9.Map of Storms by Duncan McGibbon (classic books for 12 year olds TXT) 📕

to the thrust of knives
yet Beast’s aim falls short, his eye contrives
to scan our pit and puts you away, chaste,
enclosed, purely Platonic. Yet, bare-faced,
to-day, you claim your liberation.
He opens on an empty machination.
Seemingly confused, he searches the crowd
and finds a flirt and calls her out loud.
To a drumroll and a cymbal clash;
his planted lover in a crimson sash
is summoned loudly upwards, to be applauded;
she is yourself; you replicated.
While you re-appear, the blushful tearful chick
we start to applaud first thinking it a sucker trick.
Every conjuror creates his muse,
stagestruck, she stillls the gallery's boos
Stabbed in the dark, hers, the red heartacke,
a fool's fake ace crimped for the break.
He leaves you clearing a blacked-out stage
of paper, magic book and futile rage.

30.The Beast and Beauty Escape: Nautilus Chamber Music

Sea-shell century, each chamber of waste
seals a dry decade in nacreous shame.
The dead implore us from airless cavities
through sutured testaments
that we forgive their impasses.
While in the body's whorl
we graze on the minute's detritus
Each verse and response
of the drying tide
alerts us to seek darker crevices,
making survival a form of commitment.
Peace at low water
exposes our rasping speech.
Fixed definition
distributes the littoral feed
which we analyse through flexible snouts.
whose wastage thickens
the columellar management
that orders our slug-heart happiness.
We live as smoothly as we like
permanently attached to worn surfaces.
While, symbols of fertility,
we scatter shelless young
seek to be wound immortally against
the vicious spiral of boom and collapse
that weaves the spindle - shaft of wealth.
Snd on the splash zone, glaucously mortal.
we strain our last salt-spit,
listening for voices
that sing the galaxy
to turn to us perhaps, though
disappointment could hardens
the taste of tears into a chiton mask,
filling our empty depths with the musty whisper
of the shore's regress.

31.The Sister’s Watch their Finery Turn to Dust.

Just any common wastland
where vile antics and fake saints
twang and trapse in a seedy band,
crazier yet behind their eerie paints

They shriek, a minor theme in major key
'how love pleads and life is luckless.
They don't give a damn about hilarity
another rancous chant wind’s darkness

In the dusky noonshine
The birds have no time for dreams
and the fountains continue to whine
an ecstasy of cold marble seams.

32 The New Prince’s Love Song:Canzone

If I told you without lies
the sygmoid curve
of your smooth thighs
moves me to serve
each whim in your eyes,
You would only swerve
away in surprise,
or lose your nerve
and blink at their size

If I told you without guile
the cardioid roll
of your quick smile
pulls to the pole
my passion’s dial
you would only say you stole
if from a poster’s style,
or lose it to control
my words, become a trial.

If I told you without hope
that for the cycle of your breasts.
I have become your perfect dope,
you would tell me I'm obsessed
with anything that's got my slope,
or mutter you should've guessed
I’d find excuse to grope,
beside they won't be messed.
It's time you learned to cope

If I told you that with no attire
the parable of your shape
has for its moral something higher,
you would only play the ape
and fidget the electric fire.
or rubbish hyperbole and gape
at such absurdity. I'm a liar
though, I made the jape
to enter your ellipses with desire.

33.The First Sister Leaves the Prince’s House: Scherzo

...et fraude visam agere sua ipsam
peremptom [esse] mercede

Titi Livi, Ab Urbe Conditur I.X.1.9.

In Post-War night, to liberate not slaughter,
a Governor's seige-skinny daughter
climbs the man-made door to shift its cold steel bolt.
Silently it opens, without a single jolt.
Blue-stockinged, a consecrated virgin
with fair hair bobbed to her temple's margin,
she sways on the portal. Her camouflaging cloak
sails flexible to hardened ground, a broken yoke.
Her shift's white brilliance lays bare her sex
and treachery. Softer than her fear expects,
the Sabines' bare-sheathed pace of entry
exites in her a greater glamour than desultory
copper coils, bracelets from the Sabines' quarters.
She finds an alibi in fetching sacred waters,
leaps down to take the bowl in front of armoured men,
who jeer, "So you betrayed your own for our love then?"
which spurs her to charge the bargained toll
for entry to her father's Capitol
to get their stolen women back at mortal risk.
"Give me what you now carry on your arms. Be brisk."
She turns and shouts to the sleeping city,
"Look they are defenceless. Have no pity!"
With a Sabine cynicism, the men hurl their shields
coils, and sheaths, at her unsuspecting form that yields.
Below the brutal weight of war's protections
and under piled progesterone precautions.

34. The Sisters Turn into Hags ; Fugue

Flared nostrils, tough warts, a rouge
of roughened skin, thick hair and brows.
They are beauties by subterfugue
that minute difference between the vows
yielded by design become unvulnerably huge
and therefore harsh. Permanence, too, cows
shapeliness that must be vulnerable, a stooge
freshnessness that makes no transitory wows,
that breaks out in a field of warts, Scrooge-
cable hair and a bulbous face, that allows
they are monsters, simplicter, a smoodge
beauty in taste’s exile, or statelessness that bows
to the contentedness of passport-carrying fraus
that worsens the scandal as the story cow-tows.

