Poetry: Selections from Bernard Pearson

Auditory Hallucinations

I’ve started hearing noises,

Not voices, but sound tics.

I hear the night,

Scraping at the window,

So I get up and for a moment

Am tempted to let it in,

The street is quiet,

A darkened necklace

Of familiar cars,

Like baubles worn by

A resting actress,

Drape the road on either side

Barren until the next day’s school run.

A cat, a skanky fellow,

In skewballs livery,

Skulks like Judas

Sniffing the tyre treads

For all the ‘goss’.

And now I see,

A couple helpless,

Puppets in the toy cupboard

Of their lust, under

A blood orange. streetlamp.

I close the curtain

Return to bed.

Wondering if other

People hear things,

Noises I mean not voices.

I’ve never tasted Sushi

Perhaps now

I never will.

The Day After

She lay on the bed

A Picasso woman

Badly cut coloured glass 

On white cotton. 

Their castaway clothes 

Smouldered like

cluster bombs

strewn about the room

Outside the breath  

of morning fogged 

her town like an old mirror.

Bernard Pearson's work has appeared in over one hundred publications worldwide, including; Aesthetica Magazine, The Edinburgh Review, Crossways, and The York Literary Review  In 2017 a selection of his poetry ‘In Free Fall’ was published by Leaf by Leaf  Press. In 2019 he won second prize in The Aurora Prize for Writing for his poem Manor Farm.