Manhunt
Manhunt
From the Howard Hughes poems
By Christopher Barnes, UK
He’d lurked out of focus,
Leaves no trace. A dwindle to vanishing point
Then vague air.
Blackening rooms.
They had been his Gulag tower
For a repeating of tucked-away years.
He bolts from the subpoena like nitro-glycerine,
Whispers in backstreet shadows,
The reeking tang of trash heaps, a scratchy shack
In Arizona, steering his commissions on the move,
Long distance from a grubby callbox,
And in white tiled johns for trickery.
Lensmen want him,
To prang his pictures (Time Magazine,
Newsweek, The Saturday Evening Post)
Reporters bated with lubberly stipend,
Law requests that he answers points,
Brokers need confession, counter-espionage,
And his puppetry flunkies
Unhappy in their mode.
Handsets shout electric reports
Sightings in treble figures,
In all the blanks across the States
The streak of Howard Hughes.
True grit by a true brit. Are you Manc(hester United), or are you wank? Just kiddin’, I have a bud from Manchester. Nice ‘portrait’ poem of Hughes, I don’t even think of Leo-Caprio, aka [‘The Aviator’].
I appreciate the formality of beginning every line capitalized and precise punctuation…look brings feel…and detail is the key to success, particularly in poetry. After all, how can one mean what he says if he can’t say what he means? There’s times I like to manage every tid-bit, and times (when slurrringly drunk) when i say bollocks with it, ‘or never mind the bollocks’, i don’t feel like punc. capit. etc Bill Carlos Williams EE here i cummings…jackson pollacks!
Liked so much ‘word-usage’ here including: ‘to prang’, ‘lubberly’ (especially), ‘callbox’; and word combos: ‘reeking tang’, ‘Gulag tower’ , ‘treble figures’. Particularly impressed with 3-word combo of assonance/rhyme within each word: ‘pUppetrY flUnkIEs’ ‘UnhappY’…wonderful attention to sound! Thx.
Cool pic from the editor too. The girl to the far right is savagewave (in 70’s), and she’s thinking: “I would have began with the Iberian defence and formed a pawn chain taking my bishops to the flanks thus improving the development of fork possibilities with my queen and knights…enough of this, I’m going to 7-Eleven for some Jolt cola and Pop Rocks!” {just being silly!}!