All Change!

Welcome to my new look blog! 
Blogger sent an email announcing the options on offer, I thought, 'what the hell!' and here we are! 
Here's another Katherine Pierpoint poem from 'Truffle Beds' to celebrate diving in!


Diving Board
Brand-new girlish breaststroke up and down the town pool,
A cool pearl button through silk-frogged buttonholes,
An elision fluid and oval as a French vowel;
You are proud of your chlorinated otterings.
A haze of talc, wet hair and hot Bovril from tiered orange seats
Floats bellyup to a streaming glass ceiling abuzz with neon.


The tough oilsleek diving board stands dark as a pithead crane,
A pointing steel gundog straining for the falling star.
Room for another flea on its back.
A long black tongue is ready for your feet.


Leg-up the ladder onto the board? - Dare you to.
Warty and tense underfoot,
It's like walking out along a great toothless gumline.
With small, rude leaks and poppings from your bathing suit,
You're a kipper gone cold in its cleaving bag.


This is a rock-face swaying in a high wind.
A concrete trampoline.
Judge it wrong and you break your jaw on the toffeehammering end,
Or burst like a fig, swooping from the kindly tree onto tarmac.


Walk back to the safe end, firm on its silver rollers.
Just let the loud boys go through first.


Go.


A dull spong and a few metallic knockings, like a dying engine
Flip you up and over.
Sweet as a perfectly-served tennis ball;
Murderous, invisibly aflame with topspin.
Then a pebbledashed implosion,
Shrugging down like a dynamited building
In the suddenly spanked and yelling water.


Katherine Pierpoint