10,000 POEMS – Posted freshly most days
I can bury my face in your centre,
if you let me fall in there:
I can feed upon your splendour
I will taste you, now laid bare:
I can push apart your shaming,
if you let me finger your depths:
I will never expect to remain
in your bed if you need it left.
You were pulled from me in the coldest of months,
in a slow-mopped hospital they cleared your lungs:
I read you the fact, what they had written,
you being just mine, no father was given.
In that shortened week I was your only mum,
in that compress of time.. my first love began.
The day it snowed to boot-thick-deep,
I dressed you, carefully, in a pink layette;
I took you down to the hospital’s car park,
to a woman waiting, with a man in a car,
but I could not let you be removed,
there followed a struggle, I still wear the bruise;
Dad tugged you hard, out from my arms,
pushed you to the woman in that fast-revving car.
She turned to your face, as they drove away,
I felt my heart crumble, and it began to decay.
A year after your birth a photo was sent,
from an anonymous place, by your perfect parents:
Four decades passed, all my family’s gone,
I sit with your picture, I am your only one.
It is that moment
they mass at the till,
in the push-tight bar,
as dad checks the bill,
and mum, in her anorak,
cannot work out
if tips are included,
as the kids look up
at the array of spirits
they have never sipped,
ever keen to escape
this embarrassment.
I mislaid a lover’s poem tonight –
now undone over wireless files –
by the members’ club –
near my short-lived home –
I dropped the text – her words have gone –
my lust-spews lost her – internet-blown
What of un-doings can I now re-build
in this swilled night-time
with sleep to kill?
A recall of her squats –
her tight compressions
over my thighs – shoved without questions –
and my pained hands on her flattened breasts –
I type too fast to retrieve behests
Tonight I’ll dream of us reaching – fumbling –
fingering and buried – ever French-kissing –
but all those breaths are a short frustration
I’ll lose the lines in my translation –
I was stood naked on a littered road
and her lost poem lay folded –
still unknown
E281118
Dad turned into a dog just before
the US-presidential election,
the world was changing so much
that anything, anything was possible,
like Dad becoming a cross-breed,
like Dad then shitting on our lawn,
(Dad never, ever, did that before).
He turned into a beautiful mongrel,
possibly part-Labrador, part-Poodle:
‘Stupid, with good looks,’ was all Mum said.
But what do we do about it?
I spent a few days hugging him,
trying not to catch his sad eyes.
What could I do? I am only sixteen.
Mum was rubbish, she told no one,
not even Gramps, who knows everything.
We were confused, in our own little world.
Perhaps the re-count would happen,
and prove that Russians fixed the election,
and Dad would become Dad again?
Not likely, according to the feeds I grazed upon:
Yes, I do RSS. I AM a child of the internet,
we don’t all just do Insta-snap.
I sat at the window, the grass grew high outside,
Dad’s peeing on it made no difference:
Mum got a cute lawn boy in,
who complained about Dad’s shits.
Try scooping them up each morning!
On the seventh day I bought a lead for Dad,
Mum was still in denial, so I took him out:
Opposite our house are the best woods ever,
once you have crossed the dangerous road,
the one Dad forever moaned about.
But now he strained at his lead,
desperate to cross, no matter what.
He responded well to my commands,
which I had looked up on Google.
He ran off, like a furious sprinter:
Dad had never run anywhere before.
I watched him spin on the loose dry leaves,
chasing the wind-blown ones,
and then he disappeared, forever.
Each #TweetForShelter
@BritishGas will donate
£1 to Shelter,
with the aim to raise
twenty five thousand
of their profited quid:
Please tag your friends,
raise a million instead:
Today, quick-twitter,
do this one fleet tap,
retweet this quick poem,
to lift a kid from her trap,
and help a family,
without a secure life:
This one xmas tweet
could ensure they survive.
I dreamt Ant and Dec
were happily hosting
‘I’m a Celebrity..
Get Me Out of Syria’:
“It was tougher than
I thought it’d be,
drinking foul water,
eating what we found,
which tasted so sick,
but I am so proud;
my camp mates are great,
I want them all to win,
but I’m a free celebrity,
and their future is grim.”
She smiled in her moment,
prime-time TV,
whilst crossing back
to reality.
I am alone, stood,
stranded in the dark,
outside an unplugged,
vinyl-skinned, olde pub,
both so remote,
the last orders forgotten,
and the staff have gone;
left with no signal, no lift,
under that ever-same
stretch of try-to-name stars:
me, a witness to the late
rush of commuter cars,
and out-for-dinner suitors.
A lone owl re-calls,
but it is only discernible
when the road is lulled,
when her refrain greets
the dead heavens above,
and, for those still seconds,
Sussex returns to old ways.
He’s thinking too late,
slightly pissed before bed,
stiff and undressed
into cooled nakedness:
He will make you stand,
your eyes turned east,
you will face from him,
as he drops to his knees:
There your reduction,
him a flesh-bare thug,
as you stand blinded,
and his heart binds hard:
Your white legs splayed,
by his too-sure grip
pushing you open,
to find a fit in your hips.
I stand at a window
in the heart of Beirut
counting bullet holes
in the wall opposite:
Fireworks overhead,
jarring the senses,
reviving my long-buried
childhood memories:
And what does the man,
fourteen floors below,
make of such explosions,
in his war’s afterglow?
I am here for a meeting,
in this luxury hotel,
for hedge fund managers
who will all go to hell.
Who left it open,
the Overton Window?
It’s shoved wide apart,
and so it now starts:
This new weird is ‘good’,
the old weird’s kaput;
as the loud voices lift
of white supremacists,
as the Left diminuendo,
is pushed from the window.
Each line is filled,
he is cross-referencing,
the train spotter marks
which model and when:
but his life speeds past,
one without note,
except when he’s pushed,
and then we know it:
Delays to services
due to body on the line.
The last thing he wrote
was ‘8:59’
I am that bent man in the long raincoat,
with a bagged bottle, my red antidote:
I am stick-led past the bar lessee,
still struck by his loss of an apostrophe;
in there a couple, I fished from reflections,
looked me just once, then resumed conversation.
I crossed shone tarmac onto grey matt stone,
that moment I gripped, not quite alone:
In the small park under rain-weighted trees,
I found my own place below the bent canopy,
with shelter from the worst, poor-afforded below,
I turned into an old man, and walked home alone.
I keep hearing Cliff Richard records
being spun on Radio Two,
I am glad he’s getting the airplay
and the BBC haven’t been sued:
Perhaps pop’s Peter Pan
will be left alone for good:
To guide those long-Lost Boys
along rocky paths to his manhood.
The Queen is seeking more benefits,
to pay for her lazy brood,
she wants us to pay for building works,
‘cos Charles refuses to:
He’ll hide inside his Duchy,
nibbling on an organic quince,
Mummy’ gets the builders in,
to fix his inheritance.
Protectionism is the Trump card,
and with his Ace the West will shut,
reduced trade and less bartering,
see the embers of boom then lost.
Our bank rates will rise tomorrow,
as our true values take a dive,
the right will scream for purity,
as the beaten left, again, divides.
Shadows from the last century
are returning on the scans,
science has since developed,
but lies are fact for businessmen.
Trump hid from early battles,
draft dodged it is said,
perhaps now he’ll take a bullet,
to become a short-lived President.
The dawn chorus
of Radio Four,
en-suite shower splashing,
footsteps, overhead, of kids
re-gathering their
Monday things;
it is too early
to argue about
leaving it all too late.
I heard it on the radio
this morning,
they have delayed the future
for our own good,
it’s in our best interest
to know nothing,
because nothing
is our future’s last good news:
What we watch tonight
on our wide-inched screens
will be the past,
because nothing is now live,
all transmissions
are being pre-recorded,
we’re dis-engaged
in these interesting times.
I am descending,
vertically pitched,
into my unknown,
in this dropped lift:
The alarm, like most things,
is out of order,
so this is me screaming
before my last horror.
She was born to slight
ordinariness,
which was also pretty,
confusing attraction
in those seeing her:
quickly dismissed
with repeat regard
of her plain features,
tricking the eyes
which briefly admired her,
until seeing her.
Jeremy Clarkson
you are such a cock,
turn a new leaf,
read a self-help book:
‘The Thoughts of Jeremy‘,
writ by Corbyn,
says:
‘Take the shit that’s
always coming’;
then no small foreigner
will screw your life,
if you see the world
through such alien eyes:
Next time you rage,
getting very irate,
heed Corbyn’s words,
and swallow back your hate.
Her other self steps out
under the hotel-lights,
with the sun lowered,
as the early dusk scowls:
In heels she copes, as ever,
on irregular paths and routes,
a recall of her airline days,
those trips less troublesome,
just turbulence and trolleys:
These punters, these travellers,
more equal in measures
of demands and sullen desires,
and not so easily stepped over,
but, in her head, in her way,
her coping with passengers is:
they all pay, they all deserve:
Holding her coat collar-tight,
chin-wrapped against them all,
swinging her bag in the other hand,
on time, on her high price spoor.
He sits in his cooled car
watching the moon’s
unclothed glow draw
past the back-lit clouds,
and he thinks about
her stripped disquiet,
her pale, tightened, skin,
how her muscles felt,
under her folding over
and his locking in;
and he can still smell
her on his fingers,
and he pulls out
those screen wipes
and rubs, and rubs,
but she’s still there,
under his wedding ring,
in his sweated palms,
on the locked wheel,
and he is unable to remove
her scented presence,
even with the wet-wipe
of fake pine forests.
The intensity of morning light
beyond the thin curtains,
signaled that promised snow:
As predicted, as forecast,
as talked about last night,
an imminent-probability.
He knew it was there
before he opened the drapes:
It was an almost-glow
off the fat fresh fall – heaped
over the rooftops, cars, streets
and gardens, and then the horizon.
He held the curtain slightly ajar
and hard-pressed his nose
against the windowpane,
feeling the cold from outside
reach in to him, through the glass,
its difference bit his skin.
He absorbed the bleached landscape,
knowing that the kids, only the kids,
would be pleased, as she turned
in the wide bed behind him,
and then breathed noisily, abruptly,
a deep sleep change;
she was sucked, back into the last
dream-rubbed phase:
He thought about waking her,
with an offer of a tea, but decided
letting her lie in would score,
a few relationship-points.
For Tobias & Mariette
The Super Moon isn’t that ‘super’,
hyperbole spread across our ‘papers,
plus Great Britain’s no longer ‘great’,
added bullshit from the Fourth Estate.
Today some librarians
were summarily shot,
others had their licked-fingers
lopped:
No fresh cash to buy,
no more books to improve –
libraries to re-define
‘desuetude’:
Once places to search
word-oddities,
where we pulled from the shelves
fat dictionaries,
but without re-filling
the reference sections,
truth will be left
to Google’s introjections.
NEWS STORY HERE
I didn’t know him
very well,
the Frenchman
I first met in ’82,
but he was
as cool as hell,
with a quiet kindness,
a leather jacket,
an accent,
which seemed
so rare:
Who knew
I would next see him
strapped in a chair
with wheels:
None of us command the future.
East Hoathly, Sussex.
We walked the limpid lanes,
empty, except for
the to-be-exploded
indolent traffic cones;
here it is dank under high clouds
and low wood smoke,
with no street lighting,
except the garish fluorescents
strung off vulgar food wagons,
which, in turn,
are measured out
along the drip-drip lanes:
A miracle, in this remote place,
feeding the five thousand,
not one disciple put off
by the high-vis Police,
or God’s bad weather,
as ever unwelcome in these bonfire towns.
We met an angel, alone,
at the far end of the playing field,
her troubled illumination
an alliance of digital arts,
with her hands held out,
palms up, her timber shell fragile,
as if saying:
‘I was not real, I was not there, I am fiction’.
She was sacrificed, as planned,
like every shot down man
in the bloodiest battles
we could impose upon the poor:
these nations, these players,
these generals, these slayers.
Her cast embers heated debris at eleven am, Sunday.
NEWS STORY HERE
This disease,
this being,
this sitting,
this watching,
this fucking,
this waiting,
this flickering,
this shifting,
this longing,
this counting,
this reflecting,
will not cease.
He once hip-waded
across this life,
now no deeper,
just ankle-high;
those he’d stripped
in his mouth
He’ll now undress,
but in his eye:
A shot of water,
without whisky,
into sleep’s
half price dreams,
no sweated sheets,
no fingered-loving,
but he’ll wake more fucked
than he’s ever been.
Typesetters once did it
with wooden blocks,
but they used the wrong text,
now this confusion results:
They set out the erred-words:
‘Special Relationship’,
but should have laid out:
‘Small Useful Airstrip’:
Two countries separated
by a language neither speak,
and the marriage is damaged,
the special relationship creaks:
Trump puts us low,
dropped to ninth on the list,
when he ‘phones round the world,
to check who he can trust.
The Daily Mail will suck
on Donald’s presidential cock,
and Theresa May will kneel,
fumbling for his fat-dollar-knob.
The closest
I got to Leonard,
was holding
his golden mic,
I like to think
that his spittle,
cross-infected me
in that sleight;
made my voice
roughly low,
pulled a fedora
over my eyes,
his sweet venom
racked my body,
a poison bane,
his Neumann mic.
Have all the Pokémons
gone to Second Life?
The streets are bereft
of kids mesmerized
by virtual monsters
stuck in their phones,
a poor excuse
to not stay at home:
Get out again,
you eye-phone youth,
get a real life,
it’s there to be used,
go catch a clown,
fools dressed to dread,
under those masks
the latest dick-heads.
We rent our cars,
we rent our homes,
we rent TVs,
on rental loans;
we rent our time,
we rent for kids,
we rent the break,
we’re rental shits;
we rent the sport,
we rent the web,
we rent our phones,
we rent the rest;
we rent our films,
we rent to save,
we rent our lives,
we’ll rent our grave.
The submarine
launched in ’42,
Dad sailed, mid-East,
post-war skewed:
He, first-born,
ten years before,
his boat, laid up,
’67, no more.
Also keel-hauled,
twenty years on,
his grey ashes lost,
wide Solent-blown.
The padre’s job,
thin dust he threw,
across the shrunken
Fleet Review,
over ghost of anchors,
ones long-thrown,
all now lost,
a sunken Tally-Ho!
The flying rats circle over K.C. News,
roosting at night, dropping off their poos,
layering the slabs in a grey film of crap,
then off to the Post Office, to deliver more on that.
We need a Dad’s Army to defend our streets!
To patrol the pavements, with an eye out for shit:
Imagine the scenes, on Uckfield’s wide paths,
a platoon of pensioners blasting the pigeons apart!
Mr Trump
please press ‘DESTRUCT’,
when you’re elected
President;
it’ll be the best way
to ease our pain,
and you’ll be left alone,
with no one to blame.
It enfolds you in its heated fug,
the wheeled threshold, the NHS hug;
we sit and wait in a digit-lit queue,
but old illnesses will still kill us all:
I went for my ‘flu jab: ‘Done in a jiffy
‘You may feel unwell, perhaps a bit sniffy’.
I’m now pricked against influenza’s grab,
at least for a year then Hunt’ll cut back:
November, next, what will be left?
