Peter J. King

@rock-rex.bsky.social

2406 Followers 1855 Following

Poet, painter, translator (mainly from modern Greek & German). Originally from Boston, Lincolnshire, I now live in the Oxfordshire Cotswolds. https://wisdomsbottompress.wordpress.com/peter-j-king

In hollows of the Winter-naked woods lie cast-off clouts — a rich matt copper layer, carpet-fitted snugly to the roots and trunks of beech and birch and alder, shifting slightly as a breeze stirs, or disturbed by small and questing beasts. There is silence here, beneath abandoned nests that perch exposed; no song, alarm call, chirrup, cheep, or churr. Bark-panelled antechamber of the Spring; there is no sense of waiting though, no expectation; it just is — itself and nothing else. Only... only, where does this track lead? It labyrinths the woods with dead-end curlicues and complicated back-and-forth contortions — yet here is where it enters, and there surely must be somewhere that it leaves (or here is where it leaves, and there must surely be a point at which it enters). published in "Dream Catcher" 33, 2016; reprinted in "Adding Colours to the Chameleon" (Wisdom’s Bottom Press, 2016)
M40 down to two lanes crawling nearly stationary centipede motion measured in millimetres I’m a segment of an arthropod midway between East Oxford and West London paralysed by a wasp sting waiting for an egg to hatch a blind white larva sitting at the useless wheel until it wriggles through the sun roof new wings drying leaves me here a blind white driver clinging to the useless wheel
(Forester McClatchey “Quinquireme of Nineveh” in The London Magazine August/September 2025) each life hit home with a soft, identical shock like a field mouse dropped by a careless owl. now, in bloody waters, terrified, we try to teach ourselves to swim before we go down for the third flailing time. it’s not death we fear, but the flashing of history the faces of all those whose lives we have lopped, their mouths wide in one inculpatory howl.
Feeling self-conscious, Will takes from his case his final draft– a scrawled, much-altered screed – apologises for its lack of grace, puts on his glasses and begins to read: My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun; Coral is far more red, than her lips’ red: If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun; If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head. I have seen roses damasked, red and white, But no such roses see I in her cheeks; And in some perfumes is there more delight Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks. I love to hear her speak, yet well I know That music hath a far more pleasing sound: I grant I never saw a goddess go, My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground: And yet by heaven, I think my love as rare, As any she belied by false compare. A silence falls and lengthens; undeterred Will starts to scan the room for any signs of approbation — then a voice is heard: “I wonder, do you need the last two lines?” published in "Now We Are Five" (Chough Publications, 2018)
wax-stuffed ears for the mandrake’s scream, belladonna for the moon-limned dark; swoon in a cloud of bats and moths night scented stock that swaps its daylight insignificance for starlit glory. dreams rise here from the pond’s obsidian, leave no ripples, swirl where there’s no breath of breeze. the new moon looms in near-unheeded threat, is larger than seems necessary for its rôle, blotting out a circle of our curling galaxy.
Yellow cover with brown lettering, in the style of "Wisden"
when I got there there had fled, and I found only here. I waited till tomorrow, but tomorrow had moved on, and it was still today. I crossed the bridge to the other side, and sure enough the other side had switched with this side, unobserved. but each time I had kept the faith, and not decamped to leave me facing him or her.
(Vasiliki Albedo “Epidaurus Dream” in The Poetry Review 116:2) my body keeps its own myths hangs on to them through every tribulation it should have been a short trip yet everything that could go wrong went wrong (as well as things that I’d have sworn could not have done) but anyway to cut a long tale short (an epic in a thimble) I got home finally and found my husband waiting there for me he’d spent the long years building sheds by day then setting them on fire at night the idiot
(Sanjeev Sethi “Trade Off” in Alien Buddha Zine 7) when I hit him with gratuitous clarity he flinched expecting something else something worse he’d been ready to hit back but now he hesitated puzzled and unsure and the clarity seeped in like venom from a dart ran through his muddled thoughts clearing up confusions spotlighting contradictions cleaning off the layers that his rage and fear had left as limescale hiding truth at last he slumped in sweaty horror faced with the monumental task of building back his bigotry before the next election
