*

I’M ON A RUNAWAY TRAIN

I’m on a runaway train

Was violently shoved aboard

Had been studying the ‘you are here’ map

Attentively outside the station

I’d just drunk a warming tea

Vaguely stirred with my pencil

Woken from a daydream

Swaying vacantly somewhere else

I’d dreamt in storyboard sketches

Overlaying the vibrato of my life

With handrawn improvements

Tentatively begun on tracing paper.

Tentatively begun on tracing paper

With handrawn improvements

Overlaying the vibrato of my life

I’d dreamt in storyboard sketches

Swaying vacantly somewhere else

Woken from a daydream

Vaguely stirred with my pencil

I’d just drunk a warming tea

Attentively outside the station

Had been studying the ‘you are here’ map

Was violently shoved aboard

I’m on a runaway train.

*

ARCHIVAL SKIES – LANDSCAPE WITH A GIRL CACTUS DANCING

She went to the archive of skies

not knowing quite what she was hoping for.

She searched ‘painter’s skies’,

(like those with the expectation of a storm)

and immersed herself in the virtual reality

of her random chosen sky.

Technically brilliant, thin

and invisibly thin brushstrokes – a burnt orange sky bled

into a burnt orange desert. Inside this landscape,

she felt a quiet expanse, as if

she had tiptoed into a nuanced loneliness.

Here, there were so many things her body could do with gravity.

 

She could dance.

 

In the thrum of grainy orange, her limbs reached out

like cactus branches while the inside of her body became

hollow and weightless. She moved, tested the possibilities

of her dancing cactus-limbed body. And while dancing

she found the join between

the burnt orange sky and

the burnt orange desert.

And could see

she was a tiny figure

very distant, a

conical body and

its long thin shadow

a smudge

in his landscape.

*

Biography

Jane R Rogers began writing poetry as a student on the Open University Creative Writing distance learning course (and was lucky enough to be tutored by Katrina Naomi), and has now been writing poetry for six years.Jane is a member of the Greenwich Poetry Workshop and the Magma Poetry Magazine team where she co-edited the July 2016 Magma issue 65 with a theme of ‘Revolution’. Jane’s poems have been published in print and online – appearing in Prole, Long Exposure Magazine, Obsessed with Pipework, Picaroon Poetry, Three Drops in a Cauldron, in Greenwich Poetry Workshop’s anthologies and in the Tate Gallery Website poetry anthology 2012. Jane lives in London but misses the West Country.