Humphrey Astley - ditch, ditch, the poetry that matters ditch, Home ditch, archive About Humphrey Astley Humphrey Astley was born and lives in Oxford, England, where he studies at Ruskin College. He is editor of Rain Over Bouville, a quarterly web zine and small press, the latter of which has published two of his own collections as well as those by poets in Montreal, Stockholm and Edinburgh. His writing has appeared in Black Heart magazine and the Workshop Studio program. The Green Dress the green dress below me is a meadow drinks my rain shell of emerald shielding pink black market- bound and the curtain on the window in the tower of the sinned the green dress beneath me is by naked isthmus cleaved down the shores of which are buttons: little buoys we are siblings lapping nightly at the tangle of our ties nobody save me from the green dress beside me Resistance The so-called path of least resistance lined with toes: the early mourners crowd the flanks of this procession, watching mankind crawl through gallows since the carpenter’s commission was deployed. > Here is the schoolboy kicking a stone all the way to his door without knowing why, there the deflection that looses the birds in a freak of directions out from the birch. > Horizons are the churches of the sceptic; they lay thresholds in a ring around her home. And where the curvature of Earth is found to slacken, with her twin eyes she reties the skyline’s bow. > The so-called path of least resistance lined with toes: the early mourners crowd the flanks of this progression at the bell. And it would be hell without my fellow fool, with whom I fear no heaven. In the Thinking that skank that freak of natur Tyra Hunter who came from the street she came off the road one night and shards of glass flew up like birds and bees to fetch the cream of Washington DC hardhat cuntmen who weren’t born yesterday “this ain’t no bitch” lo and behold her body held in low esteem and all her blood an unconvincing red a queerouge in pools they mopped it up with dollar bills with a payoff of three million that’s a buck for every pore through which she’d breathed that skank in death she knew the freedom that was perjured in the thinking of her traitors Tyra Hunter was an African-American transsexual who was involved in a 1995 car crash and, effectively, allowed to die by the emergency services. ©2007-2020 ditch, and the individual authors. Material is copyright © and is made available without charge for personal use only; it may not be copied, posted, or used for any other purpose. Thank you for respecting the rights of our authors.