Here’s an opportunity to read a couple of Peter’s poems from that publication.
Peter Kenny is a freelance writer whose credits include poetry, stage plays and musical collaborations. He is co-founder of Telltale Press.
You can find out more about his work here:- https://peterkenny.co.uk
NIGHT WALK
The whine of the moped’s engine
diminishes in the dark parish
and stupidly I spook myself
imagining the scuff of shoes
in this moonless night, motile
with satellites and Perseids
that skid across the starry sky
like momentary omens.
I reach an island of streetlight
as bats burst its halo
and my shadow is elastic.
It dials its dark around me
yearning down the blank rouette
where my feet can only follow.
Guernsey, you are my safest home
but I know there are black books
stored under your floorboards
and Le Gardien du Tombeau
looks down on many secrets:
your soil is the ash of witches;
dead slaves lie in labyrinths
the Nazis groined in granite.
There’s something I’m half suspecting;
that someone else is with me here
with eyes black-barred like those of goats,
someone who’d command me
to descend - past the closed cafe -
to the uneasy midnight sea.
But what scares me most is me.
breaking some private curfew
I’m half laughing, half afraid
for tonight is not the last night
I will be drawn into the dark.
I still have time. I can return
to a room with a bright desk light
and type and type and type till dawn.
TIMEPIECE
Apple-damp from storage,
all the way from Guernsey,
the box is borne indoors
like a child’s coffin.
I lift my grandfather’s clock
from a nest of newsprint
and know that it’s broken,
hearing its unhinged slink,
a shifting skeleton:
spring, wheel and pinion.
Then I picture him
winding the clock
and, from its motion work,
imagine a spring uncoiling;
the syringing probe
of a strange mosquito
that drained him
of days.
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