They’ll have turned down the heating,
and give back less: As I fall apart,
so will the state, we are both diseased,
our futures degrade.
There on the dresser
the family pictures,
sons stacked and set,
mother’s glossy fixtures,
my brothers captured,
in Kodak-rolled histories,
but mine’s found missing,
held there, not one of me:
Roared on the orbital,
gone from the old house,
a portrait held up,
my stiff-lip countenance,
framed in these rough palms,
my face here removed,
the accidental son
is now finally proved.
A dyslexic life’s hard
in many, many ways,
she pins a puppy on
every Remembrance Day.
“A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong
gives it a superficial appearance of being right.”
Thomas Paine, former Lewes resident.
Here – trapped again –
clipped at The Swan
with a Liquidators track –
a requested song –
ska for the drunks
who cannot dance –
especially the white
low-middle-class –
and those blacked-up
for bonfire fun –
hoping to upset
everyone –
White men as black men?
Not very ‘clever’ –
please torch the cocks
and their racist feathers
E021118
For PP
Your parents’ residence
was recorded by
their wall hangings,
and their belongings,
which you removed,
as if cutting down
through their lives,
stood for so long;
almost counting
acquired rings
of years, but you know,
already, it is fifty.
In the garage,
the wall of tools,
each with a place,
a purpose, nail-hung,
kept oiled and ready
for fixing and mending
any breakages,
but Pa’s skills,
his grip and twists,
will no longer be made
in this place,
now emptied.
I am sat on a bench
in Elizabeth Gardens –
that irregularly manicured
Jubilee remnant
I hear the thrum-engine –
the Uckfield to London line –
low tremors from the station
with both of us resting
but then she shunts loudly
on her commuted haul
and with my gripped pain
I stand – stiff – but resolved
that my own departure
is kept to a timetable –
one promised to my wife
at my bench-long halt
You go ahead – I need to rest
and I watched her walk on
with the dog – and its pull
Me – re-scheduled to then follow
E311219
Last week I was
a film ‘body double’
for a big star –
us, both, irresistible.
For three days running,
sat quite still,
my ear were filmed –
this takes great skill:
I am his doppelgänger,
from the rear,
because I have these
film star ears.
I did sign up for
‘nudity’,
perhaps you’ll see
a bit more of me.
Do not consider
continuing
unless you can,
hourly, bear
this state
that is provided,
until the minute
when you pass,
and do not expect
any fixed date
of release, because
your good life
is measured by
your good death:
Perseverance
and will applauds,
with a last-laugh pill
as yours.
For AM
Farley Farm
was close to drugged,
slow with November’s
perpetual damp;
my view was short-taken,
by dozens of time-kicked
bricks in the long-revived
fat hip barn:
Having spent the morning
stacking dusty blocks
I was all for piling-up
everything more artfully.
A gardener appeared,
arm-locked in the steering
of a wheelbarrow of plants,
now lifted, redundant.
We required his own way
of up-rooting things,
and the piece was loaded
under his soft advice.
There, laid in two parts,
the sculpture divided,
over scatter cushions,
to soften the journey.
A grave length remained
of worm-turned turf,
where the statue had stood
we left a patch of earth.
Would we dig deep shifts
in the coughed guts of this land
then take home the spat news
our livelihoods have gone?
Would we vote – stand –
to the voiced-charges they made –
that our coal industry – our life –
is not there – will not pay?
Would we shout and argue
now the future isn’t ours
and gather at police lines –
faith in this – our last cause?
Would we dare to hold
our sunburnt ground
before the police horses
and rage of police hounds?
On Clement’s second call –
when horses charge again –
would we remain – standing –
as honest pit men?
Would we have the strength
to battle any more –
or did Thatcher crush it all
in her short civil war?
With more martyrs to count –
than days in a year –
they all got rolled up
into this Christian schmear
Another scam to buy
more shite from the shops –
(once just a mask
to hide your face from a corpse)
Wear your neighbours’ patience
really thin –
as your kids make doorbells
ring and ring
Those normally just rung
by Parcelforce
and Jehovah’s Witnesses –
Ah, of course!
This excuse to eat treats
and fatty gloop
with the fasting for martyrs
lost in the loop
So roll on Bonfire Day
with no pretence of faith –
except in the Gods
who’ll make sure it won’t rain
E311019
The pushed-pushed
Lift-Shut-Now-Button,
[US-Eng: Elevator-Closure-Function];
pressed, but no more
electrical assurance
of any seal
of lift-shut avoidance,
now switched off,
under legislation,
some rights-to-access
codification:
Plus the kerbside
‘DONT WALK’ bright lights,
there to be poked,
under the Bill of Rights,
but now, not working,
not as useful,
one more gullible
Westerners’ placebo.
News story here
A stream of migrants,
a flood of immigrants,
a stride of itinerants,
a slip of transients,
a confusion of foreigners,
a wave of incomers,
a steal of vagrants,
a thrust of aliens,
a landing of outlanders,
a gust of drifters,
a surge of unknowns,
a trespass of expatriates.
This lost football soul,
(the gulls say he was sold
from under their feet,
to help the Canaries tweet),
but with one penalty shot,
saved down the kept throat,
perhaps this big shot
was one best forgot.
#BHAFC
Rewind your clock
an hour tonight,
we re-wound our state
back on Brexit night,
we re-took our borders,
a ‘Foutre’ to the French,
the Great British Fuck Off,
that was never meant.
#ClocksGoBack
Sat down, Grandma,
Grandson, and Mum,
Grandma, huffily:
‘No point sat by ‘im!’
Grandson, grumpily:
‘I’ll be on me phone..’
Grandma grunts,
Mum checks her own,
and Mum reads out
a Facebook feed;
the tired waitress
tries to intercede,
placing before them
menu boards,
waiting for her voice
to now be heard
above that of Grandma’s
moan about stuff:
‘It wasn’t like this,
when we grew up!’
Mum, now bored:
‘The world’s moved on!’
Grandma, resigned:
‘When I’m gone…’
Grandson, buts in:
‘Can I bags your phone?’
I guessed, correctly,
on which side
of the bed
you sleep:
Each morning
you lie to his right,
as if the bedside
tables are there,
both backed to the wall
with reading lights,
now found redundant
under e-reader precedent.
The murmurs over
these brushed recliners,
their comments,
their observations,
as background sounds,
intended as private,
but still transmitted
between disturbances
from vendors and tides:
Here I will surf lives
without any device.
Franzen calls it ‘a private hall
of flattering mirrors’*,
where we stay active enough
to feel the love of others
over the internet’s radar,
we exist, returning,
as low blips, heart beats,
these fleet sightings
of us, the low-followers
on the swipe,
are very necessary;
we the un-celebrities,
to whom the Gods dictate.
Ranked low on recliners
by freckled differences,
some late sun-aged
before this dead sea,
as ragged and wrinkled,
umbered by the sky,
muttering in languages
so indignant, lain,
offended by others’ children,
and the laughter of families,
each interaction
a foreign intrusion,
as they languor, topless;
not that you’d want to see
the lower laughter lines
of these clay figurines.
Special Assistance,
just two of us,
and in those minutes
I was lost,
under decades
of othered-avowals,
she bound to her
dementia-bed spouse,
him, one of us,
shuffling, forgetting:
When so met
I am guilty of vetting,
with my symptom
enquiry lines,
mapping my
prescription of time.
His first phase
like mine, didn’t alter,
only reduced
a former builder:
‘It was awful,
but no real pain.’
‘We are different,’
there, I said it again.
As youth we spoke
against political fear,
now in our dotage we only
SIGN HERE:_________
A petition easier
than kettled-streets,
thus avoid confrontation,
except in tweets.
Now, what we wake to,
we cannot undo,
that accident of drink,
words lost to you:
No soften of pain,
nor popped-codeine,
to fix risen days,
redux, lie ins:
Foul-breathed wine,
paused, re-aligned,
from few hours straight,
to another lost time:
That reminder, rattled,
loose-change gathers,
buying bar laughter,
soured breath,
days after.
There is a smallness
to you,
he thought,
just physical,
petite, of course,
whilst, in that moment,
you exploded in his eyes,
as he watched your lips
form the word ‘Pogues’,
thinking what a kiss,
on such lips
would be like,
a largeness of
bitten pout,
as you reformed
your accent
under his tease:
You walked back,
untouched,
on lit streets.
No new-built Britannia,
no tax-pirate ship:
A small piece of Britain!
It’ll cost zillions of quids!
A gift for us all!
Worth every penny!
But pounds buy less,
unsure how many:
A floating gin palace?
Build no more yachts,
we’re pre-Brexit sunk,
we have spent the pot;
now England’s stuck
at Scottish loggerheads,
build deathly Successors,
load the warheads,
aim them at Holyrood,
and prepare for launch,
Eton mess made good
by Boris’ first war.
Hillary!
Hillary!
This guy’s a shit,
like Bill,
a cruel fool,
focused on tits:
You know
how to handle
such shallow men,
please
don’t let Trump
win anything.
Those red brick villas
on the sloped lawn hill,
with service roads
linking collections
and deliveries
at every odd hour,
where patients walked,
the ones that could,
between the few points
some had known,
only known, since birth,
long-ago baptised
in that place by
the cloyed smell
of cleaning, and of filth
carried over, into them,
the walking, the lain,
the chair-rocked,
a few with head guards,
over those broken minds.
Don looked upon
his neighbour’s fruit,
should he admit
he’d like to grip
her brace of ripe
and weighty pears,
whilst her husband
was unawares?
But possibly
the best bet is,
let go of her fruits,
and go straight for her t*ts?
Boaty McBoatface
was launched yesterday,
with smash of champagne,
but it’s name is changed
to ‘David Attenborough’
now, bow-painted thick,
not ‘Boaty McBoatface’,
which got sunk by the gits.
Fifteenth May, nineteen eighty-five, Brighton,
a Top Rank Suite, for an evening’s adoration,
standing, a puntered-audience of boys’ bad skin,
but fast forward, here, now, sat-settling,
in gentrified Hove, off the low Western Road:
Waiting, stalled, greyed women and men,
pot-bellied, various middle-aged friends,
like the rank of boorish South Africans,
love-locked, along with billy-no-mates,
who arrived, drunk-stumbled, seated late:
‘You missed Rattlesnakes,’ Mr Cole said,
looking equally pissed at their loud entrance.
And I ended the concert, stood at the exit,
removed by my stiffened need to stretch,
whilst the audience sat, politely applauding,
I shifted, mine the only standing ovation.
Rip it off from the past,
sliced on rusty nostalgia,
a span of heritage,
is this truthful disaster,
when history’s lost
pay old craftsmen to make
more bygones-be-bygones,
real genuine fakes:
Bow to the Crown Jewels,
displaced paste from the past,
profited and traded,
‘cross an empire, so vast;
flaunt valuable rocks,
but sell free-to-use jewels,
those men in blue suits
from the right schools.
Gather those remnants of your strength,
and stand longer than any other,
more than those who may expect less of you,
and bring back, again, to yourselves
the small powers that others frame as broken.
This is the call to you, the robbed,
to recover the fragments – only briefly lost.
Pull in to your own, the carers and ‘selves,
the latent energy in these long days,
you are surrounded by equals in reduction,
you are lifted by sisters and brothers,
of this frail, but ever-extending, family.
This is the call to you, the beaten,
our lives are now, surely, sweetened?
Please find in this inconvenience
a greater sense, on every level,
which is there, I tell you –
it is enough to lift each one of us,
above the rigid rules and freezing.
This is the call to you, the pained,
your dignity can be reclaimed.
I may be too loud in my ineloquent verse,
but I wish for you, too, such a place of words;
to revel in the delight of your voice –
removed from speech? We are still here to rejoice,
in any format that connects.
This is a call to you, ‘The Brave’,
I’ve never met so many people I have loved.
My day, now half-cut, by red wine’s stain,
a small triumph in filling the lighter I was given,
that Zippo used by my father’s stiffer hand,
will light the fuse to smoke and relax,
knowing that our disconnections connect.
This is a call to you, the living:
“Our disease is the one that is always giving!”
VIDEO: This Is The Call
He can, no longer, so cannot,
handle the lock of their horns,
and so offers an abdication,
dropping on to his knees,
almost broken, reeled, cowed,
feeling beaten, to save their frailty,
to delay their falling.
Your presidential fight
is a three-horse race,
one with a cock,
the other two-faced.
Skinheads scared me,
old stupidities,
their immediate uniforms;
bared arms, Fred Perrys,
with high-rolled jeans,
over Doc Marten kicks,
and the sneered attitude,
in ska-scored gigs.
But those skinhead girls,
I briefly adored,
their androgynous looks,
which I hooked, engorged.
But the depths of clans,
shorn, or long-haired,
all sunk in belief,
of such no one cares,
unless you are stuck,
in a false uniform,
that of thump-dressed,
or of us, the warned.
I heard it on the wireless,
(so it must be very true,
with my degree in disbelief
in that which is now viewed);
women will gain parity,
twenty one hundred thirty one,
a man-made time-proof date,
when the misogynists are done.
Not in your lifetime, our daughters,
on this male-queered stiffened sphere,
‘The Rights of Woman’ not in print:
‘Mere self-publishing, my dear.’
Men look down from their plinths,
erection high, regimental;
until that date ‘The Rights of Man’
will stay filed under ‘Genitals’.
–
It’s so early,
the dog isn’t roused,
and the sluggish heating
is yet to announce.
But you pull on boots,
purchased for this,
and wrap the coats,
as the cat insists.
That short walk
past the Cinque Ports,
and the neighbouring hit
off pizzas and chips;
left at traffic lights
allowing the right
to walk due south,
past the Picture House,
branded both sides,
and the library lies,
awaiting budget-chops
along with the shops,
and dull retail banks,
even Pizza Express:
‘For Sale’ glowed homes
for too many pounds,
then, more bloody chips,
fat wafts opposite
the old post office,
and our town square,
still empty, still there.
At fifty miles an hour
along London’s tracks,
beside allotments,
and back-to-backs,
past six-deep internees,
stacked in graveyards,
parallel to house building,
and joggers in parks;
above small archways,
over scrapyards of crap,
then on to the river,
across spanned tracks,
crossing the Thames
the commute here slows,
almost a pause,
but then over they go,
for eight long hours
of Powerpoint charts,
‘a quickie’ in a bar,
then home from the farce.
The drunks’ bench
affords the best view
of this day’s end:
Ceased opening hours,
as the evening drags
the short-cooled sun
down behind the black
of the silhouette-town,
and those profiles of trees,
bare, I once copied down,
from I-Spy in the Wood.
A smiling clown
lives under my shed,
that beastly thing
your kids now dread:
His beery breath
is much more rank
than that stink
off your aged Gramp;
this clown’s teeth
are as equally rough
as those in a tramp’s
gap-filled mouth:
This prankster sleeps
in daylight’s peace,
he dreams of flesh,
to eat with chips.
“OK Google,”
please turn off,
you know too much
’bout my choices in life;
what I looked at,
for how long,
it’s a dead-end relationship,
your snooping is done.