37. Beauty Finds the Beast on the Beach of Love: salsa

Everyone here has as new shape to cut,
another profile to throw against
the sun, to squeeze unyeilding
gut into new contours of naked fun.
The work-injured newcomers put aside caution
to unpeel a guilty white scum, while
confessing devotion to a grape-nut,
once their angels of lightness should beckon
them unto the sands and the beach hut.

As melanin images thicken
lascivious brown searing down
despite the shade of pines .
legs, shoulders and flanks
reaveal their confidences
in the inquisitive heat.
While friendship makes the heart light,
laughter and beach songs
rouse the exhausted through the night.

Yet here everything rides to the horizon.
A motor boat crosses the afternoon sun
and its rays pick out the deck-struts
to pour through the heavy witness of the glass
and pose such a bare skeleton to the meridian.
The children on the diving platform
are melted to distant maquettes,
while their laughter fades to the thin edge,
a sharply grown silence, backed by breeze:
our peelings elves mock their escapers.
Everything in you is ground to the bone,
to the distilled white of the museum,
smelling of spirit and beastly ozone.

38. The Rejected Prince Remembers Beauty:capriccio

Wrapped in a fifties overcoat,
dark-haired and pale, a war-child,
the finisher of other children's games,
you are leaving your friends
in the wet, empty silence
of an orphanage garden,
for a mother you know you must love.

They have cut your dark hair short,
wrapped in a gaberdine overcoat.

I am talking to you
the night of your school review,
a skit on Hamlet....Backstage
you exchange stage-hand denims
for Gertrude's brown taffeta,
to swap text, for text,
bare, back-spacing.
You tell me not to look
and do not know if I do.

She is probably somewhere now,
wanting to know if I did.


39. The False Prince Releases Beauty: Lament

It’s time I let you go home,
now my wintery downpour
swells and floods this loam.
Love's form becomes an eyesore,
shows up my balding bone.

What use was I to you
or the rooms I put you in?
While in pop boudoirs, too
you starved your body thin.
Go, chess piece, who
checked the winter king.

40. Beauty and The Beast in Love: Adagio asai.

In the body’s silence, stripped of words,
a muteness, as if we were alone
to ready ourselves for dress.
Wolf-wild, worn -wise, we regret comfort:
the pelt unpeeled, the appeal unfelt,
under the arc-lights of gender,
we are what we dreamed,
what we forgot ,what we were not.
Athletes strip too, to break the bounds
that space contains. Lovers are naked
to contest memory.Our tongues are weary
of fabled ecstasy. Life searches you
more keenly than any guard:
the people more unfathoming in joy
than earnestness.


Isobar:Charred Voices


Music for Schools

Silence after a bruised and shaming break,
back in the soggy safety of straws and sweat
and I sat in fear, feeling my fingers ache
from stubborn writing I could not get.
Air- tongues rasped of Salzburg, "but first let's make
a treble clef." Then Mozart's sang from the set,
Molto Allegro; breaking through awake
as if I were alone. Crackling voices snapped to upset
my fun. "Write down each note as I sing it. Take
turns to check your partner's work." Mine was wrong yet
my bullies did it all with no mistake.
as if to day, "We can do this too, you dozy wet!"
I broke my pencil. My hand began to shake,
bruised to learn that runts louse up in all they get.


The Raising

Once as a child his coat was put on him
and he was taken out,
Away from the torpor of indoor safety.
They started to walk
and he straining on ahead, alive, pulled them
onwards to sights
his parents had known every day in this place,
but still wanting to go
to master the customs of streets, broken objects
and the accents of space.
A purpose spoke from all those artifacts.
Behind every touch
his vocation droned too loud to need the Word.

Prone, he heard no voice from outside the heavy house
his clay lay stored in.
Long ago the breathless mound of remaindered
muscle, tendons, flesh,
when it last moved, had still forgotten the goal
of that infant walk.
Only the tread had never ended. His dispossession
was the common loss,
was his ear's death to sound, his eye's to sight
the death of touch in the skin
were they all behind it, plotting
to bring the man
to pine for the place where he never was?


The Day of the Innocents

To think of one as small and as silent as her, why?
Why do I think of the classroom, where Annie would be brought?

She would wait outside the door,
not even touching the buttons of her coat
until a person in a hurry met those sharp, blue eyes
and took her hands to them one by one.
After this her teachers
couldn't find the words to say
what she would have done, had no-one been there
to stop her shredding every page she found
to stop her breaking every plastic shape,
before those sparkling eyes.

Why do I remember the tears
when her mother's came into the room alone?
And then the doctors frantic with failure
beating her tiny chest and driving breath
into those greying lips
to raise her slackened lungs

After the panic of the wrong ambulance crew
after the urgent uselessness of autopsies,
you'd think she hadn't left the place at all,
as she had come so barely.
It took ten years to teach her
her mother’s name and the name
her mother once named her.

Because there is nothing to remember,
I have learned to remember nothing.


A Middlesborough Quincunx.

Once, he heard children's voices from the Asylum.
Alone, in