Frances-Ann Norton: Poetry

Dream Poem 101: Tight With Grips The pen has fallen between the twin-beds. she rolls over and fishes her arm down between them feeling for it. The sun is so bright through the window Winter bright Low Far Cold sun light. The beds are covered in a pale blue nylon counterpane with a gauzy nylon flounce very 1970’s. Her black hair has been swizzled up at the sides Tight with grips. Se has a ballet class to go to. In a shop looking for an outfit for ballet class her clothes aren’t suitable. In the girl-teen section children are eyeing her suspiciously. She has to go But gets into an argument with a man on the way out. He is a Show-Room car actor. From above the controller peers through one way mirrors In the control room observing groups of people Down below Power games Factions. The rule is  you must meet your girlfriend on school reunion day Within the city limits of a Derbyshire village. He is be...

Fried Kudzu All the trees are dressed Pelaw and Fellgate pass in a flurry of blossoms and verdant fields, lush hedgerows  and a sudden green overwhelming of street lights with foliage. In the Carolinas the kudzu at this time of year would wantonly climb pylons snaking out onto electric wires like tightrope walkers in their desperation to reach and strive upwards and onwards. Self-destructing strangle-vines. The very thing they are best at asphyxiating has ended up being the petard by which they are hung. Unstoppable in their headlong shoot to doom. Path to annihilation. Perhaps they hope to take out the whole of Marvin or Waxhaw with their last strangling gasp before they are fried and frazzled by Duke Electric. Images wiki commons:  Photographs in the Carol M. Highsmith Archive, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Divisio n 1980 tepegraph poles 1922 Newberry south carolina ca. 1922 - ca. 1953) Title Newb...

Niagara in the 90’s; After James Richards, Raking Light 2014, Digital Video with stereo sound. Safely seated in a small darkened space In the 1990’s rooms of the Tate Here to see Inventory’s DaDa reflection on social housing. London trains and busses have exhausted me. Onscreen a series of obscure and abstract images Until Niagara appears. And now two films are running, the one on screen and the one in my memory. Niagara Falls in December, the nineties have just begun like a new love affair. Niagara Falls in deep love Of crashing foam. A woman in a yellow trench coat that her mother bought from a shop that doesn’t exist anymore, Headscarf and red lipstick. She waits at the top for her photo to be taken. Pose like Marilyn. But there are no colours Everything is blank faced, locked up Frozen solid, danger zone. The petrified falls and thickly Iced, icey, walk-ways are A hazard Impassable. Like this fake marriage...

Breast Diaries 4 Why is she going for counselling? Anger Grief Moving on Permission to let it go Waiting for the clog to drop Waiting for a meltdown. To freefall To turn herself inside out. And then will she stop being afraid? She have a hole in me that she has obsessively and compulsively filled with chocolate, alcohol, smoking, God, working, making my life so full she can’t think, food, keep fit, dancing, dieting, running, writing, making art, not in that order and some consecutively and some at the same time. She is gurning and grinding and consuming life like a great cement mixer. Stop being afraid? No that plague rat is her friend. Like an old sock in the basket, she has been turned and turned again. Theseus has visited her and tied his red string around her little finger, there will be no free-falling. Chemically induced menopause is sizzling her softly but melting is for butter in a pan. That clog has been dropped down a shaft, i...

Babel The story goes, once we all had a common language and spoke the same mother tongue and all was harmony. The people said to themselves let us make a tower so we can be as tall as God and maybe we can be as great as he is or greater, and so they built together, gathering materials, and they made it strong and they made it high. Stained glass windows, columns of pure gold, mosaics of turquoise and cobalt, staircases of marble, it was a marvel to behold, nothing compared either before or after the skill and craft that went in to the tower of Babel. They reached as high as the first layer of cumulus and the atmosphere started to get thin and become cold. They were wondering how to continue. But God reached in his basket and pulled out coloured birds by the handful and threw them up free into to air, each one different and varied, each one with a different song. The birds flew down to the builders of the tower, like a rainbow shower. The birds sang so beautifully, so ...