If I need a map,
I’ll A to Z,
navigate my life
with no traces left;
I’ll use a brick phone,
and Duck Duck Go,
then avoid Facebook,
or just stay at home.
“Look at that handle!”
cried Allan,
as we strode toward
another motorized moment,
and Otto inhaled the leather
and oils of the past
off the cars parked across Luxford.
Lost details from our histories,
fuel switches and choke pulls,
seats that never reclined,
and other discomforts:
We middle aged men find
our comfortable pasts
locked in old cars.
It was on completing the book
that on the back cover
I felt a wetness,
then on my forefinger
(like a dammed tear
collected from another’s cheek),
a minutiae of fictional grief
for the book’s first death,
announced last,
but not written down,
and our shower curtain dripped,
a confirmation that
no make-believe tear
dropped from that book.
For SG
You would meet me after work,
for a drink, sat closer in Fitzrovia,
my years ahead start,
I hoped wasn’t my only appeal:
You know as men age our vanity grows,
and attention from younger people
is our tonic: a look, a smile, a touch,
such regards are our effortless sex,
because the real stuff hurts,
maintenance just court-ordered,
not even an act of concentration
can help us to keep up, perhaps drugs:
I could see what we were doing to you,
with such sugar daddy assurances,
we men, we perspicuous things,
we look upon your world,
as one-eyed kings.
Remove him from headlines,
bred, born to re-breed,
a future in carriages,
to be shoved on parade:
Feed him on privilege,
trade far his blue blood,
a kid with that lineage,
sell his charms for quick bucks:
An addition to the past,
of old Empire and pink maps,
but soon ruling Gormenghast,
this child waves, birth-trapped.
It is early October, in my sixth decade,
this low sun’s heat now obfuscates:
Two score fears of Betjeman’s bombs,
aimed to rain down on everyone;
that threat, then stalled, by a melt of Cold War,
but on the horizon a more terrible storm:
MAD-placed positions offer limited balance,
but we are slow-burning this lonely planet.
My neighbour’ll not prune until her last flowers fall,
but such lore set aside, now the sun misrules.
I stand above my shadow, as sundial and god,
my presence on earth more than enough,
to have been found guilty, on my own conviction,
my residence is toxic, I shan’t be forgiven:
I return to the shade, under still-green trees,
a level walk home, up by two degrees.
It is the smallest things,
like the forefinger-thumb poke
on this screen,
which now is increasingly
afflicted by rigidity
and twitch. But,
I can still type and swipe:
F*ck Parkinson’s.
Even as it’s taking me.
Savile, half vile, by name,
‘as evil’:
and now Theroux,
an inequal victim
of Jimmy’s lies, it seems,
as transmitted.
But him, Louis,
never abused by Savile:
only the untrusting could see:
My mother, a nurse, met Savile,
in the eighties,
and found him ‘Creepy’.
And Louis found what?
The salaciousness
of Savile’s acts:
A monologue for Theroux
to look disturbed:
That’s his TV.
“And so we must remember
how we were beguiled” LT.
Which drugs work?
Well anything illegal,
plus doses of alcohol,
or inhaling some freedom:
Not television-consumption,
and the inanity of such,
which is foul humdrum,
remove that crutch.
Let me read Ginsberg,
howl wild words ’bout sex,
meet strangers to talk to,
but not to fuck (not yet),
because fucking strangers
brings swabs of bad luck,
which need more meds
and I’ve said drugs suck!
Let me loose on the world
before it dissolves,
let me lose this shit time,
before the shit takes hold.
*ngl*nd, *ngl*nd,
y** *gn*r*nt f*cks,
r*g*rg*t*t* ‘Th* M**l’,
th*r* y**r tr*th *s pl*ck*d:
‘H*m*s for Wh*t* Br*ts’,
‘F*ck the d*rk-sk*nn*d’,
‘*f th*y *r* M*sl*m,
d*n’t l*t ‘*m *n’.
*fr**d *f th* w*rld,
th*s* n*me-c*ll*ng r*nts,
k**p th*s, ‘y**r’ *ngl*nd,
‘c*s *t’s * pl*c* *f f*ck*d c*nts.
I never saw her selfies,
just those last few camera shots,
on her lonesome way
to 67P’s hardened rocks:
I’m sure she had worked well,
that little spacey probe,
but always doomed to crash
on an indurate comet’s slope;
a mess she must’ve made
on the speeding icy mass,
hurrah for humanity,
we’ve littered more of space!
Desserts of shame!
Cover thine chunks!
Your sugary delights,
they offend Mr Hunt.
Reduce your fats,
you obese puddings,
return to austerity,
to simpler cooking,
to ancient ways,
when sweetness was short,
the poor pot-bellied,
the rich pissed on port:
He’ll ‘save’ the NHS
by cutting it back,
and lighter taxes
for his sweet fat cats.
The Times, 30-09-2016
I can tell time passed
by the reduction
of the contents
of the bumper pack
of cotton buds,
that one in the cupboard,
below our sink,
its product packed
so thick that patience
is needed to tug one out.
When that count is half-done
will we be half-emptied
by the rituals of cleaning
up residues of errors,
which only they can reach?
Eventually a rattled reminder
to replacements-required,
another thought about
what we have bought,
are we ever re-stocking?
Will that be when we stop?
Hurry up and wait,
she laughed it,
with her American beauty,
re-cast in the shadows,
there, where we stand,
bodies, on this lot,
in that temporary corral
of trailers (for us,
and other night visitors,
short-term residents
of this burger-wafted
camp of strangers),
all at the mercy
of radioed instruction,
by mere children
on walkie-talkies,
also squawked at,
by a body-count director.
Dad has a suit for the funeral,
and time for a balcony fag,
as the middle kid kicks a ball,
playing alone, ‘cos dad is sad’
Mum is moaning in the kitchen,
‘stuck here until I die,’
and the youngest girl sobs quietly,
for the truth, which makes her cry.
The cremation is booked for two,
a slow drive to the garden of peace,
to their cold dead’s last resting place,
eulogies from an unknown priest.
The youngest girl is kept away,
the only one wet with grief,
living the terrible loss
of the love that she so needs.
If there was a hard way
or an easy way
I would always choose
the hard way
MD said
but I knew it
already having been
broken by her
the once-champion
Irish dancer
who used
unexpected steps to win
and who later quit
to avoid complaints
from within herself
as a dancer
To be the sure
choreographer of her future
Oh, F*ck, Oh F*ck,
Hillary’s ill!
Time to ‘OD’
on sleeping pills!
America, America,
Please do not crap
on this ‘free’ world,
it’s just a cat-nap:
Let her recover
in bed, and the polls,
then she’ll kick Trump
far-right in his balls.
There – again – a man falling in love with you
From outside – in the dark – looking up
I could read his thoughts at twenty-five yards
through their bare double glazing
as he engaged himself with more than your words
Even across that distance – I can stand inside him
I can unfix his smile and slur his slightly-drunk words
Let him falter – adjust his laughter to minimise its effect
I can make him worry – too much – about his bad breath
But I know my place on this side of the glass
where I watch you – if I want to –
seeing how you make men fall in love with you
in that accidental way of sweet smiles and
eye contact – those mistakes we made
E010620
Henry the Hoover
was never ‘for’ Brexit,
he liked to keep it simple,
being a hard-working Brit,
Unlike Dick the Dyson,
with his uber-brand name,
who was blowing off Europe,
because it sucks to Remain.
Henry the Hoover
was never ‘for’ Brexit,
he liked to keep it simple,
being a hard-working Brit,
Unlike Dick the Dyson,
with his uber-brand name,
who was blowing off Europe,
because it sucks to Remain.
Picking up the pencil
to draw a human being,
was an avowal of my return
to that time of evolution;
first encountered, younger,
when making another mark;
in all these years, somehow,
I am no different from my past.
There is a self-portrait,
my rough hand in charcoal,
in which my Steerpike face
reflects these same scowls,
which thirty years later
are now etched by this disease,
my own drawn face
complains too easily.
Bloomin’ ‘Bake Off’,
what’s it all about?
The Beeb lose it to Four,
then post headline pouts.
But Mary Berry
isn’t a burnt-out tart.
she’s sticky as sugar,
and will get a new part:
Perhaps hosting Top Gear,
now filmed in a tent,
leaving Paul Hollywood
to rub his beard and lament,
he could’ve done ‘Strictly’,
or, at a pinch, ‘Crimewatch’,
but he’s stuck in a field,
rained on, and ‘Baked Off’.
First poem here:
If this were Lewes they’d start a campaign,
to retain the town’s loos under their ‘rights to complain’:
At the top of their list – everyone’s freedom to p*ss,
in a designated place, not in some parking space.
The threatened Luxford loos would be declared a free state,
by a clique of DFLs*, whose lives are deplete
of any purpose on earth, ‘cept lattes, and revolution,
(still regretting their vote against the Liberal’s coalition,
that vote of disgust against tuition fees,
meant swapping their Liberal for a Conservative MP).
Back to the loos – for ‘Men’ and ‘Women’,
the cold seats under threat from the Council’s scheming:
If this were Lewes they’d buy up the plot,
get planning permission, and build a string shop,
in which they’d accept the new ‘Lewes Quid’,
that banknotes’ ink made from recycled p*ss.
DFLs* – ‘Down From London’ derogatory Lewesian
term for people moving into the Lewes: also applied
to people moving from Lewes to Uckfield:
‘Downsized From Lewes’
Today, with regret,
I have to announce,
the loss of our loos
because of their cost:
With each pee and poo
the overheads rose,
and so the loos
had to finally close.
Now to be replaced
by parking spaces,
to make more cash,
instead of faeces.
Part II here
That bent fence,
greened by its
northern aspect,
no longer upright,
in need of fixing,
or replacing
entirely,
and around it
the living trees
remain immune
to such a weak,
heathen, design.
Sir, should you wear lycra
at your time of life?
It’s tight in places
even your wife dislikes;
there’s too many logos
on your bouncy-chest,
and too much stretching
‘cross your wide-arse cheeks.
Give up the lycra life
for a game less taut,
take up bowling,
a much baggier sport.
The maintenance of this place,
to mend unhinged gates,
to creosote fencing,
to cut back the burst hedges,
to prune the thorny boughs,
mounts before anything starts,
becoming the list
of the never-finished;
add to that self-improvement,
and nothing ever gets done.
You read a world
from so little,
said John Clare
to the Gypsy,
a time before
the handset
ripped our books;
now enquiry
is removed
from our heads
by devices,
on which we write
and find –
no store of poems
in our minds.
What a knob
George Osborne can be,
the illiterate author
of Austerity;
now pedalling for power
in northern houses,
where hope was trashed
for privatised prizes:
He’s really after
a mightier retreat,
located due south
in Downing Street.
For @robertbaittie
You – the architect of your future –
setting the lines and levels
to maintain right angles
and correct returns –
You will be the one responsible
for any discrepancies –
the courses are yours to design –
there for others to measure
and for a response to this life –
your living monument.
E150119
A heartbreak of beauty,
on the high street,
she reflected this morning,
reversed – what we see.
Ordered online,
her outfit of choice,
the town’s pageant queen
commands without voice.
If she could read
our servile minds,
she would no more be ours,
the float-show declined.
‘Yes,’ you told him,
‘I was in love
with your brother’
Him: ‘That does not matter!’
You both seduced
your rounded youth,
but, eyes closed,
he was still unsure
which one you saw:
Yet you shared a short,
unmarried, life,
with your half-English,
and his own, too precise.
A rattle of ‘roaches,
in the tight shower space,
was the moving-in present,
left by prior tenants,
and two doors down,
a neighbour, laughing again,
when calling out:
‘Never marry a woman!’
As your afternoons,
of barefoot heat,
sex, gulped air, sipped,
and tongue-sweep,
under groped fascination,
his brother
was there, deep, deep,
in your imagination.
I grew up under
the order of
suburban curves,
boxed allotments,
striped lawns,
the apprenticeship
of newspapers,
which we fed
into houses;
careful to avoid
the murmured float
when bombing down
cul-de-sacs,
with no bagged burden
by eight am;
to return, to dress,
uniformed, to school.
as we now send our own.
…here.
My last poem
about David Cameron:
Sadly, ‘Pooh’ will never
come back again:
Off to ponder,
‘tiddle-tut-tut’,
To wander the forests,
with his wife – Piglet;
Along the sandy paths
of the Algarve,
To plan their future –
not too hard,
Because, thinking a lot
taxes Pooh,
Unlike the Revenue,
who will still tax you;
So wave ‘bye-‘bye
to the short-shirted bear,
he left us in sh*t
piled up to.. [Go to first line]
This eye-lined weight
takes me to my bed,
too easily, to sleep,
even then, struck midday,
when the rest of my family
is filling the[ ]gaps
left by my missing
during waking hours.
And I will lie, still, dressed,
rolled round, under the cover
of my selfish-slept discomforts.
You are,
in that moment,
longer than a minute,
a time without gauges,
under glasses of wine,
weighting you;
having read a part-story
to one child,
and your other half
is a floor below,
and you consider
the stairs down,
to where muttered-TV,
with guffawed additions,
fills the stairwell,
and that climbing back-up
now feels irrupt:
so stay there,
in the bedroom,
with a leggy glass
of wine,
and write the lines:
‘I shall survive’,
a thousand-thousand times.
It has struck hard,
that hour I long ignored,
until now, this week,
when my body clock
turned back
my lower strength put to,
by discomfort’s drag,
through my frame,
here, inside, unseen,
where bones meet flesh:
With no defence,
no pill
no armour,
no burgonet.
No more ‘normal’,
no more being immortal.
Only with a long sleep,
my free-to-rest whore,
under her peace
I temporarily transform.
I can still press-up,
but the inner weight is
greater
than that of my youngest,
sat today on my back,
and like his presence,
riding for a loud laugh,
my invisible weight
laughs last.
With my therapist,
a genial chap,
we sit and review
my quality of chat;
a bit of a struggle,
with my stinking cold,
an incurable disease,
which has now taken hold:
In the near distance,
two floors below,
a howl of laughter
is loudly let go,
then back to peace,
as my therapist stammers,
r-r-r-repeated advice,
and nice bedside manners.
Dear Headmaster,
Not a great start,
to begin the year
with a uniform farce.
Down in Thanet,
in Academy mode,
you kick out kids
who fail dress codes.
Why not instead
employ Poseidon’s mist?
Allow them to learn,
and support your kids.
I touched down in Bucharest,
for my connecting flight,
on to Tel Aviv’s equal distance
of foreign placed-ness,
at that point, where I stood
in a terminal, sparrow-spotted,
and under the guard of men
in serge uniforms, weighted by rank,
chairs also stood, imperial, ragged,
as if waiting for the return flight of
a poverty-struck Ottoman Emperor,
equally stained and dusted by time.
She ‘leased’ her son a Chopper,
first thought – the Raleigh-type?
Spending several millions,
it’s a helicopter, not a bike!
In these days of poverty,
don’t pay her any more,
no longer to be trusted,
with ‘Sovereign Grants’ for sure.
Students borrow cash (to learn),
debts, a travesty;
no grants for the masses,
but one for Mrs. Majesty.