graft line from “Remember they say the dead” Lenrie Peters, in "Satellites" (Heinemann, 1967) when the bomb in the nail-filled waistcoat detonates, the indoor market’s glaucous underwater gloom in one actinic instant is dispelled. the clamour’s silenced by a wave of bursting eardrums, the scents of spice and fruit transmuted into something complex and appalling. colours are condensed: where there had been a muted spectrum, only reddish brown remains to coat green heaps of human marble scattered on the dusty floor — shattered tribute to the death cult’s sombre deity. what he created, they believe, it is their mission to destroy; where he gave life, their self-appointed task is to remove it.
She drifts directionless; is unafraid, perhaps because she doesn’t understand yet, hasn’t tried to find her way back home. The surface has no depth to it; she floats, but not on anything — not on her back, not on the turquoise of an island’s sea. She’s silent. She’s moving. Is it movement when there’s no direction home? when there’s no direction anywhere? There are no stars above her or below her, and no light or dark (she doesn’t know this, for her eyes are closed). She doesn’t know her eyes are closed, and drifts a motion that approaches nowhere, no-one; leaving, but is leaving what? is leaving whom? Is drifting here between two destinations, maybe more, arriving at a point that shifts, that isn’t coming nearer anywhere because she doesn’t know where anywhere might be. She doesn’t know that movement needs position; she is content to float in frictionless and fruitless inanition. She doesn’t know she is content.
Andrei Voznesensky “The Big Fire at the Architectural College” in Anselm Hollo (ed. & transl.) Red Cats (1962) There’s a fire crackling like crumpled paper on an echo-chamber hearth, fed on plans and perseverance (smokeless). The heart’s ablaze, red flames aflicker, casting shadows on the page, honed sharp but shifting. Through shade lying cool and rumpled, lazing unconcerned by what remains of some mass sacrifice, with severed heads and limbs, cracked bones in smoking piles.
They shear the fleece on rolling fields, and send it off for grinding into filbert-coloured flour, then to be baked in golden loaves. The grainless, chaffless stalks are baled and left upon the four-day shadow leas, until they can be used for bee skeps, bedding, dollies, hats, and more. And while the roly-poly bales sit out all day in late-September sun, a single ragged, wind-blown crow alights, and perches for a while, and mutters darkly, looking for a murder.
I can only speak in general terms. Each morning flourishes a new insanity, each paper opened opens me to miseries. And we ignore – we must ignore – the bulk of tragedies; a population’s sufferings would rip our minds. I push the world away from me, and so it doesn’t slash or pierce, but throbs. And that slow throbbing doesn’t find expression in a separated rage — writing of selected horrors heals me for a time, but how can poems hold the rage the world deserves?
they congregate on dry stone walls in groups of ten and wait to fall or cloud the moorland air around the irritable heads of grazing sheep they scatter gentle babes like salt on wounds untended two-winged paradox that brings disease decay but cures removes it two-edged blade
from spawning grounds in clouds of milt and roe, appearing out of the Bermuda Triangle — a storm cloud of imagos, more dined upon than dining. an unimaginable trek; no circled wagons to protect against predation as they vitrify. they make no sibling friends, or they would spend the long, long journey mourning.
darts from the cover of a sprawling rosemary almost too quick to see snatches one sunflower seed and off again or clings a greedy gymnast to the twisted wire beak piercing nuts between the metal strands calls (bell-like) “teacher, teacher, here comes rain” back to the seeds and disappears
damson, bullace, sloe are smeared on armour plating, given lacy wings ovipositor jabs into surface tension makes bloodthirsty nymphs darting at its prey the tiny dragon glistens like a hoard of gems
teetering between two worlds the comic waddle flashing like pelagic faster than it looks falcons fleet but clumsy and agile two kinds of threat from rats and goats from seals and sharks and vampire bats and human greed one fate in store eventual extinction
harsh sunlight forges what in English woods would be a gentle dappled shade into a vibrant, shifting show of jade and emerald of sapphire, ruby, orthoclase all of a sudden in a shaft that flashes through the canopy we get our first glimpse of a male inscrutably emerging from the undergrowth its stained-glass glare vies with the forest floor’s kaleidoscope
Now comes good sailing: sheets filled, water curling from the bow, heeling to the wind, sun glinting on white foam, no need now for a return to shore. But maybe I shall miss the land: the shadowed forests and the endless plains, moose, bison, caribou, bear, wolf, and mountain lion, and the ghosts of cultures fading from ancestral grounds, nobility displaced by politics, Abenaki, Passamaquoddy, Wolastoqiyik, Mi’kmaq, and Penobscot — now just Indian. No, no, I’ll take to water, steer a course by sun and stars to where there is no you or I, but just the sea reflecting sky in rolling waves.