Properly starting to mourn him some

Desperate fool with even less to live for

Than me sent me down tumbling,

Crashing to the ground and soon I was

Back home and back to bed with every

Bone aching and all I could think was

That bastard interrupted the whole goddamn

Process.  So this morning there I was

And I knew she was calling me in, the

Blessed Saint James and that’s exactly what

I did and life has been better ever since.

Bradford Middleton lives in Brighton on the UK’s south-coast. He works part-time in a supermarket job but spends most of his time either drinking in the many many bars this town has to offer or at home writing. His words reflect the environment around him and some of his poems have been published by the likes of Chiron Review, Evening Street Review, New Reader Magazine, Razur Cuts, Paper & Ink. His four chapbooks are all sold-out but he’s working on getting a few more out there.