Take our seated Monarch,
and her Hello-spread-out kids,
stick them in a council house,
there to live, to earn their keep:
But there’s no cheap re-housing
for the Saxe-Coburg clan;
“If they cannot find a B&B,
it’s back to their homeland!”
A chopper flight to Germany,
to queue up as immigrants:
They’ll claim that state’s foreign grants,
whilst we’ll set free our kids.
Speaking with my mother,
after phone disconnections,
not-getting-throughs,
and of unreturned calls;
then, again, her anger rises,
a spiked, child-sick bile,
reflux-like, but not mine,
still before we stop talking
I tell her I love her,
but I am once more muted
by the receiver’s placement
on her telephone’s cradle
I sat on the drunks’ bench,
near the ever-overflowing bin,
shadowing that worn patch
of pressed mud, shit-tinged.
This sitter’s view, skewed,
a beer-distorted luxury,
beside dried bird muck;
a far Tannoy says ‘Sorry..’
Further on the meadows’ path
bushes are clean-picked,
the bearing branches snapped,
stamped back, welly kicks,
where pie-makers,
and black-fingered kids,
thorn-pricked, with sucked cuts,
have harvested:
They have filled, lid-shut,
Tupperware containers,
loaded up September’s
sweet black scratch crop.
Then, the smell of weed,
and it is not Japanese,
the path is now a trade route
for teenagers’ to please:
The three lads pass me,
space for the sad bloke,
with cocksure strides,
and the exhalation of smoke
which we old imbibe,
those sweet fumes of youth,
one so deeply inhales,
bench-sat, wine-abused.
Simple headstones, dated,
only affording initials,
‘Katie’ could afford the time
to scratch her’s on the face
of the screwed lead plate,
her vertical memorial
before she gets to die;
and the tramp, with a cycle,
lay his copper-only coins
across his palm, not enough
to grant his inner fortune-teller
any hope of good news:
Under his stained hat and beard
there crosses a longer story.
The white line men,
with a truck of cauldron
and flame,
lay chalk lines of intention,
then the fine art,
application by hand,
tool, and technique,
to use the drips
along the straight sure
toe-pegged wood strip;
with an eye for their line
and for the cars’ crossing –
before dried.
A thickening of nails,
a thinning of skin,
this inversion of me
is not the me within;
as my time bomb’s set
to blow itself up,
my ticking countdown –
this dragged body clock:
Freedom through night,
there the luxury of life,
short-sleep my succour,
in which I delight.
The Caravan Club
of Fun
has arrived,
with its cliche cries,
and a still anticipation
before the first day
of generator hums,
and kids’ screams;
the big wheel,
dwarfed by other ones,
still demands
a quid,
and quick kisses.
To sit still – fixed by
their demand –
that circle
close to Quaker-rounded
silence –
To give all of
yourself
but untouched –
only looked at
and so taken
in by their eyes –
to their hands
rubbing you –
soft to hard
in charcoal’s
rough soot
E060219
You know where to stand, at 06:45,
on that concrete and slab pier,
above the meadow where I walk
into that sunrise,
which you will travel towards,
irritated by its flicker at speed
and jealous of my steps
through dew grass,
and further irritated by these,
my slow observations
of high-wire catching,
weighted, cobwebs,
as you journey into the Bridge,
on a service which sucks
out your life,
out of which
no holiday survives.
No,
that is not your shadow
which you make a claim upon:
it is off the same sun,
but from another country.
That shadow is of you,
but not yours,
it is land-grabbed
from the owner,
overhead,
from the same place,
as other places,
but, without any care
for border crossings.
They rode in that lift,
on their mirror-checked trip,
to the honeymoon suite,
but not to sleep;
this temporary couple,
married, untroubled,
by the weight on fingers
of their wedding rings:
Bar-acquaintance, to this,
their lift-locked kiss,
divorcing the guilt
to succeed.
I cannot recall her name,
pretty as she was,
taking me on that crossing
to the island, the other side,
holding my hand,
a new experience,
of other’s bone and flesh,
before only my own:
She made me balance, barefoot,
with my shoes strung, because
the weir head, a concrete slab,
was our submerged bridge,
rushed cold by the constant
flowed inches of water;
then we were there,
over, into the skinny woods,
no tree much older than her,
she being older than I,
in amongst tight saplings,
and there she pushed me,
against a thin trunk.
We called them ‘snogs’,
her breath inside me,
and her roaming tongue,
as foreign as a thick snake,
it performed a dance,
charming me, hardening me,
but it was then stopped:
A laugh, a man watched,
and she touched again,
to feel her effect on me,
and they walked away.
Here he still sits,
long-legged,
with his foreigness,
to all of us;
the loudness
of the household,
his to maintain,
even after
just three beers,
even when
no longer here.
Chris Bell b.1961 d.2009
Nezer Sereni, Israel.
awake at 3.30
where you sleep
writing at 5.30
here in the east
to the wired hum
of the ceiling fan
my breath circulates
as pre-planned
to assist my sleep
in this Israeli heat
which at midday
will force my retreat
but now disturbed
by my body’s pain
my dreams my freedom
are gone again
until I return
to my forced collapse
this mid-afternoon
pain-free relaxed
under sleep’s drug
I’ll relish once more
my prior state
far time zones before
I admitted again
to my long-term plan
and it delivered to you
clear tears again
for which I apologise
now in advance
for future fears
when taking my stance
Dusted by the fallout,
now grit-showered,
the weight of white
on their protection,
on their masked faces,
still ringing in the ears
of their hearing,
hours after digging,
each child-cried to find:
A short limb of victory,
as they fight war’s
finger-choke:
They wage their own,
without weapons,
but pictures.
Lillian, Lillian…
you’re too good for him:
Julian ain’t worth it,
you’re undervaluing
your ability to screw,
to wine, and to dine:
Go stroke Matt,
he needs ‘Puss-cat’ time.
The couple stood,
him a gruff man,
she with her layered,
read-long suntan:
There holding up all,
at the boarding gate,
demanding to stand,
and to debate
their low place stood
in the boarding queue:
We paid for priority,
that’s what we do!
I swayed behind him,
on my wobbling body,
his complaints were valid,
but manners quite shoddy.
On the return flight,
we watched with a smile,
them embark from the front
jumped to first in line:
Paid for Priority,
they marched to the gate,
and EasyJet profited,
from their not wanting to wait.
It will slow down,
our promenade,
that we are pacing
to ever-last,
on this dance floor,
where we step,
to a song which
makes you weep;
I’ll hold you after
the last struck chord,
until those notes
are no longer heard,
but without that music
to guide my feet,
from our ballroom
I will have to flee.
On my screen,
a palm held light,
I am led into Aleppo,
to a hospital,
where the staff stand,
waiting for the rushed
aftermath,
on foot or trolley,
the cradled,
the carried,
the blasted,
the burnt,
the broken,
now entering
this mending place,
where bloodied bodies
are assessed;
here a bandaged baby
delivers its screams,
as loud as
the now-bereaved;
torches are
a switched solution
with the power cuts,
in this hospital,
which provides
a temporary fix
of things.
Our potted approach, by uneven kerbs of stones,
to a solitude, this sun-aligned home:
It took a thousand paces to measure the olive grove,
stepped, metres-squared, hectares, in Ostuni,
at a surveyor’s pace across rock-tilled soil,
along the perimeter and back to the starting point,
where the building is rooted between trees,
the house, the grove’s only fixed shade-maker,
where shadows are not altered, not by leaf growth,
not by bough collapse, not by plough,
but constructed, like the conceit of time,
over God’s rough footings, instead, now telling the false hour
by the drawn-line’s shady cower: And, as if to throw more doubt
on His creation, they even command the water:
a blue rectangle of fifty lengths, measured out in wave slaps,
off an English breast stroke, as an echo, the puffs of breaths.
The coal-black dog hunts down lucertole,
those too-quick-Italian-for-lizards,
hid under unearthed rocks, those rotor-turned,
their blank faces bleached, but not sunburnt.
I have
booked, again,
a return to
that dry place,
where his death
in the holidays
killed my faith
in families,
seven years
before,
and I am still
not ready
to fly there,
to be my brother’s
ghost,
to be mistaken
for him
when shopping,
or standing,
being Chris
for those
people,
who insist
I am him.
“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be.” — From Mother Night, Kurt Vonnegut
Published on Facebook,
a happy deal of cards,
a knave-free life,
for his re-fixed wife,
whilst we looking ‘Likers’
know the truth –
no honest comments,
because that’d be rude:
We transmit our pleasure,
but rarely the pain,
eighteen-rated marriages
are never Facebook-explained.
A programme of contrails for Eastbourne,
held over, circled, then the low-flown
aircraft burst through the scuttled wisps of nimbus.
Above the beach of shingle – levelled by pop-up chairs,
and picnic squares, of towels and blankets
(for dads’ brief nap) –
the crowds watch, stiff-necked
by aircraft performing overhead,
deafened by the scream of a Eurofighter.
Mutterings in the afternoon bar
slightly sour the mood,
thick racism in those heat-slowed voices,
and they would rather have Spitfires,
than any recently banked, now gone,
European accord.
A locking up, that is my take home
from the prelude of last night’s dream:
I was in a workplace, which I walked through
in my dressing gown, obviously, and, suddenly,
each terminal was beyond my ability to use,
each terminal then being already used,
no seat, no desk, an anticipation
of my future, my redundancy.
They found me, in that dream, hobbling,
and returned me intact, assurances that
I was welcome back.
As long as I am wanted, for what I can,
not given space, because of what I can’t.
Drive east out of Ringmer,
then turn left, before Earwig Corner,
accelerate on hedgerows’ chase
– parallel to Will Craig’s place;
there, on the driver’s side,
fields turn to skipped Caburn,
and your breath, to then be taken,
by the county’s only rotations
of three-armed grace,
under over-blown blades:
You now accelerate, drop-thrilled,
past the singing windmill’s hill,
and over, and down,
beyond the tilted crown,
across the bucked landscape,
on lanes, bough-scraped:
The hard-driven route,
gear-stick, de-clutched,
but then slowed by the stopped
harvester,
that wide-load between weather.
Our team’s flags rattle,
pegged vertically
into the Landie’s wing mirrors,
a parade-worthy sight
on Uckfield High Street:
Yet, there’s still cricket to be played,
summer holidays to be taken:
That slow countdown
to term time.
Equally slow on the Lewes bypass
“Sheer weight of traffic”:
We park in the ten quid garden,
and follow the path to the ground,
down through the brief woods,
there, returning to The Amex,
with sun bathers on the banks
outside our East Stand!
Nottingham Forest?
One of the boys asks
about Clough, the Senior,
and their lost glory-days.
Twenty one stripes
cross the pitch,
every white line
rolled out crisp.
Seats slow-warmed
by our returned ars*s,
for the re-run return
to Premiership chances.
We pulled up before
the Brexiters’ gates –
raised higher by
a new bit of fence:
Seeing this barrier,
smiling, she said,
That’ll not halt
the immigrants..
Instead, it transpired,
the fence was raised,
to cage their dog,
not exclude a race.
[Thank you Bella May for the quote]
Sex?
Over-rated:
no more three letter fun,
now a quick amusement,
once enough,
I am done.
I watched the worm
turn, blindly,
a sprung hose flailing,
only to discover
there was
no easy shift of soil,
no burrowing down,
having the pressed earth,
of my footprint,
casting there
an immutable slab,
for a worm.
I didn’t know her name –
before this play of Games
but she Yusra Mardini –
the swimmer of that sea –
pushing on –
to cross again –
as a refugee –
an Olympian
She trod waves in the Aegean –
over long-drowned Queen Aegea –
there they swam –
towing to shore –
a fearing load –
that smuggled horde
Dropping once more over the side –
into the pool –
her place –
her life –
but no more a fearful Syrian –
Mardini has arrived –
she is swimming
Eleven deaths,
in that dying place,
those cot-bound lives,
now erased,
a morgue of smallness,
remains, charred pieces;
the grieving still huge
for babies, deceased.
Guardian Story here
“I do prefer travelling on my own,
She’s two hours early
for everything:
Had a lovely car, a Yaris;
I saw my model out there.
“This Yaris was fantastic,
had everything on it:
The kids Bluetoothed,
Leave it I’m driving
I don’t want it on! I said.
“Coming in to land,
landing at five-fifteen,
through by six:
Hire car place not open
until eight in the morning!
“Had a coffee:
Couldn’t pick it up until 11:
They would call me, Have a coffee,
Already had fucking three!
No calls from them over five hours.
“But my son rang me,
See my number was working,
I said to the woman,
so they gave me a
hundred dollar discount.”
The Duke of Westminster is dead, today,
Who the fuck, I hear you say,
Gerald Grosvenor, billionaire, sixth Duke,
interned in Ecclestone – it is no joke.
No longer sat in Eaton Hall,
his yard, ten thousand acres all,
To be passed to his (youngish) lad –
being entitled isn’t so bad!
Three days a year they open their gates,
to give to charity, from God’s own estate.
Within succession, an obligation there,
to raise a few quid, three days each year.
No inheritance tax, to save our state,
instead a trust, ensures none paid:
The richest aford the best in advice,
whilst the others live fucked-over lives.
I step in these thick-soled carpet slippers,
aware that some floorboards will creak
when I tread and apply too much pressure:
I try to avoid such strain on places,
that will attract low complaint,
of the short pleasures which I take,
such as readings, or speeches,
I see these as our common duty,
that none of us should shy from,
because this life is not
about waiting to die, at best,
not in thick-soled carpet slippers.
He cut off his ear, that story in time,
Vincent, later the locals’ fou roux,
a manic, in delirium, brushing oil on
carton, and canvas, around Provence.
He left the internal, and the eaters’ dour,
to the landscape lunacy of colour,
a brush-dabbed constellation,
of his very centre, Rue du Bout d’Arles:
A road of girls, and brothel doors,
over screaming complaints of whores,
to intolerance, in House Number One,
a late request of Rachel, for her a parcel,
a remembrance of him, a part of him,
in Gethsemane’s cut and betrayal:
Gauguin had left, and a knife
of violence upon himself.
Dr. Rey noted, a severed artery,
and a hat disguising his slice.
Van Gogh walked to the girl, in the brothel,
To gift her him, that which needing healing.
My dad threw me a bag,
and only when I was holding
the weighty smooth sureness,
of that contained pebble, he said:
It had been removed
from a young girl’s skull,
post-mortem, it was
noted, the cause of death,
after being shot up
from its settled place,
on a wide roadside verge,
by a spinning mower blade.
Never intended to kill,
that bullet-bit remnant,
water course washed,
a history left to geology,
but now removed by blades,
from the land, and the lain,
cut from a rough bank,
and then cut from her brain.
If I could wall-mount every moment
of this imperfect state, mirrored,
it may help others to face
what I find, here, unexplained:
That which comes, hourly now,
with no complete guide,
no dip-in-book, no wiki-space,
no consultant by my side:
only us, on the insides of mine,
which I now share through poetry,
to help us both understand
why this is not in my hands.
