E2K: a journal for the new literary paradigm

The girl from Bayeux with cars on her wall

is young, bilingual and knows how to drive,

I live with my husband - no car at all -

we meet in the hall, en route to our lives,

picking up pointers to disparate lands:

Monaco, Hockenheim.....Bournemouth, Torbay;

I gather her partner lives near Le Mans

- she used to work at the Bayeux musee,

biding her time till her present career:

Trans-Euro Tourism - something like that -

gave her the green light to move over here,

net a new car and a short-tenure flat

- aeons away from that old tapestry!

I sigh as she taps the green light in me.

"Green Light" was first published in Konfluence #4 (August 2001). Helen Buckingham was born in London in 1960, and moved to Bristol in the West of England in the early '80's. As a long-term sufferer of M.E., she is in the paradoxical position of having masses of time at her disposal in which to write, and almost the exact inverse ratio of energy available with which to do so. That said, she has perservered in defying medical science for the best part of twenty years now and many of the resultant poems, short stories, and articles have been published throughout Europe and the U.S., as well as having been performed live (in venues as diverse as Bristol's legendary "Jester's Comedy Club" and the crypt of Coventry Cathedral) and on BBC Radio.