Dennis Moriarty is fifty-six years old and originates from London. He has lived in South Wales for over thirty years. Married with five grown-up children and grandchildren, Dennis enjoys reading, writing and walking the Welsh countryside. He has been published in The Rye Whiskey Review, Setu Bilingual, Spillwords, The Blue Nib, Our Poetry Archive, and numerous anthologies In 2017 he won the Blackwater poetry competition and has read his work at festivals and gatherings around the UK and Ireland.

Urban Fox.

I am an urbanite, an inner city boy
Who works
The graveyard shift of overflowing bins
On the overflowing avenues of the night.
For all my endeavours I am paid a minimum
Wage of takeaway slops
And half eaten microwave meals for one.
I am cockney common
Frowned upon, looked down upon from
The lofty heights of the middle classes.
They fear me, loathe me, resent me for living
On the street
That was mine long before money and privilege
Moved them in.

And when they see me working my shift between
Their parked cars,
They splutter and spill their after dinner coffee,
Choke on words too crude to be spoken.
I see them now and then in their windows looking
Down on the street where I move,
And I imagine I see in their eyes a flash
Of fleeting envy,
Envy of my freedom, my cunning, and my ability
To scavenge survival
From the overflowing bins of their wasteful existence.

The New Normal.

We are pinpricks on a map of this
Post lock down world.

Stepping out from the shadows
Of isolation
And into the charcoal sunlight of
This regimented recreation.
Bar coded freedom the scan and go
Of a new world order,
Trust maintaining it’s social distance
And we live each day
Always at least two metres away
From the truth.
No longer our birthright, peaceful protests
Have been outlawed
By our political masters, the criminal elite.
Vaccine passports worn like prison tattoos,
A badge of honour,
The code of compliance, a code known
By only a powerful few.
A cashless society, we sit at home, tracked
And traced as we shop online.

Freedom an illusion, anonymity the ultimate
Act of defiance.