A life reversed, when the rules were fair,
clocking-on was simpler, when time wasn’t feared:
Now striding coarse slabs – to monitor my state,
balance on flagstones – this path of restraint.
Sweet-sliced fruits, thin-cut childhood,
allotments in time, when the growing was good.
Yes, we had threats, assured Armageddon,
but now I live, struck, by a chiming destruction.
I shall still travel, on the edge of the blast,
making each stride one more, not the last.
But, seeing me frozen, appearing to be stuck,
that’s the point when I’m time-fucked.
Stiffly drinking flat beer, atop the bar stool,
posted there by his inability to stand, even sober,
but, still, with a quick arm, a lifting pitch
of pint upon pint, as old thoughts limped,
like his legs did, on his way to this mounted spot,
bar side, beer-mat marked, holding a high court.
As drinkers washed in and out, to and from
the smokers’ yard, his thoughts bloated
with his supped pints – the warm gut hit
of bitter and crisps – sending him off again
to 1953, when he danced to rock and roll,
on The Pier, years before it fell into the sea.
By the time he drank it the ice had melted
maybe a sign of unsaid things
of melting love in a with-held union
with no more appeal to committed rings
but such their marriage a slow adjustment
into an agreement which was seldom agreed
a removal of impulse within the contract
adjusted to halt his scattering of seeds
To bed and back-turned sleeping positions
no parsed ‘goodnight’ no actual speaking
and into sleep he sinks in frustration
finding this night
love without waking.
I live with no religion,
I live without your god,
because they screwed it up –
one hell of a lot:
Mismanaged and misplanned,
offering little in good faith,
instead they demand
a foul life be your grace.
Child sacrifice and abuse,
put upon one’s only son,
in the name of god’s love,
for the good of everyone?
Let us raise a faith,
in our own kind hearts,
and leave it to religion
to blow itself apart.
1.
We looked down at our craft,
a rubber dinghy, rescue-orange,
not Charon’s promised ship,
but we are tied to it now,
to get us thirty-three kilometres,
to a safer place:
I had paid for a life jacket,
with my last fifty dollars,
the going price,
and strapped the aid
to my youngest’s body,
losing him in its bulk,
assuring him it’d be alright.
Salt on my lips burnt to remind me
that we faced poisonous channels,
that we do not swallow the water,
that we only taste the air:
God’s last breath.
And I looked him in the eye,
my eight year old child,
this century’s offspring,
not saying anything,
instead silently praying,
that we both survived.
2.
I fear flying, with him,
a ridiculous agony of what could be,
if we dropped from the sky,
but here we take to the water,
in a simpler, but, more dangerous craft.
I left my wife, his mother,
buried too deep to recover,
her headstone delivered
one night by Putin,
on orders, whatever they were:
I cannot speak Russian,
only Arabic, French and English,
being a Syrian, a descendant of Eblan,
the first world power,
before New World wars ever began.
3.
Our useless boat almost sank,
on its launch, but we bailed,
clung, held each other –
my legs went dead in the crush –
Under breath: God, please, if that could be
the only death tonight.
I woke to still-no-land,
in the damp sobbing, lit by the glow
of phones held up,
seeking signal distance;
my held child slept,
ignorant of the sleeplessness
I endured
as a parent, guardian, keeper,
watcher, life guard
who cannot swim.
Then the water joined us,
Achilles heel-first,
here, vulnerable to the sea.
This was our nose-dive,
and I held him, we descended:
He chilled in the tall waves’
lifts and drops,
spitting out coin-foul water,
bailing our throats with heaves:
I slipped under as that jacket
took him away, to the other side,
his limpness no more weight,
no buoyancy required
in the underworld,
a cold, cold death
for my warm-clime child,
and me.
Richard Trevithick, I had forgotten about him,
’til @themanengine stood again;
pulled, like the trucks at Penydarren Ironworks,
under Trevithick’s steamed-up torque,
designed by a boy from Tregajorran:
giants of engineering, both cloud-throwing.
BBC Story here
Only for a short burst
between-stations,
this is Britain’s
remains of greatness,
which, back then, required
the re-fixing of time
(to keep up with our ingenuity);
but now, we amend our expectation
to this unfixable lateness
Picture: @RobKRead
Such sucked lethargy,
I am sick of it;
I was once
a travelling-Gulliver,
but now atrophy
ropes me
to this strange landfall
of tiny agonies,
crowding me,
reducing me,
until my self shrinks
and returns home,
into our large bed,
where I shall end it
speaking to horses
in my then-Swift sleep.
I can no more shop in Millets,
the sartorial choice of men,
where shorts are twenty quid,
but such shopping trips must end!
She Who Must Be Obeyed
is getting rather strict,
my clothes should be top labels –
the ones that she will pick.
So throw out my Peter Storm,
discard my beige collection,
no more windproof anoraks –
blown away by her rejection:
Instead it’s top notch brands,
to be found on our High Street,
but only if they’re second hand,
costing no more than five quid.
It had long-passed,
but the field we walked,
as I had warned,
soaked our shoes,
and
the dog almost drowned
(in the clumps of grass).
Under a pair of beech trees
I looked up,
seeing frail silhouettes
over silhouettes,
rain-glued translucency,
veined-leaves
in forced overlaps
under a still-threatening sky:
All the time
the single rhododendron
was impervious
to the wetness suffered
by the rest of us.
Raise you, a Boris Johnson,
See you, a Donald Trump,
Two knaves on the table,
Both asses, orotund.
He was bent to his shovel work,
on the hottest day of the year
as age raised a dark vest of sweat,
soaking a shadow across his chest:
He stopped to chat, resting too heavily
against the swing, and as we talked
the roped seats oscillated under his
transmission of low energy,
Newton’s Law imposed where he leant,
part-recovered from his shovelled work,
whilst his girls lay immobile in the shade,
which he had previously made.
Broken is my reaction:
A child, now a man,
lifts a child, both dusted,
carried, one barefooted
caught in sleep, or poverty?
He looks dead,
must his back be bared?
Or does his red shirt roll
over his hung head to mask his death?
But it could be a girl, either way,
carried from that blast,
where stairs hang
as if Escher had been
at work in Aleppo on another
Regular Division of the Plane.
So unexpected,
a country band in Bari,
our spaghetti western,
almost a calamity,
but saved by such laughter,
and deprecation,
and we danced, remaining,
our explanation.
A grey-faded memory of my émigré aunt,
on the quayside,
where we saw her off on a mountainous ship:
My Dad, an old salt, so going aboard,
(treading the deck) was required,
until we disembarked, before her departure.
**
On that same dock, over twenty years later,
I dug on the grain mountain, but failed to work out
my previous time there:
I only saw others’ ghosts in the redundancy
of the migrant-shipping sheds,
left behind, dusty pendants in the voids above the grain.
The same dockside sheds from where my Aunt had set sail,
in a previous incarnation,
when I was shoulder-carried by my own mountain:
Only now, this night, I reconnect those two pasts
in these greying surveys,
within my contour lines, marking my life, re-mapped.
The scent of jasmine,
there contrived,
gardened,
placed along our path,
around this front door,
taking me
to that backdoor,
where a blackbird nested,
in an accidental
frame of the same vine;
I wasn’t tall enough to see in,
but a partial view was secured
by a discarded egg,
and later, a bonus, for me,
just a kid, a fledgling, dead.
Inis Meadhóin or
three middle Aran Islands
in Galway Bay
province of Connacht
subject to century-set glacial erratics
Inishmaan the smallest
of those Aran Islands
by qualification of population
said to be thick with
traditional Irish culture
and tripped grike-deep fixed
ever-floating predominantly Irish-speaking
and still a secure knowledge of English
but still Gaeltacht
a vernacular before anything else
including Aran sweater-clichés
purled in the real world.
It was huge with disdain,
a dirty-white fur ball,
banging, banging,
on the steel door,
in that sunken pit of concrete,
with a pool – nowhere near
the size of the seas
of the Arctic Circle;
we looked on, with other visitors,
from behind glass walls,
us the bear-trappers,
with our entrance fees.
Reminded by this current story
I was up with the light air
before this day’s sunrise
as the heat broke with
a burglar’s threat
but just
itch-shifting curtains on the sash
and a thud by the unseen flow
further through the house
which had to be examined
a door to be stopped
because the kids would not
they would sleep through
anything like this intrusion
of a breeze’s soft thuds
In that Victorian pleasure garden
the Pells recreation ground
a walled pool and a play space
in commemoration of a Jubilee
all the time a spring runs
into another rugged-winter
into another summer
a solitary outdoor attendant
once maintained the grounds
In winters the ponds were
skated by the bravest
but the swimming baths made a better
skating surface when lowered
to allow it to freeze two tickets at tuppence
but his body floated beneath the thick surface
eventually retrieved through cracks
hauled with a long-handled crook
horse-drawn off to the mortuary
but they knew his true story
a wife of complaints and disagreements
I’m starting
a political party,
for all those remaining
disheartened:
The cheated, the old,
the poor and the sick,
all who can’t afford
an autarky.
Internally booked, still to be paid,
so, I am now, somewhat committed,
to a special assistance, a short flight,
a one-way ticket which is mine:
Her return seat is reserved,
my obligation, then, her future comfort
on a solo flight, letting her go alone,
to meet a new man, on that flight?
He would notice her reddened eyes,
and, being so very English,
wealthy with embarrassment,
not ask her why she cries;
he sees her wedding ring,
which she turns, and turns, and turns,
as if she is over-winding an old clock,
too much,
so it will no longer work.
Mutually Assured Destruction
is the deal,
but that infers an agreement,
with a ‘letter of last resort’, a waiver,
for silent-running replacement subs
to work to the end-of-life,
at the cost of forty billion pounds,
and the loss of eight billion people,
to keep fifteen thousand jobs,
in Scotland, which has voted
for the loss, but not the deaths.
For @PamAyres
I wish I had beautiful cuticles,
not these ingrowing scorbuticals
I would wear open-ended sandals,
not concerned about any scandal
because of my feet being exposed,
and their smell then in your nose.
The hall returned to its rented state
by the party’s emptying,
re-stacked stiff back plastic chairs,
and nothing remained of them:
Swept, bagged, and loaded out,
nothing, nothing, except the echoes
of friendships forged in parties,
trips, fights, and school classes.
There, for me, a preview – end-of-term,
of their school, those rooms,
at the epi-centre of their lives:
Swept, bagged, and loaded out.
I drove Joel to the Dead Sea,
we circled Jerusalem,
in hindsight a preview
of Europe’s guarded future,
he sighted soldiers, boys and girls,
occasionally clumped,
common as olive trees,
drab, but uprooted too early,
guarding entry to and from
our concentration of gods;
also called, in Arabic,
al-Quds, that place,
the oldest city in the world,
within new walls, through new gates.
OMG my poo is purple!
Bowel cancer, googled – for certain!
Then I remember last night’s feast:
A brace of beetroot, I was p*ssed.
Dr Google swiped aside,
I can shower, now in peace,
but, by Christ, as I rinse,
I am passing purple wees!
Over Buxted, into folklore,
our sniggered-search for Nan Tuck,
the ghost of those woodlands,
a crone, flown from The Uck.
We set out as useless hunters,
on her kindling-carpeting,
the coppice of nervous laughter,
with hid fears half-echoing:
‘A dearth of any wildlife,
where Nan Tuck’s spirit waits’,
but we disturbed a leaping deer,
and were stabbed by beaked complaints.
No fearsome witch, no spells,
no cackle, no dark arts,
but stepping back onto tarmac,
we walked calmer down that path.
A true story
Her guarantee – they’ll die
under nuclear bombs:
One burst over Guildford,
God knows why so random,
Cameron Bear
hummed a light tune,
the last line:
“Hurrah, it’s now through:”
There in Number 10
Piglet he hugged,
(His wife’s inheritance,
[thinks] more than enough!)
“Blue shirts ironed!
I’ve booked flights today!
I’ll Leave Brexit-lump
to the bitch T. May!”
Glastonbury, Glastonbury,
take home your shit,
don’t leave it pitched
for others to shift.
800k
of camping poop,
bought cheap from Millets,
loose-pegged, now drooped.
You embraced the moment,
but dropped your tat,
forgotten ’bout now,
back in your cosy flat.
Next time don’t ‘festie’,
please avoid the hike,
stay at home, pitch up
to downloads you ‘liked’.
Ullage, the short difference,
to be re-recorded
in a skinny red book,
stood soberly-vertical,
behind a jar of slippery
pale-pickled eggs;
there’s many Bar Rules
about equal measures,
keeping this club in order,
but an occasional shadow
re-states the cellar’s height,
corner-of-the-eye stuff,
CCTV captured, she said,
orbs floated, inflated,
whilst, creaking, overhead,
actual timbers and joints groan,
a true, structured tale
of cat-slide reconstructions:
Here the beer tastes great,
priced right, served with grace,
as aged patrons, oft-glued
to the re-drawn-football,
never lose sight of old mates,
and a ghost is welcome,
as our own spirits ruminate.
[Enters stage left]
That click-clack of the
blind man’s walking stick,
and background natter
from the receptionists:
Noises-off.
Dove soap on my fingers,
I had washed for the Doctor,
who knows more about me
than I can ever recall,
he is checking my notes,
re-pronouncing the drugs,
which I tend to forget
[Prompt required].
I’m tongue-tarred by the coffee,
sipped before my drive here,
a route of life-threatening lanes,
and I try, try, to recall my script
for this ten minute soliloquy:
A repeat prescription –
to conquer the constant nausea,
my travel-sickness,
even when hardly moving,
my performance then given,
up from the gut.
[Prop – mop]
Everyone’s making the day’s news,
the shooting of blacks and blues,
filmed in high res –
streaming on Facebook,
the mess, shot by voyeurs,
the fake film crews:
Addicted to a screen held in a palm,
kids swipe quickly through the harm,
as we, their makers,
‘Like’ killings,
to watch back later,
whilst the grieving
flick through psalms.
Social media is here,
the fifth column,
set now at too high a volume,
a channel,
without a controller,
now, turned louder,
always filling the news vacuums.
I have never faced war,
no action under fire,
no orders to follow,
parade-free, slouched:
My grandfather declined,
being the religious one,
conscientiousness,
and, so, an objection.
His son ran off to sea,
sealed in a submarine;
Dad learnt how to kill,
and how not to die.
My other grandfather,
lost to Rommel in Africa:
Would I object to orders,
like those I imposed,
on my Action Man
– gripped hands?
I would not:
I owe my past a life.
“Let’s give our NHS the £350 million
the EU takes every week”,
wrote Matthew Elliott,
Chief Executive of Vote Leave,
in his, now removed, tweet.
I am also self-censored,
asked to stop sending
our Brexit-relatives
the bare-bone facts
whilst all the time,
before the vote,
their righteous voices
were quick to scream:
“You can’t persuade me
to change my mind!”
But I never did try:
I couldn’t disprove lies,
until now, and then,
it’s uncomfortable for them,
having broken the future
for our children.
I’ll be with you, whatever,
I’ll take your mass destruction,
Just tell me what to touch,
And I will push your (special) button
#Chilcot
I am that dithering insect,
trapped in the sash overlap;
running out of energy,
stopping,
then rising, briefly,
before another abeyance:
With no explanation
of the true properties of glass.
