David Greenslade

Presenting the re-usable, self-steering, three handled, zip-along, five gallon, polycarbonate, water bottle. The patented castor-nipple races to, fro and all around eager to deliver water wherever it may be needed. Even where it’s not needed the bottle pushes in and makes a point of being noticed. Staff and students are now used to the sight of several bottles racing across campus, jostling at automatic doors and racing down the corridors.

Distributing Blu Tack and Sellotape the staple bride hovers like a missionary over a heathen carpet. The industrial strength fibres of the carpet fall in one cardinal direction as if before the blast of an enraged volcano but won’t convert. Neither will they eat. What the fibres need are so far outside the awareness of this good visitor that even as beneficent staples fall other hasps unlatch. The time lapsed carpet rots. Salt encrusts the pillars. The staple bride hoards office supplies against the shocking manners of dusty bookmarks lusting for suggestive texts.

Hawks perch on the arrows of a road sign. They see what motorists cannot and some behind the wheel adjust their driving according to the hawks’ behaviour. Those with an eye for the hawk, the kite, buzzard and eagle try and bend the road according to raptorial advantage. Imagination soars and many find that the mind cannot halt even during sleep. Sign hawks take advantage of this and ravage the memory of those who envy claws and flight. Sheer vanity persuades some drivers that they too are raptors. But carrion is the case and the tragedy of speed is disinfected from the motorway.

The metaphoric rifleman defends his right to read and write and has taken refuge in the censor’s very whistle. The gun is also shrill but because it isn’t loaded it’s easily destroyed. Piety on TV is worse than a tank on the lawn and no matter how deep the bunker the mob will find a fault. No one is safe and one by one poets are rounded up. The barbarism of paradise is not to be challenged and as if to prove it here come angels to tear this soldier limb from limb.

David Greenslade writes in Welsh and in English and fragments of his writing have been translated into languages as diverse as Czech, Chinese, Irish and Uzbek. He has been published by Shearsman, Parthian, Dark Windows, Faber, the Morning Star and Two Rivers Press. He teaches at Cardiff Metropolitan University.