The Ofi Press Magazine

Poems bys Jim Conwell (UK)

Published in The Ofi Press issue 36.

Natural History Museum  

Before the dinosaurs returned,

A huge whale skeleton hung,

suspended from the ceiling.

Mounting the wide stairs in that stony space

You would pass the whale’s bones,

like walking alongside the wall of a ship.

Big enough to feel yourself lost inside

that vast emptiness. 

Surrounded by huge, ribbed cathedrals of space

and stray barrels from the ghostly wrecks of ships.

Inside a creature that does not know you.

Cyberman

I want to be a cyberman

full only with circuits and gears,

carefully designed for specific tasks,

within limited parameters.

I want a secure future.

Nothing organic.

Nothing which might tolerate growth.

My sister was full of growth

in the end.

Huge fucking balls of it

That stuck out her back

and colonised her inner spaces.

But I am not a cyberman

and my only consolation

is imagining their dismay

when they killed her.

We the Living

I am sixty years old.

I have just lost my youngest sister,

Bernie.

“NO!” she said, vehement and outraged

when I suggested that I might leave

before she had been downstairs for a fag.

It was obvious, that evening,

that it would be impossible

to get her down. But I was a warm

promise that what lay ahead

might not happen.

We left her then.

She had to go there on her own.

Because we were the living

And we would go no further.

Jim Conwell lives and works in London. With an original background in Fine Art, he has worked for nearly 30 years in the mental health field. He has had poems published in The Journal, The Lampeter Review, Poetry Cornwall, South Poetry, Orbis, The Ofi Press, The English Chicago Review, The SHOp, Uneven Floor, Turbulence and The Seventh Quarry.