‘The perfect number is a positive integer that is equal to the sum of its proper divisors’
I did count out what I have done for you,
now you to count what you’ve done too.
My fag-packet relative comparisons,
reveal to me necessary adjustments:
Upsetting a child is a minus of your sum.
Putting down one’s own is long division.
Disparaging of men, is a simple add-on.
Not offering compassion is a multiplication.
And your friends complain of your equations,
dead-reckoning now with their own estimations,
they live quite well, with your bone-dry worth,
but only if their values are not reversed.
The gates needed painting,
rusted red – shameful shades,
the kick-chipped exit railings
begged for a uniform coat of paint.
Hardy souls took up the shout,
to buff Manor’s roughened fences,
a slog of slap and weeding,
and school was reinvented!
Some may notice our efforts,
and other parents may walk by,
but down there, at knee-height,
kids’ll see that we have shined.
So pick up a brush, or shovel,
get down to your local school,
tidy up the walls and railings –
it’s what life’s taught you to do!
He piled ‘powder high,
a daily malarkey,
cheered on by you,
the blood-baying gallery.
He ran from the plan,
belief of a remain,
trying to avoid
a Greek tragedy
again.
this slight evening
under a canopy
served fish dishes
and poured short stories
of brief failed marriages
and drunken adolescences
I look at these friends
my evening romances
For the children, teachers, TAs, and staff at Little Horsted School, East Sussex. Thank you for choosing @parkinsonsuk as your charity, your fundraising is fantastic, your poems are beautiful.
Put on your jump suit, it is quite a struggle,
meet your buddy, the man tugging your toggle.
Pull on your harness, adjusted too tight!
Walk outside, the sky looks quite HIGH!
Say ‘Goodbye’, shout out ‘It’s all fine!’, secretly hoping it’s not a lie,
Stride to the plane, like a pro, its roaring props don’t half blow!
Climb a short ladder, still afraid of heights,
Sit in the floor, swallow back your fright.
Get strapped to the man, who does this for thrills,
Take off, sat backwards, up above the field.
Polite conservation, as you fly through the sky,
talk ’bout anything, anything, but not about dying!
Watch the light go green, people fall out the plane,
Now its your turn to feel their pain.
Sit there, on the edge, just like God,
Turn your head to the left, and then drop…
For D
Hold your family, avoid letting it slip,
release other monkeys – to loosen their grip;
your double-edged sword is running too deep,
its arced-scything blade cutting beneath;
disengage from turmoil, wars are never won,
but battles should stop – especially your own.
“We will not go
quietly into the night
“We will not vanish
without a fight
“We’re going to live on
We’re going to survive
“Today, we question
their ignorant lies!
[ apologies to @rolandemmerich ]
Another charity shop has opened up,
its shelves already whiff with stock,
featuring Atwood’s ‘Alias Grace’,
and the lower-shelved words of Peter James;
his ranking fixed by alphabetic rules,
although Margaret does classier vowels.
Pressed shirts hang, stiff with starch,
whilst dead man shoes no longer dance;
A range of aged prints catch the eye,
Picasso hangs, yours to buy;
Retired golf clubs stand on guard,
their shine worn down, over par;
That jug you gave to your old friend Jane,
she’s re-donated, so you buy it again.
For Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson
Those jokes he makes:
no lattes today
no more croissants
useless Greeks
Under the right’s
now-pyrrhic victory
the one he wishes
they had lost
which has given him
everything desired
a stab at leadership
before the result.
Stop all the clicks, cut off the internet,
Prevent the right from barking on your feed,
Silence the news and wireless hum
Brexit announced, let the mourners come.
Let Osborne circle, tweeting overhead
Posting the message Cameron Is Dead,
Put hands round the necks of Remaining love
Let the riot police wear black cotton gloves.
Europe was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought Europe would last: I was wrong.
Union stars are not wanted now: delete our one;
Pack up the trade and dismantle the fun
Pour away the wine and mop up the blood
For nothing now can ever come to any good.
[Apologies to WH Auden]
A small moth
fell into my wine
pulling strokes
on the red tension
whilst leaving its powder
off useless wings
a peppered
surface
I lifted it
from the struggle
with a capped pen
now I write it
that insect
slow-dried
mildly drunk
in red ink
I wake again
a shrinking isle
sunken under
right-wing lies
‘Independence Day’
is not my choice
our country screwed
Farage’s farce
put the lights out
I’ll not return
what tossers joked
is now incurred.
That never-made aircraft,
I vowed to complete,
is left high up,
beyond your reach,
confusing instructions,
re-folded, unread –
a father-and-son thing,
We can build it, I said.
To be hung from the ceiling,
our flown fabrication,
in truth scaled-back,
like most obligations.
That occasional sighting
of high-visibility
stepping down
the High Street
two school classes
under guidance
across junctions
with due care
whilst us
the relative elderly
stood aside
from the excitement
which snapped
baby-toothed
with hunger
for learning.
I no longer sleep
in one place
not ’til late
on our half wed-bed
not in time
to take broadcast views
not late-enough
for the shipping news.
For my children
It is a stone’s throw
from the cliff edge,
tossed to a seascape,
ever washing away;
our chalk-bordered
vertical face,
atop Beachy Head –
their sign to be placed:
‘No Foreigners Allowed’
to be hammered
into the hardened Downs
by those already here –
the washed-up,
the hating, those pale,
English mongrels.
I flew over
our earth
on the same day
as Mr. Peake
but miles away
without
the melting touch
of gods
Taken by man-wings
to our fall –
from there
above
Expulsions –
but unashamed –
now suited
and strapped
to a sown-remedy –
for us – The Fallen –
open parachutes
our strung indemnity
E100619
‘One size only’
the hat display read
such an offer fills me
with consumerish-dread
because a man like me
full of life-long learning
has a problem wearing
one size without gurning
to squeeze these hats on
induces such pain
forcing the compression
of my burgeoning brain.
It was in the cloakroom,
aged five, where I cried,
not wanting to be there,
tearful in that mote-strung light.
We were surrounded by the shed skins
of other children, labelled,
those hook-hung anoraks,
pegged, emptied
into registered obedience,
unto the vast common hall,
beam-vaulted, a Victorian school,
I now know this hind-sighted as I am.
It was almost a prayer-free church,
with a never-trod office
stuck high in the wall, accessed,
it appeared, by God’s stairway.
And off that open space
high window-fitted doors
invited shy glances into classes,
but were beyond my height.
Did I hold Dad’s hand as he walked
with me through low furniture?
It made him an even bigger giant
in my small space.
We were shown past crate-piled milk,
bottled, to be expertly straw-poked,
unless as I later learned,
the birds got there first:
Sun-warmed, a gloop of cream on top,
the sure-indicator but never off,
that first lesson
in my infant education.
Taken down by hate
for ever-believing
our differences
makes us greater:
That point was
worth making.
Jo Cox, MP. 1974 – 2016
Without any roots
removed
a re-planting
before
studio leant
then a re-starting
Tipped to horizon
felled
onto saw-horses
worked at
after worked out
with other wood sources
His quiet-strike tools
a pencil to sketch
drawing up to
his expectation
that to be met
But sculpting re-forms
timelines in grain
re-route of art
this wood ordains
E280619
I leave here –
for my waiting kids –
Gorky –
Heaney –
and Mervyn Peake –
The Smiths –
The Who –
and Leonard Cohen
and my own words
for them to know
E301018
“We are all visitors
to this time,
this place..”
A moment
a note
which passes
without us noticing
only the world’s clever
ever get to observe
those ticked over
slips of The Knot
looped round our necks
the pattern-ties of life
they observe
our oblige..
“to learn, to grow, to love
and then.. home.”
So muggy
it was 1976
that my parents
drank tea
out in the garden
below my bedroom
whilst overhead
ridiculous bats
scattered
the insects
as talk
in their foreign mumble
of that language
of adults
never looking up
to see me
sill-propped
at my shared window
flying blind
gathering my fill.
Pride-f*cking Eng-land-red beer-pissed in Marseilles
you are stripping our country when shot-slung beer-hazed
Pissed off a dark-hatred your low-favoured fury
you’ll battle French police but grovel to their jury
Thugs f*ckers too fat to play too well
that’s why you’ll breathe hard in your holiday cell
there guards spit phlegm you’ll watch the saliva dry
hide your new fear
for here you will cry.
Can you offer
an explanation
of the thumping
of exhaustion
which puts me in
an old stuffed chair,
tired enough
to then sleep there?
Forty winks,
becomes two hours,
losing my waking,
ancient powers;
stiff in the neck,
with gum-raw mouth,
noticing the sun
has since moved round,
poking me:
But behind
the soft-pulled door,
under the tugged-blanket,
I’ll sleep some more.
There, that motorcade, black,
slow-routed, presidential,
and a roadside audience,
flower throwing, reverential;
their soft-bunches landed
upon Ali’s dark hearse,
as the last man of America
danced off their remorse.
A found photo
monochrome
of me and dad
I was balanced
on a holiday pony
he walked in-step
with the work-shy
beast
neither sure
of their burden.
Woken from a dream, a broken trip,
where I fell in love with a freckled girl,
marching ‘cross a desert, my tribe, youth-sick,
I was slow-kissing my freckled girl.
I know I fell hard, from another height,
vertigo-embraced, with her, freckled girl,
the fabulous dream, from last night,
and love was there, my freckled girl.
High on a creak-sway wooden tower aloft,
I lived briefly, with my freckled girl,
broken dream-time, I woke with the hour,
alarm-tripped, gone, that freckled girl.
Recounting, now three decades on,
with that fade of one freckled girl,
the past echoes in my dream-time songs;
on waking now, gone, my freckled girl.
The label, captured, a proof supplied,
reinforced by an old Fisher’s design:
Note: ‘for luggage and hamper labelling’,
now ‘Merit Parcel Tag’, e-bay’s selling.
The card, written, upper-case printed,
fixed, tied, with parcel-string, knotted:
Scout-known? A killick hitch, or a lark’s head?
Tied to a passing, before his child, it said.
A theory, The Serpentine,
no river of blood,
but an old favourite place
to meet one’s God.
Witness to the Court, on his death,
Folliot ‘moody’, precursor at best,
given by an unknown source:
‘Suicide’, verdict, in The Serpentine’s course.
Also left, Clotilde, bequeathed a few pound’s-swell
by ’48, his wife, resident, The Imperial Hotel,
at Queen’s Gate, London, SW7;
Clotilde died, aged 78, no cause given.
Her passing was recorded,
in Paddington, London.
Her aged-death registered
a long mile from her husband.
“FREDERICK JOHN WILLIAM FOLLIOT
FOUND DROWNED IN THE SERPENTINE
9TH DECEMBER 1945
REMEMBERED BY THE SON
HE NEVER KNEW”
In The Gloucester Citizen, December 1945, a verdict of ‘found drowned’ was returned in Westminster
on Frederick John William Folliot, a Doctor of Philosophy, aged 44, of 7 Holly Place, Hampstead NW3.
Muddy bog land wet through
but bent to it for days
her long trench a shallow excavation
of centuries of bed deaths
her quick-wristed sieve-shook remains
find recovered fragments of time
and each is labelled packed away
so many partial discoveries of
ancient runes a man or woman
unknown until fully examined:
The whole skeleton the hip width
the relative dimensions
of her brittle find lain out cleaned wiped
for the experts’ opinion
and she will hold her breath but continue to dig
until the sex of the dead is given.
The bearers will need access descending from his room
Dismantled – the stair-gate – a low barrier removed
she’s too small to know that her Daddy has left
accompanied by strangers – no last goodbye – not kissed –
he’s leaving behind a wide-open gap
one she will feel when grief finally grabs –
when she’s a mother lifting a latched gate –
for her child’s protection – then the opening re-made –
an ascent – unlocked – her memory of his space –
his goodbye no more missing – on a landing – they’ll embrace
E150119
Of her coastal walk, away from Easky, Eire,
she wrote:
was.. beautiful.. the highlight of my day..
but she wished for more time, to unpick those flowers,
rough-castings, bird-sown, almost ‘littering’
the coast-coarse grass, there, at the very edge;
she wrote:
the rocks, dressed in dried seaweed, have their own beauty too..
Not just bare barometers of future fair weather,
giving her rescuers a rare restful day.
“The WPC 2016 invites ALL members of the global Parkinson’s disease community to make a video for the WPC 2016 Video Competition about their experiences living with, treating, researching or caring for people with Parkinson’s. Video is a great way to capture and share the power of science, hope, humor, and inspiration. It’s also a great way to encourage discourse about a disease that is often misunderstood.”
My collaboration with David Sangster – we still have yet to meet!
Below the mussel-threaded outlet pipes,
with their spitting lips squeezed tight,
Wilf found a wine bottle,
beached in the low-tide sand;
on examination, without opening,
we concluded ‘a French red’,
with uncorking we sniffed it,
Wilf declared it: ‘A good vintage’,
but any booze, to any boy,
is the best he’s ever had.
By our eighth decade,
the correspondent wrote,
over twenty-percent
will succumb
to dementia:
I can see her,
fixed to forgetting,
and sat bed-side,
the frail ‘other half’ left,
shelled, bombed-out.
Will there be enough room,
for so many?
The twenty percent,
to be bed-locked,
to be bed-blocking?
As you avoid
hospice-bound falls,
on shortened stick-ticked walks,
or on a shuffle between rooms,
before the last shuffle begins,
will you be feeling lucky
to be, in your moments,
one of the eighty per cent,
still lucid, but alone,
in your eighties?
Her grit-slipped
roads there,
on a tyre-trolled
headland,
of wind-quick
wounded-dunes,
she briefly sat
on a surf-piled mound.
Red wine, theology,
and a bowl of crisps,
our take on Corinthian’s
Eucharist:
We analysed religion,
and the weight of faith,
passed the bloody wine,
and snacked on belief.
At which point does
‘His’ forgiveness begin,
after we alt-delete
our cache of sins?
What would you think,
once through the gates,
coming upon Hitler
in that forgiving place?
Mid-day, ‘The Laughing Fish’,
I sipped a pale ale aperitif,
a hopped starter to pub lunch,
best sup-slowed (law-aggrieved).
For the first hour we talked
of many long-accrued ‘things’:
Of Spits’, curved rear panels,
and loomed-wiring.
By the end of the second hour,
we pint-crept to short sips,
in a bloke-slowed collision,
of tall-tales needing grip.
On ‘The Fish’s’ steps we stood,
under the sun-burning Gods,
our agreement on ‘The Meaning’,
we agreed should be lost.
Don’t ask me how I am
ask my wife
don’t ask her how I am
ask my wife
ask her how she is
ask my wife.
It’s after midnight,
actually one o’clock,
she is asleep,
and I cannot turn off;
I endure the exhaustive,
late-hour crush,
for slept ones, I live for,
who count so much.
I am half-unique,
my diseased-feature;
I am still awake,
a nocturnal creature.
Tonight it’s no different,
my keyboard rattles,
no song in my head
and that also matters.
