Mike Ferguson

Approaches to the Beehive

How to 60s me. Bee husbandry can begin with honey and lip balm, but this is simply to entice you in. Teasing. Nature’s hexagon – not for beauty but for a minimum of materials. There is a noise of industry we apply widely to make servitude sound like fun. Piled up in a conical shape. It is not like a wasps’ nest you might drown in diesel. The bouffant of backcombing ever higher. No, not the B-52s dropping secret bombs into Cambodia. The queen excluder is a manipulation by the masses.



Sword Swallower Swallowing Swords

But not when speaking the title. A tongue twister in more ways than one. With esophagus ease. How the aorta watches for its reflection in a shine of steel sliding by. It is all in the irony of repressing deglutition. The Space Cowboy as a sharps router. Saliva glide. Circus and sideshow and hospital. Fakirs who were genuine. Nudging your heart to the left is a libertine politics of the existential. Can danger really be blunted by lack of a razor edge? There is a swallow murmuration but the swallower must make no sound.



I Think That You Often Are

The sudden uncontrolled giggle is an obvious giveaway when so much is otherwise pained. There are those who are on a world stage and do it there, despicably. It is a phrasal verb, but I thought there might be some literary trace. Fibbing, as when the cocks and bulls discourse with similar tell-tales on faces. And the tendency to buckle over, knees bent, trying to stifle this confession. Knowing there is our symbiosis – how often we lock little fingers, that life-long superstition, wishing for the same cure – you’d think I would recognise the deception more immediately.



Mike Ferguson is an American permanently resident in the UK and published widely online. His most recent print publications include Professions [The Red Ceilings Press, 2018] and the music poems anthology Yesterday’s Music Today co-edited with Rupert Loydell [Knives Forks and Spoons Press, 2015]. A retired English teacher, he taught experimental writing to his students for 30 years.