Chris Underwood is a twenty-two year old 3rd year undergraduate at Goldsmiths College, University of London (BA English Literature) in the final stages of putting together a collection of poetry entitled 'Love, Honour and Obey'. The collection contains one hundred pieces that cover such themes as abortion, love, loss, death, warfare and old age. These six pieces come from the beginning, middle and end of the collection but more can be found on his Myspace blog here.

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SELECTED POETRY

by
Chris Underwood

STILL-BORNE

There are still wrinkles in the duvet,
Smudges on your pillow-case and
A youth-damp fragrance on the towel
You left behind. Your lips still flutter
On a beer can, your skin still sweat-sticks
To the craquelure faux-leather sofa, and a
Cigarette still smoulders in the ash-tray like
The fierce-thought of a date I should have
Written down - there is more of you left here
Than I can still remember. More than my
Finger-tips still know. These fragments of
Ill-gotten, undeserved life gather in an archipelago
Of silence, an uncharted No-Man’s Land of
Atoll-dreams that swirl amongst the dust-motes in
The orgasm-sodden air.

© Chris Underwood

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VODKA BABY

I stare point-blank into your eyes,
And see only reflections of things
That I hate within myself. Faults
That prove the rule, rather than
The exception. Glimmers of hope
For things that will not be, and
Regret for those that should never
Not have been. Where life-light
Should linger, rot only the pallid
Embers of common sense. Prudence
Chokes your every word and like silt
Clogging a river, you sit and fester.
You thrash, and bawl and cry for help
That you’ve never deserved. Wrapped
In swaddling is how you’d have preferred
To remain until you gasped your last adult-
Infantile breath, coddled into oblivion and
Forgotten just as quickly as you were made.

© Chris Underwood

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PARADIGM SHIFT

A last breath frozen in flashbulbs;
Words that are headlines for a day but
Tomorrow only fit for layman’s scorn.
Elegant genius and hallowed thoughts
Are the crude foundations of younger
Men’s celebrity.
There’s a half unfinished portrait,
Propped up against a basement wall,
With a brass plaque on the ground nearby
Engraved with a household name that
Nobody remembers.
There’s a space now on a museum wall;
Like a self-contained, introverted aura,
For someone more appropriate, more up to date,
To fill.

© Chris Underwood

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THIS SIDE UP

Fingers that smell of honest old earth
Trace the sham stone-clad worn
Indifference of a building struggling
To stand upright in the poison-pulp
Newsprint wind. A factory looms
On the hill, spinning a sky scarred with
Crimson and scratched by ashen sticks
That once were trees.
Together so many little things
Which make you sad and distant,
As if you are mourning the loss
Of a world that never was your own.
Your skin turns to a prison cell,
As you steady yourself on the stairs,
One step at a time moving further away
From home.
Through the floodlit, fag-end fog faces fade
And recede until all the world is coarse uncertain
Brush strokes of engraved flesh smeared with grey.
A throat slashed, surgical and savage, dribbles
Television static blood that oozes thick and lazy as
We play-pretend at happiness and affection until
The end of the world, where all lines meet and
Terminate.

© Chris Underwood