I was put to bed
in such pain
that our youngest
couldn’t sleep,
his fears compounded
by a dark-lit landing
one floor above,
so he sought assurance
and slept with us.
Mandawuy, given,
of Yolgnu people,
his skin name ‘Gudjuk’,
writing songs for his nation;
he was labelled, briefly,
‘Australian of the Year’,
his coronation late –
Gubba man’s idea.
Ill, but on stage,
with his band Yohtu Yindi,
his crown re-found,
in the grace of singing;
his voice, so loud,
again dream-gripping,
with a re-cast lifeline,
thrown by performing.
He said: “I am not dying”,
his beliefs in living,
he went, a sorry business,
to the Eternal Dreaming,
‘The Healing Song’ – incomplete
but he always sung the words
long-connected “to mother earth
and the universe”.
“Racism is a disease… We’re all equal..
I don’t care what their colour is,
or religion….as long as they’re human..
they’re my buddies.”
Mandawuy Yunupingu
17 September 1956 – 2 June 2013
Snogging, lips and faces,
a quick public grope,
outside Cinque Ports,
on the disabled ramp’s slope.
In the grip of booze-lips,
almost locked intercourse,
without talking, just tasting,
tongued pints, and some shots.
Do Not Resuscitate,
leave, alone, to die,
that sufferer suffering,
a clipboard-writ lie:
Wheeled, bed-blocked,
left in the corridor,
her last resting place
noted by the coroner.
All I have left
is a shot of my dad,
his black hair
combed hard
over that
balding spot,
one I’ve yet
to fully match:
His flat-feet lifted
onto his desk,
showing his soles
at their best,
whilst holding, delicately,
a magnifying glass,
examining nothing
for the photographer.
Quite unlike him,
it appears, easily-posed,
a black and white essay
for the local print-news.
My father, once a copper,
then ‘a fingerprint-taker’,
here framed, last sight of him,
my footprint-maker.
Nan, northern, small, from an earlier time,
she called the cinema ‘the flicks’,
with her Geordie spittle, forever an old lady,
behind bottle-bottom NHS glasses.
She sat on the edge on that elastic-sprung chair,
the three-piece suite, which we later inherited;
Nan sipped her occasional wee-dark whisky,
when visited, on a Saturday, by all her children,
but one – unknown – for her, always missing:
That secret she kept became her last honesty;
her out-of-wedlock mistake re-born,
with the final clearance of foreign nick-knacks,
mementos, of a life, without her first child;
he was long-removed from her early shaming,
steam-shipped, as an infant, to another world.
He left home before them, to that other place.
He died, the letter said, in an automotive crash.
I can still see Nan’s fag-suck lined mouth,
her skin, leathery, never once kissed
by her first child, his distance, his shipping,
beyond her long-sight, her failing vision.
A slow, stab, flourish, and lift
of piccalilli – turmeric’s yellow twist:
This pot of eastern reinvention,
a bastard child of the Empire.
My pre-punk Nan, war-widowed,
smoothed it across the corned beef –
her fatty, but still flaky, meat solution,
shipped in tins, each with a key.
We sat, spread on the yellow sofa,
with our plates balanced,
watching Nan attend to her fags –
back then they didn’t give you cancer;
that room a fug of Silk Cut and Players,
exhaled in stylish puffs, I watched
their twists in the mote-sparkled light
as my relatives prayer-hushed
for the football results.
When my uncle spoke,
exposing his stained teeth,
we knew no one had won.
Nan had to move
from her council house,
the one with the cinders
and ash path,
a piece of which
we always took,
briefly embedded,
flesh-framed in blood,
in one of our scrapes,
after a trip, or push,
up to her door;
the sibling way of boys
let loose from a car.
The menace of
the shadowed alley
took us, echoed,
to her patchy garden,
where her hind-sloped,
disagreeable Alsatian
marked out our pitch,
which was surrounded
by a notional fence,
being badly strung,
held thin in my fingers,
almost cheese-wire.
The washing line posts,
the only things planted,
stood a ball’s throw apart.
Nan moved from there
to her new flat,
without the dog –
it being ruled against.
No path, instead,
grip-rippled ramps,
up, then switchback,
up, then switchback,
past ‘No Ball Game’ signs,
around the stray dogs’
piss puddles;
here, no patchwork
of grass to absorb,
no forgiving cinders
to fall on,
only yards of child
breaking concrete.
I am going to free-fall,
through thinned-out clouds,
a given, this booking,
for my charity’s pounds.
I shall be that speck,
strapped to another,
you may see me drop,
as I hurtle, pre-splatter,
completely committed,
to a complete unknown,
like us, also falling,
our future unbeknown.
We know, all we know –
that the straps will work,
and the ‘chute will unfurl,
and our landing could hurt.
Another slumped sofa stretch
of cushion-pushed impressions,
indents, formed by your unloading:
a day lost, switched off, no movement,
except the brief wrist-lift of your iphone.
Stroking, seeing, other scrolled-worlds
of individual broadcasts, pictures,
hourly-worded eulogies, reporting from
their kitchen table, or visited bars
in other places, from moving friends.
Pitch-side, shivered, we parents all cheer,
in debt to our coaches, these great volunteers:
Now it is time to thank ‘The Special One’:
Gary.. here’s some highlights of what you have done:
He stands in all weathers, foul, fair, frost-nosed,
just like his demeanour, his language, it glows:
In Crowborough, he crowed: ‘Johnny get the ball!’
‘No Johnny! No Johnny! Johnny don’t fall!’
In Eastbourne he echoed: ‘Aidan! Good save!’
‘No Aidan, no Aidan, kick it that way!’
To Reegan and Reiss: ‘Stop hugging each other,’
‘Carry on like that, and I’ll tell your mothers!’
In Tonbridge his tone was more forgiving:
‘Ethan, shoot!.. Eeethan! Ethan keep going!’
But back in Maresfield, his grump was returning:
‘Harry.. Get up! Harryyy! Harry you ain’t ‘urtin!”
Substitutions to make, but who to choose?
‘Wilf! get off! You’re having a mood!’
Recently he’s been very kind to the new:
‘Harvey! Sam!… I’m not subbing you!’
Gary shouts to Robbie, his voice almost gone:
‘Robbieeee, Robbie! Run! Push-on!’
‘Bobby! Bo-bbyyy! Down the line!
‘Run fast with the balls, I used to with mine!’
Other blood-ties are passed more motivation:
‘Fred! Frrrrrred! That’s the wrong direction!’
As Connor dives right, Gary screams loud:
‘Hold the ball Connor! No punching allowed!’
Daniel, broken-wristed, he’s missed some fun,
Gary assures him, ‘You’re not the only one!’
Hayden kicks hard, hitting Gary in his goolies:
Later, that night, Heidi will check the family-jewellery.
So a thank you, Gary, for your fabulous coaching,
A unique approach – it means that we win most things,
The big thing the lads have learnt in all your time,
Is to keep passing: ‘Pass it, Pass it! Down the bloomin’ line!’
I found that place, I imagine it square,
your inch-by-inch patch, an emanation
a waft of pool chlorine,
always there;
here I returned with my buried face,
after a night on another sofa, my choice,
to avoid my beer talking to you
in your sleep;
I had woken, flying, with the late-brush
toothpaste taste – a chalky coating
over my reflux’s
mouthed complaint.
All my morning pains were blown
by my non-prescribed drug of choice,
a resin block, squared
inch by inch.
Your American Dream
worn thin through decades
your nightmare now risen
waking politics of rage
Your mark on your ballot
with a right-to-win hope
your future is threatened
by the electorate’s vote
Your democracy is rotten
rusted blood in her veins
your Statue of Liberty
is lit by hate’s flames
Your family – once docked –
fleeing foreign distrain
your salt-sprayed forebears –
would they want to remain?
Your Libertas should turn
to look back on her lands
Your Dream she won’t see
with her face in her hands
Following – Moon Landings 1.
Three thousand children,
some missing,
wishing to be schooled,
but, still waiting:
Cold-camped
in shallow-rooted fields,
no siblings;
those long lost,
arm-locked into fear.
No formal lessons for any of them,
no sit-scraped classmates
for these other faces:
Hunger, forever, their learning:
Juvenile lives marked, tested,
almost buried
in this foreign field.
Walking away, drawn,
our premier-ready
stadium:
Down again, sloped,
to the station
crossing.
Fans halted,
the Brighton train
isn’t running.
Let me try to explain
what my life dictates:
I’m driving
on the wrong side,
where I have to think,
again, no usual moves,
re-school my reactions,
to get by,
to cruise,
on new-normal functions;
my engine,
a metaphor,
without lubrication,
add lack of sat-nav,
and tail-backed impatience.
Let me maintain
this license, still free,
allowing me to drive,
wrong-sided,
slowed speed.
Here stood desk-leant
now feeling fine,
knocking back left over
swigs of wine:
Earlier Harvey’s
unsettles my gut,
a prelude to the morning’s
face-down chuck?
Unless I am lucky
and avoid a hewed-spew,
I’ll suck down my bile
and collapse in the loo
to attend to this toilet’s
spick-spanned wipe:
this is my prayer-mat
knelt
sick out of sight.
Education, a subject,
which we all mastered,
to different degrees
of (certified) achievements;
once left, rejected,
we turned our backs on it all,
but then comes parenting,
and we head back to school:
We have to re-engage
with the playground’s heaving,
sit on shrunken kids’ chairs
at parents’ evening;
look around walls,
search for our kid’s great art,
smile to ourselves,
because his stands apart;
but then we only see
what we want to believe,
and we never believe
what we really see:
Long hours etched
across his tired teacher’s face,
her love of teaching
dulled by SAT’s constraints:
Phonics and screening,
our child’s new ‘true’ voice,
he’s hushed in the corridor,
to avoid Ofsted’s annoyance.
‘Academisation’, is that a real word?
My spell-check refuses,
but then that will re-learn.
Our children, these vessels,
yearly-filled with fear,
failure’s no option
for our school kids this year;
this country is ruining
the health of it’s youth,
whilst our brilliant teachers
are told to improve.
I am wobbly, walking home, some late o’clock,
a trespassed short-cut over dampened grass
through this estate of town-planned care:
No roads, paths only to lamp-lit porches
as cars sit, misted, braked on verges.
The street light’s spill, a dry amber pool,
me, sense-struck by the waft of cuttings;
I am re-routed, indirect, by a solitary tree,
it’s stillness shocked, split, by a pigeon’s clap,
it disturbed by my standing, or my breathing?
The momentary effect, combined, then leading
to my old flight to Israel – picked fruits, sun-browned,
lawn-fronted homes, of sprinkler’s ticker-sound:
Same lives parked, people air-conditioned,
sat lamp-lit, the sole indication
of life struck by us, flighted, but never leaving.
Sayings, Hearings
You say the things you say,
to protect the ones you love,
but those hardened words
go beyond ‘just enough’.
The person being put down,
a low-targeted heart,
hits him ‘specially hard,
when already blown apart.
Breathe in, before you speak,
breathe out honest lies,
such simple Buddhist tricks
would simplify your life.
Gravel Voices
Jean’s gravel route,
no different to ours,
just an over-the-road
distance.
Trodden, it sounds like
a pre-school shaker,
the one the lucky kids
were given.
Step-fade-step,
across her driveway,
whilst our one,
a road width closer,
is louder recall
of kid-invaded,
beach steps,
when shingle slid
into the curled
picnic rug’s weave,
as our burnt parents
pebble-pinned it all.
Thinned hedgerows,
roadside, were alive,
brown-spooled,
with magnetic tape:
Up over Falmer,
every weekend,
another discarded
cassette –
rejected, or chewed,
seen, but not heard:
no download option,
or resurrection.
The public playlist,
discarded, a deletion,
of my-my-my
generation.
Making Hay
I headed down
the High Street,
sloped to the river,
baked, dust-blown,
everything diverted,
almost deserted;
the traders forgiven
for early closing.
My small-change
pet shop purchase,
fed an empty-rung,
receipt-rolled, till,
But,
an exchange of value:
We talked about skydiving,
John Noakes,
and column-climbing.
Those shaded contractors
blasted sand off pavements,
and I headed home,
only hay-weighted.
Laid
We are, both, naked, bedded,
but still winter duvet-pinned,
the throaty pigeons’ monologue,
our only laid-in disturbance.
Outside, the town is still,
no step, truck, rush,
beyond the open sash –
the first warm night this year.
Two ten pound leads engaged,
those roped-in counterweights,
taking that window’s wind-rattle,
now the immobile heat has arrived.
The kids, old enough to sleep into light,
one more hour, we say, without agreeing,
to anything else, even with us being
naked, pinned, and laid.
When rusted-nausea rises,
before you and the sun,
when you sweat-in-sleep,
and wake an old woman,
when stood your bones jar,
as if dropped-from-height,
when you carpet-shuffle,
dancing Ali’s last fight,
when bending to tug on socks,
and your arced back burns,
when squatted to the loo,
thighs-cry, grimaced gurns,
when pained to turn
to butt-wipe and follow-through,
that time, your ill-words, reversed..
it will then be about You.
All square, one-one,
but, still a loss
for The Seagulls:
An in-equal result
of stripe-painted
kids’ faces, briefly,
unable to pull a smile,
whilst we parents,
post-match gathered,
rolled, barbecue-fed,
with cold beer-wash,
struggled, in the sun,
with the enormity
of the task ahead:
Banoffee pie.
‘Four-hour’ Dave
puffed and laughed,
whilst Nicci smiled,
distant recall.
Mike R was forced
a second helping,
a second goal,
he’d preferred.
Such heat off
our rare-seen sun,
knocking Andy flat,
laid, but sober –
a low wall, on another,
as Charlotte gave
striped-Fred, returned,
an over-glasses warning,
his first yellow card
of the barbecue season.
Why walk such distances
with only the weather
measuring your steps
over The Downs
as breaths are taken
in exertion and sights?
Why walk without
a destination –
the next stride
on loosened chalk paths
side-stepping puddles?
Why walk from your fixed place
packed-up – back-turned
to be rained on –
blown –
to find loneliness –
never met by hearth
and hearty places?
Why walk such distances,
with only the weather
measuring your steps,
over The Downs,
as breaths are taken
in exertion and sights?
Why walk without
a destination,
but the next stride,
on loosened chalk paths,
side-stepping puddles.
Why walk from your fixed place,
packed-up, back-turned,
to be rained-on, blown,
to find loneliness,
to be met by hearth
and hearty places?
*Jane Volker’s blog:
http://wildatlanticwanderer.blogspot.co.uk
I stood, stock, in the road,
arms wide, an amateur Christ,
awaiting another crucifixion,
to be run-down, lifted,
cross-heist,
only to allow a mother,
flagged by three kids, a buggy,
to cross in that turned-in place,
to be safely, again,
path-unhurried:
Stared at, over-steered wheel scowls,
by you school-drop drivers (the worst);
can you please deposit your kids
on a far (distant)
verge.
No wonder your grunty, flaccid, son
demands his own car “for sixth form”:
Your poor lad enjoys
uber-time – Mum’s taxi, always,
the driven norm.
