Two Poems by Tim Blackwell

Heavy Rotation

‘The famous heavy rotation out of LAX’

I can’t say why I tell it now,
or why I’ve not told you before,
but this was decades back,
the old cold war.

I was sat out on the ridge one August evening,
watching as the darkness hardened,
waiting till the thermals scattered
and let the stars hang sharp and true.

Music bled from the radio,
the same few songs,
until the battery died.
I held myself low in the scrub,
listening to the small things of the night
skitter and cheep.

The bombers were down by the lake.
B-52s, their crews on strip alert,
their turbine cries unspooled against the hillsides,
crooning to terrible children
who mustn’t wake.

I thought about
how the dinosaurs
knew different stars,
how the planets
hew close to the sun.

Then came a wrench.
Fence-lamps glittered and blazed,
catching the Nightwatch steepling from the runway,
making for — Mount Weather? Raven Rock?
You couldn’t tell.

I scrambled back to the truck,
floored it home —
the porch lamp lit, front door ajar,
radio still worrying the playlist.

I climbed into our unmade bed,
lay down in your abandoned warmth
and kicked the sheets till dawn.

The Minimalist

I am pierced to the heart
the minimalist wails

from his bed of nails
with only one nail.

Tim Blackwell lives in Brighton. He is on twitter as @lampfrey.