This poem takes its title from by the poet Vasko Popa, "From one bone to another"

the image is of "the lovers of Valdaro"

read along below:

FROM ONE RIB-BONE TO ANOTHER

Eyes closed, I'm
matching my 
breathing to
 yours.

I am aquiver,
I am off kilter 

it goes straight to my head 
(you just don't breathe enough)

My head rocks and 
I fall down to your lap

Like bones in the field,
our knees and shins refused

to take another step skyward.
We're blending into the soil,

keeping our eyes turned against the air,
being eaten into the Earth alongside

spears and flags and other Roman arms.

From one rib bone to another

This happened, not all of it, basically just the first line- I looked at a shopping list and was super confused (that's the long and the short of it)
You can read along below

COMFORT ®

I was spying creepy at a lady’s shopping list

Bread (brown)
milk 
dog food 
beans 
Comfort 
cheese pizza 
Lettuce 
Lager
ravioli 
mushrooms 

Everything seems fine until a double look down reveals  
 Comfort
what is comfort- where can that be found 
at the shopping market - and can it be carried 
in a basket out the doors and 
held on to and kept refrigerable?
A biro line through bread, well sure, 
bread is with the bread and the beans 
are with the beans. But where am I
going to find comfort?

Is it
melting the freezer with hot kisses, breathing love
on the glass panes and writing messages for one
another to see- secretly revealed with a breath of 
your own; or maybe our passion heating up the diary 
and boiling the cheese and curdling the milk sick 
with the sight of such comforting things as your 
pecks on the cheek; maybe a warm hug leaping 
out at you from the vegetables, a tender embrace 
in and among the avocados, tucked away beneath 
fresh-dirty potatoes, healthier than spring spinach 
and spring greens, is it blushing green tomatoes red?


I am going mad looking for it, tearing through the cheap beer and wine and writhing around in crisps, spilling Pringles, kicking at the tube skidding across the floor and not looking at what I've done, just looking for you and for some of this damn comfort. Where had she got it, smiling contently and happily at the checkout, swinging mushrooms and misc tins from a hamper, chatting with the cashier unconcerned and relaxed 


It hits me as I am walking home, defeated, 
Comfort ® is just fabric conditioner.

Comfort

This poem takes the idea of evolution as well as early man/earth and dramatises it a little- you can read along below  


AT THE TOP OF THE SHOW

At the beginning I was a swallowing mudskipper 
with wriggling legs, lugging myself up the dirt path 
I forced out more defined limbs, still stuck in the prologue.

A howl was sent round the forest, scrambling up a tree. 
At the starting line, the ghost moans of primordial change 
was in the bough running through the treetops. 

At this crossroads there were no words and nothing 
had a name that could be reproduced here and now.
Not a thing you could wrap your tongue around.

A set of chattering teeth made their position clear in the bush, the hymn of change and the evolving chords of mammals 
are stamped into the sound of the woods. 

Just then, the jungle still had the lungs to shout. 
The chops that shot off a song only a mile from the coast

It really all got going out in the sea, on the seashores. 
Isn't that where everything kicked off

                                                                 For instance

Britain was an unnamed and uncared for volcanic rock 
swamped with water. Prydain is waiting
 in the super future annals of history

Britain the baby Volcano was hugging and holding, 
clutching and rubbing its back on Pangaea. 
Humped over Ireland, reaching out to Norway, and 
Iceland, and Greenland. All unmanned and absent from maps. 

No lines or barriers could pin down, say, the United States 
from holding Canada or Mexico in a tender embrace,
 front or back.



Unconfirmed nations in their communal orgy. 
A great spot of rock, stone and trees swimming 
in the only giant ocean charm.

After the split, shifting nervously, after the big move.

We're straightening up and marching uncertainly down from 
Tree Town, which began the adventures of the Amazing Ape. 

(One day we'll push out some hairy thumbs. 
They’ll eventually learn to tie ties and button buttons, 
self-consciously. The thumbs which me and my mates 
will use in a thousand years to seal a meeting. 
You used them last to hold my hand). 

A congregation of Horseshoe Crabs have gathered, and are communally discussing the events of the day, on the beach front. That's where I see you now. Ahead, I see a place with just us, after all this business is over. We'll cut our own space out 
of the forest, or we'll settle right back in between the trees. 
It's curtains for us when we get back 
in the sea-town we were re-born in.

At the top of the show

You can read along with the recording in the track description, 
you can look at some drawings and poems on my Instagram following this link: https://www.instagram.com/ljbellpoet/

All work is original and is the creative property of the account holder

LJBellpoetry