James Martyn Joyce

Eye Test

He begins with the easy ones,
calls them loud in his sombre drone.
Then the straining ones, still
clear but with a hint of wonder.
Before the need for pondering takes hold:
Ms and Ns swapping places,
followed fast by Ds and Bs,
then Os and Qs and Cs,
until the final line he can stagger
might spell ‘breath’, but doesn’t.
Below, the jumble could be ‘love’,
or ‘fault’, or even ‘guilt’.
The remaining lines a rumoured place
of terror, worms, clay.

Talking to the Wall

Shop Street: anthill busy in the splitting sun,
the young man in the Tigers T-shirt
pummels the wall with his fists,
forehead thrumming on the grubby screen
of the financially reticent Cash Machine.

His scream brings the street to a halt:
buskers hold their caught breath,
the juggler’s baton freezes in the air.
The one-man-band, his left leg rigid,
forgets his elbow and the drumming dies.
The bongo players miss their beat completely,
and the sun-brown girl in the blue sarong shuffles to a stop,
the dance leaving her shoulders stuck
up around her ears.
Even Bernie-B pauses to stare,
forgetting for a moment the rents outstanding,
her shopfronts out there, earning nothing in all this heat.

As for me, shoulder to the bookshop door,
I hear my mother’s voice again,
from the year accountancy didn’t beckon,
telling me: You think you know it all,
talking to you is like talking to the wall.