Image: Jean-Michel Basquiat – Bird on Money, 1981
Chavonne Brown lives in Birmingham. He is soon to be a Creative Writing MA student at the University of Birmingham. A number of his stage plays have produced for the theatre and he hopes to do further work for the stage. He currently writes for The Unapologists and his work can be found here.
Scuffed watch looking like falling stars on a cloudless night,
Glass through glass and my shadow is darkening sky;
Little world in the face of a timepiece,
Little world in the face of that passerby,
Little world in her chatter and his huffing sigh –
An infinity of bright suns in that woman’s frown
(As she tries to coax her child off that fence)
What’s the story there? The stories? I wonder
I would wish to know everything about a person for looking –
The good, the bad, and the things they cannot fathom
I would compare and contrast and try not to judge;
Knowing a story as it is lived makes it harder to hate,
No matter if the tale seems plain or perturbing
Any little world is as worth viewing as another,
If only to know what mediocrity thinks of itself
(The answer is always too much or not at all, that is its curse),
Or what pomposity thinks and thinks and thinks
(The answer, of course, is entirely too much)
It is barren, it is too warm, it is ringed with regret or hope,
Storms swirl where but psychic eyes can find them;
All is cold, or tranquil, or tear sodden of old.
This is a matter of human astroanatomy,
This is a study of neuroastrology,
Which smacks of Hollywood New Age hooey
But I assure you is a thought experiment in semantics
Little worlds on a little world in a vague corner,
Universal sea that asks nothing of us
Yet we ask everything of it;
We are in the watch face, another keeps our time.
Porridge 