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A WORLD WHERE · PAUL BROOKES
$10.00
After reading the poems in A World Where, anything seems within the bounds of possibility. At times dark, but with plenty of humour, the absurdity of our own world is renewed again and again through the kaleidoscope view of Paul Brookes’ imagined realities. A fascinating collection.
Kate Garrett, editor of Picaroon Press and Three Drops From A Cauldron
| Weight | 5 oz |
|---|
Read excerpts
WORK IS SLEEP. WHEN I RETIRE
I will be awake all the time.
I never have to sleep again.
I’m counting the days.
I’m always knackered
when I wake up. The shifts
Are too long. I’ve decided.
Only way to get complete rest
is go for a jog, or concrete the drive.
I work in the sleep zone. Heavy
lift events, rearrange images.
Sweat like a pig to remake
others dreams and nightmares.
I can’t wait to forget all that.
Stay awake forever. I deserve it.
You Must
forget more than remember.
Memory is forbidden.
The less you can recall the better.
Those with memory need to be cared for.
Memory is a burden. It is difficult
to learn how to forget.
WE WAIT FOR SICK SUNBLAZE TO
go.
Too long in the barren teeth
of glare,
lustre is death,
see this wrinkled skin,
cancerous blotches,
blinded by this sharp, dry lucence.
The soft, sodden darkness will give us life.
Make us young once more.
Rub out these wrinkled laugh lines.
Smile again in the night.
Blood unclenches without light,
opens nightscented warm inside thighs
and playful inside fragrant mouths
tastes a sweetlife of shadows.
Darkness outside reflects
the firedark between your thighs,
welcoming wild cave of your mouth.
Our tongues play together
in the juicednight.
What has come into being in us is life, life that is tenebrous; eyes use what sunless gives,
dark shines in lightness, and lightness cannot overpower it. Aphotic.
Listen, words bear witness to dark, so that everyone might believe through them. Words out of warm, wet atramentous mouths.
Words are not the dark, they bear witness to the dark.
Real dark that gives dark to everyone; it is coming into the world.
About the Author
Paul Brookes was, and is, a shop assistant, after employment as a security guard, postman, admin. assistant, lecturer, poetry performer with “Rats for Love”. His latest book, A World Where, was published by Nixes Mate Books. His work was included in Rats for Love: The Book, (Bristol Broadsides, 1990). He has published the chapbooks The Fabulous Invention Of Barnsley, (Dearne Community Arts, 1993), the illustrated The Headpoke And Firewedding (Alien Buddha Press), and the illustrated The Spermbot Blues (OpPRESS) He has read his work on BBC Radio Bristol and designed and presented a writer’s workshop for sixth formers that was broadcast on Radio Five Live. More of him can be found at thewombwellrainbow.com
Interviews, Reviews, Media
Copyright © 2017 Paul Brookes
Cover photograph by Paul Brookes
ISBN 978-0-9991882-1-7
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review or scholarly journal
