August 18~ KEV THE POET

New week, new poetry! Today SHINE welcomes back UK-based writer and spoken word artist, "Kev the Poet." Kev brings us three poems:  Double Vision, Groucho, and Midnight In Tromso. Thanks, Kev, for once again, sharing your work with the SHINE international poetry community!

Double Vision

I think I saw you on the river cruise
(your distant Canadian doppelgänger)
Elbows up, cheating at the pub quiz with mom and grandma
combing your long, red, hair like bored Rapunzel
wishing yourself home through fjords and fish.

But it wasn’t you. She bore a name
from a bad comedienne, now long gone.
But like you, she had merciless gray eyes
(and probably like you) had a nasty
edge. Treating everyone with acid and honey.

I think I’ll bear that grudge as long as the
baggage carousel goes round in airports.
The same cheap luggage, same cheap platitude
You, mistaking rudeness for attitude.

as you barged past me, your maple suitcase
a distant memory as the taxi came.
Took me to another plane, and then another plane.
I think we passed each other. I saw wind turbines.

Blind open, seat in the upright position.
You saw windmills, perused the inflight magazine
and chased a plane you couldn’t catch.
The gate has closed, the wheels are now up
I was on a connecting flight, last year.

Groucho

The streets are full of lacto-free narcos
Shouting at Tesla Wankers passes the time.

I’m slightly dislocated since coming home
Nothing appears to make sense anymore.

So, out of prison, the fun-sized fascist
call out genocide, get called a racist.

It’s just the age of ipsedexitism
where white people say they invented rap.

These are the single-deckered sunny days
we’re all just sitting on the hot engine

trying to get home to domesticity
whilst spoilt teenagers facetime their sex life.

I think we’re all just waiting for Groucho
who’d puncture this balloon

with hot cigar and a salacious gag.
But every comedian is now elected

including the pub-bore part-time MP
a bad shepard of the dispossessed
 
So, I think of another place to exist
and if survived Thatcher, I’ll survive this.

Midnight In Tromso

It’s misty mountains sliding by.
The smell of stockfish drying slow
That giant ship, sailing in a bottle
pulled up a hill by it’s Captain.

And even when seasickness got me
I was still at home with stuffed foxes
and trolls hungry for goats and tourists
my mum on a gallery wall.

And how do you live in daylight
when the light is coruscant?
Even Maccies becomes Santa’s grotto
(after midnight, past my bedtime).

The fact is: you let yourself go.
Go out at midnight in Tromso.
with your new friends. And it’s not the
late karaoke bar that defines us:

It’s the fact we travelled so far
so short. And when we go back home
people will say ‘Who are they? I knew
them before the ice. It can’t be them’.

Kev The Poet is originally from Liverpool, but now resides in Devon. Kev’s work has featured on BBC Devon and weekly on Shaun Keavney’s show on Community Garden Radio. Kev gigs regularly across the South West.

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