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Poetry Focus On: OLIVER DIXON

Oliver Dixon is a poet and writer based in London whose poems and reviews have appeared in PN Review, London Magazine, The Wolf, Frogmore Papers, Long Poem Magazine, Blackbox Manifold and Gists and Piths. His debut volume is forthcoming February 2013 from Penned in the Margins. He blogs at Ictus.

Cartoon Man

One moment sun, same ochre as the leaves
it’s steeped through, gracing my meander home
from work – the next : this odd attempt at rain,

hardly rain at all but just this gentlest
sprinkling imaginable, sparkling down out of a blue
cloudless except for several oval clumps

like ideas occurring to a cartoon man:
am I him then, caught between two weathers,
clowning through this ticker-tape parade

of glimmers set up for someone worthier
to read a Sign in, some epiphanic
confirmation of faith – for him, perhaps,

the old asylum-seeker, fled from war
and displacement as I’ve fled driving-tests
and over-crowded tubes, but too busy today

spiking leaves one by one into his sack
even as others, other rusted hinges,
twirl unscrewed around him? Is there time,

in the end, or space in our memories
to pause and remember anything
so fugitive, uncatchable, each droplet

a tiny aperture onto a timelier moment,
a vivider world which is nonetheless
this one I have only to live in?

poem by Oliver Dixon; published online with permission of the author.

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