Bloodshot Monochrome. Patience Agbabi

      SHOTS

       SEEING RED

      1

      Black mum parts my continent of head,

      with glazed black cotton begins to wind

      each division so fiercely my mind

      bleeds black. I can’t close my eyes in bed.

      White mum uses fading navy thread,

      the tension less cruel, more kind

      but the vision colour-blind

      so I see red.

      2

      I read the instructions for shocking-red dye

      (freedom has given me the green light)

      yet bury the evidence under a head-tie

      like the insight

      that I see the world through a red eye

      where blood and heart mean more than black and white.

POSTMOD:

      a snapshot. Monochrome. A woman

      in a ’60s rayon suit. A knee-length pencil

      skirt and jacket with three-quarter sleeves.

      Hot aqua and a mod original.

      That shade translates to stylish grey. It’s me.

      And on the back, someone’s scrawled in pencil

      Brighton Beach, 1963

      for fun because I wasn’t even thought of

      in 1963. Imagine Rhyl,

      ’82, where the image was conceived

      by someone with good taste, bad handwriting

      and lack of a camera. Yet that negative,

      in our heads only, was as sharp and real

      as the suit so out of fashion it was in.

GREY AREA

      We two sip wine outside a Jo’burg café.

      Soweto’s bloody dangerous, don’t gotill it’s over she says. I don’t respond.

      A white man swaggers by with a black

      woman who’s not his wife, girlfriend or date.

      A black man curses her in Xhosa.

      Click.

      The white man pulls out a gun and

      I’m sitting so close I could lift my hand, touch metal.

      Slow motion back

      to our car. No split second.

      The beer is ice-cold in Soweto, cold as lead.

      Home is a grey area yet safe.

      I don’t want to go.

SHOOTING ‘UFO WOMAN’

      Action! Alien with Day-Glo afro

      (wig) and eyes (lens) like stained-glass window,

      mount silver stairs, float down to earth

      (down-escalator Canary Wharf),

      make earthling (hardcore dealer) pause en route

      to admire strange skin (ogle PVC spacesuit).

      Alien would conquer world

      from business epicentre, with S-Curl

      but the lens regressed to sand, attacked my eye

      and blaxploitation sci-fi

      turned film noir.

      I left in dark glasses,

      in a black cab like Metamorphosis,

      each streetlight burning in my vision

      how fact (I could be blind for life) shot fiction.

NOT A 9/11 POEM

      No, postmen don’t get postman’s block.

      They may deliver the wrong letters

      but are never stuck for a line break

      or line. If you think writers,

      poets are lazy, give them enough real work

      to sweat out their poems, a tragedy

      like 9/11 and a week

      to work on their wordplay

      and watch them divide

      into poets for spontaneous

      overflow and poets for emotions made vivid

      months later in the aftermath, the stillness

      but since there’s still no peace there’s still no poem, no postmortem.

‘GANGSTERS’

      shot straight into the Top 10 and school

      uniform was dead. Ties tapered,

      blazers trailed and we all murdered

      to look as miserable as Terry Hall

      or mad as Jerry Dammers whose smile

      was a few keys short of a keyboard.

      We didn’t get the 2-tone metaphor;

      know the rankin’ rude bwoy model

      was Peter Tosh; that the Wailers

      preached ‘Simmer Down’ in ’63 to stop

      rough an’ tough on the dancefloor,

      but for ska to rule the airwaves

      Sometime