Waved off sounds,
our wireless re-casts,
‘Uckfield FM’,
over transmission masts,
from studios atop
Bird-in-Eye’s view,
back to this town,
washed by the Uck’s abuse;
whilst the voices, radio,
and on-line, exude
their playlist of music,
a light interlude,
of features, information,
a local voice,
this station tuned-in,
to Hobson’s Choice;
requests, interviews,
and warm chat too,
Uckfield FM –
who needs Radio 2?
Thank you Heidi Greenwood for arranging my morning of fun!
I enjoyed a fabulous time at Little Horsted Primary School [http://www.thelifecloud.net/schools/LittleHorstedCESchool/ ], first with an assembly, in which we discussed Parkinson’s. I then read the school the poem I had written in advance for them –https://mikebellwritesblog.wordpress.com/2016/04/18/sweet-truth/ – and then we went into a poetry workshop for Year 5/6.
What a brilliant group of kids – we came up with the idea of writing a poem about ‘Caring’ – the subject being one of my PD irks – who cares for the carers?
The class self-elected subjects of ‘care’ ranging from a Granny (with a fictional history of wrong-doing), to soccer, elephants, and everything in between!
In the beautiful weather we completed edits outside, with them speaking out the poems, to iron out final glitches. Then they read them out to the class.
My parting gift from them was very touching [I love chocolate].
I look forward to returning to judge the competition & showing them a film of me jumping out of an aircraft & screaming – please sponsor me here –https://www.justgiving.com/fundraising/Mike-Bell9?
Thank you Little Horsted for embracing Parkinson’s UK – from a gratefulYoung Parkinson’s Network member.
Capture the clock –
we’ve this time to lose –
speak with the old –
mute now the news
Listen to aged-voices –
life-burr – soft-breaths –
rhetoric worn-down –
senior voice attests
Summon hoar-views –
lifted in grey –
embrace explanation
off soft-mumbled rage
Sit in the chair
in which they tremble –
embrace their time –
do not pass them
dissembled
Look in rheum eyes –
read drowned-years passed –
absorb their life
because this is your last
E210119
The dart, sit,
then flit, of a
kingfisher’s reign,
David sat focused,
fixed by royal flame:
No luxury of procrastination,
this artist,
nature-trapped,
within his
condition.
The tremor of nature’s
tree-shaken
empire,
sits in his soul
feeding
his fire.
Programme:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03szdr7
We are all passing, some of us speeding:
Last breath of Sussex, that garlic scent-seeping
‘cross my car-flight, off lamp-dipped byway;
roofless in the dark, dash-muddied spray;
the fear of deer-leaps suspends my ill-state,
I’ll drive too fast, to avoid pain’s complaint.
Drop down, under Barcombe, about ten fifteen,
over The Ouse, banked, by garlic’s foul teem.
My late return home, from a house in Hove:
We carved plans in ply, with Wilfred Owen.
Last year’s beauty queen,
Chelsea, her name,
placed, atop the crown –
Ranieri’s tinkered game:
Hazard, a problem,
sunk Spur’s, enraged,
a trip-up, and gouge;
The Bridge, cruel-staged:
To lift the Premiership,
whilst drunk at Vardey’s,
the ultimate result –
for poorer-paid parties.
He sits
Photogenic
Ready to f*ck
Your wife
Your children
Aged eighteen-plus
Head-propped
Held-loft
Off Rankin’s voice
Instructed
To meet
Frame-avoid
My news feed:
Al Jazeera’s
village pump,
widened beyond
our Murdoch
news sump.
Oil-changed,
refuelled,
greater fears:
We live with
black-gold, and
gas-stung tears.
I have reached
That bagged-age
Standing still
Staring at pavements
A time-fixed thrill of
Watching traffic
Chatting to people
In shops and from pubs
Finding my peace
Stood on slabs
Wondering about
Wondering
It is a
Wonderful life
Wonderful
Still standing.
Hands up please,
Who slashed
Ms Caulfield’s tyre?
Which of you Lewesians,
Took out your ire?
On her, your ‘hard-working’,
Tory MP:
Who only this week
Voted to keep,
Migrant children
Out her hair –
One cannot trust kids,
Anywhere:
Next thing you know
We’ll be over-run,
Legislated from
Having a slash for fun.
Our wood burner smells
like a girl I loved,
once she took me,
with a wrist-measured-tug.
I live with no big claim,
no assumption’s shout,
my size just enough,
nowt to flash about.
For Jo & Glen
Shades,
I need,
This short-lifted
Mission:
Escape from
Winter’s
Cold derision:
Flickered
Flight-lights,
In darkened sky,
Remind me that,
We’re not designed
To fly.
Glen and Jo,
Perfection,
As all those coupled,
Ensure my landing
Is flat,
Untroubled.
Taxi, terminal-ease,
Through Ashdown Forest,
We return to Uckfield,
Sun-loved,
Refurnished.
Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/
Dumped, field-cast,
Cold-dead fridges:
Rust-touched monoliths
Of consumption’s riches:
Tossed, blown,
Left out crap,
Thrown off a truck,
A laughable act:
Funny to the fool
Who fills the downs,
On fly-tipped, weekly,
Scrap metal rounds.
I don’t think I’ve penned
Verse,
’bout Jeremy Hunt,
Possibly,
It would be,
Couplet-affront:
Offending word-use,
Rhyming a poem,
I can hear the rune,
‘Hunt’, then going..
The distaste such doggerel
Could inflict on your ears:
Perhaps our doctors
Can suture my fears:
Stitch the Hunt tight,
Allow nothing to pass,
Then he will truly
Talk out of his arse.
I can stand all night
At my hip-high desk
Tapping this keyboard
Facebook requests
Whilst my family slumbers
Under duvet-sleep
And I will wonder
Why sleep is a treat
This disease removes
My covered requests
To bury my dreams
In the double-bed rest
Settled, sleep, chase
If I could, I would,
Forgive me my wife
For sleep removed.
Music:
Saturday-shopping
I dreaded when young,
Dragged, another lashing
Off mother’s tongue!
Then into my teens,
And shopping alone,
Woking by bus,
Woolies, Smiths,
(slow route home).
I always bought enough
Note books to be,
Responsible for one
Rain forest tree.
Back then, in web-less
Nineteen eighty-five,
The Amazon, green,
Was hugely alive:
But ‘Amazon’ now
Is a rack of shelves:
Redundancy due
for Santa’s elves.
A Black Friday,
discounted, marathon;
Queue up now,
Cheaper trees @Amazon.
Elasticated trews
are de-rigueur:
Now you’re middle-aged,
re-configured.
Beige is there
on your fashion radar,
In socks and sandals
you will go far.
For Mariette Robijn, and her family.
Mariette stated:
‘No one wills
A favourable reception
Of any illness,’
instilled
By Oma, her Grandmother,
Over a century, under God,
Recalling, her husband,
Leader,
Landelijke Knokploeg.
Hilbert ‘Arie’ van Dijk,
Executed, too cruel,
Helped leading the few,
Their Resistance,
hope-fuelled.
Her youngest son died,
A few years later:
Her great-grandchild died,
Lost,
in grief’s labour.
Despite these tragedies
Oma carried, ill-eased,
She’d always say:
“Be brave.
You have to agree,
To embark upon the journey..
with an unknown destination.
Without knowing why, or .. how..”
Consent:
no expectation.
I was sink-bent,
slapped, cold-splash,
To invert my wet,
tear-fear:
Roll-scars warmed,
by a damp flannel,
Then, wiped sight
back – familiar.
I wish for
re-invention:
This request,
to shift pain’s stains,
My loss,
my disconnections,
Repealed in
hoped-for mind games.
Boris Johnson*,
That foul-mouthed twerp,
Mop-haired,
Stuck up,
A right-wing jerk.
(*Other politicians are available)
We were gathered,
invited,
To Stonecutter Court,
Each labelled,
breast-badged,
Unique in comport.
The presentations,
Discussions,
Learned discourse;
Word-routes,
mindful of our
Stem-buried thoughts.
Us, enquiring people,
Sat stiff,
endured,
As London’s pile-drivers
Hammered next door.
Our driven excitement,
Talk, some of a cure:
Futures,
fixable?
Onwards,
Assured.
Saint George [born high – near Syria]
now contused – laid low from media –
long-stuck in Calais [no marching on]
having traded his armour & Ascalon
No visa or passport [or formal hope]
Geo. put his faith in another ‘s boat –
draped in charity [wears Red Cross] –
he eyed a UK – but his heart did not –
for over 700 years we carried him far
[flag of little England & tattoed scars]
We revered that saviour of virgin life
but now eschew his foreign field cries
[Geo. can’t last another winter’s maul
& wake – to breathe-in Europe’s thaw –
he hears death-rattles under his tent –
he’ll not survive – count him as dead]
I struggle with our
Newspapered-hate,
Word-wounded
Reaction inside:
Bile-rise, a gut-rush,
Overweight,
Then, in quiet times,
Modified.
We strafe children,
Keeping no score;
Youth sacrificed
By both sides.
Bloodied-hands
Piling more souls,
Under morte-mercy,
Of a higher command.
Here masked men
Plot death on our streets,
And europe mouths
A mute caveat;
A former leader’s
Guilt we seek,
But Blair bombs
Chilcott, flat.
I do not suggest
We never learn,
As facts pile,
Unabridged:
But, do remember:
oil will burn,
Thus, we’re obliged
To piss on the rich.
Four hundred (plus) years,
Shakespeare’s sooo old,
His poesy and plays
Leave me nipped, cold:
His texts are buried
In England’s lost-past,
Along with Chaucer,
He’s a pain in the parse.
Kids shouldn’t have to
Read dead-dotards’ words,
Give them this English,
Our language, now heard:
‘Thee, thou, thine’,
Those impersonal pronouns,
Return to the Greeks,
Word permits turned down.
Embrace our language,
This happening-voice,
File the bard’s folio,
Under ‘Mild Annoyance’.
When I die,
I don’t want to be famous,
Too many people,
may then bestow greatness,
On my stiff corpse,
laid, coffin-graced;
Too late for me,
finally-erased:
I don’t want my glasses
perched on a wreath,
Nor outward pouring
of hysterical grief:
I would rather die loved,
by people I knew,
Than adored-dead
In an on-line spew:
Give me a tweet,
Like me, and friend me,
I would rather live now,
Knowing my enemies;
Don’t leave it too late,
When I’m boxed, without choice,
Love me today,
Whilst I still have my voice.
Long-strided
pylons ahead
loose loops
of cables
for tug-of-war
games
or sewing
of the sky
a long thread
over furrow
folded fields
also
line-tamed.
One piece of advice,
to the younger writer,
Maybe two more,
‘cos I’m a rhyme-fighter:
Poetry is easy,
but it doesn’t make verse,
Doggerel should DIG up
all those IN-BETWEEN words:
It’s about THE subject,
Examining THE thought;
And here’s an example
Of a verse with no rhyme.
Another flight home,
wait-slumped,
in the Alicante lounge;
my temporary carers,
beyond the call,
pool-restored my soul.
Us, there, air-side,
grazing on rolls:
hard-cheese,
salty-tortillas,
the same arrayed-dish
from thirty years earlier:
Back then, alone,
on the run,
a station,
somewhere in Spain,
I was rattled south
on the RENFE train:
Connection-making,
taking lunch,
a flight-stopped
guard’s whistle;
now, lounging,
eternally,
my time-travelled.
Pollen-flared
a bee
settled
preened
out of the wind
me and this gatherer
sharing shelter
from the Mediterranean’s
onshore blow
neither wanting to fly
anywhere
the lumpen oranges
I had helped remove
thud-soft
a few secure-gripped
within the stick-scrape
of the tree
other bee-labours
now tabled fruit
our moment passes
as he lifts away
break taken.
What we can do
while we still can
this poetry
these words
my
uncorked decant
stand up to this
diagnose no more
push back the illness
explore love
and enjoy.
Written for Little Horsted CE School, East Sussex – poetry workshop
Just like Roald Dahl,
The best writer of stories,
I surrender too easily,
To sweet-tooth fairies:
Chocolate, oh chocolate!
Terrifying stuff,
The scary thing is..
I can’t get enough!
I don’t care ’bout wrappers,
Brand names or offers,
The chocolate inside,
is all that matters!
Chocolate, oh chocolate!
Causes tooth rot,
The truth is, the truth is,
I don’t give a jot!
Easter eggs on sale,
The day after Xmas,
Begging to be bought,
And eaten to excess!
Chocolate, oh chocolate,
A mouthful of treats,
You are so bad for me,
But still taste so sweet!
That paper-boy
dawn chorus
in half-light
played
shrill here,
again garden-deep
placing me back
on my wobbled bike
sack-shouldered
weighted rub-cuts
of news
which I delivered
in every weather
others’ opinions
as the street lamps
burnt out on time
I diligently posted
rolled folded or flat
subject to slot
delivered without fail
by my Fleet-inked fingers.
I donate to Wikipedia
Five quid every month,
For that small remittance
I am no more a dunce.
Table-trapped,
In the heaving,
Squeak-stepped,
Sports hall
(A premature fest,
Of seasonal fayre),
He was creating,
With hand-sure tool,
Under engraving eye,
Time-etched deep,
In long-crafted care.
In these shipped
Next-day,
Of rough imports,
(Lined up,
Trophy-thick,
In our matching homes),
We wonder,
With heavy,
Catalogued-thoughts,
If we are better
Than those,
The Jones.
That walk-in music,
‘The Boys of Summer’,
Amplified high, over
Stacked bullets and bins,
As hundreds of punters,
Surged a screamed age,
Ran to the egos (still,
Couch-slumped off-stage).
I stared at that girl,
The Waterboys’ tech,
Then failed to sing
My simple motet:
Backstage, a caravan,
A view of the tour,
Headline act echo, her
un-asked encore.
Later, thin clouds,
Perched high in the roof,
Cooled in the stadium,
Rain-dropped reprove:
The water girl gone,
Just me, salt-dripped;
The get-out, worked hard,
I left Lyon, ungripped.
I woke up hard,
From an erotic dream,
Victoria, a bar, sipped
Beer and stood;
That communicated,
Repeated,
Brush of stranger,
Half touch, hip rub.
She was chatting about
Keith Vaz being ejected,
From this place:
‘His type,’ she said.
And I was attracted
To that type of woman,
Back then: Older,
Late thirties, open.
That was the eighties,
When my physique
Was more tuned
Than my mind:
I had ordered a lager,
That dated my dream,
Being a bitter man
These days.
Single and on the pick-up;
She had a cruelty,
This stranger,
Attractive back then.
A concrete rippled ramp,
Past-scarred by drain movers,
Short vein of fix-tarmac,
Rolled ‘tween cast covers.
A skinny, resolute,
Clump of grass,
Too rough for the lawns,
Fights up through the path.
An inert alarm box,
Above bolted doors:
Two horses cast shadows,
Stick Man, of course.
Montpelier, empty,
That wind-robbed place,
As if the cruel mistral
Had fully-erased,
With maddening blasts,
All warmth-known,
And me, broke, bagged,
Foreign cash gone.
Before me, corralled,
Tour buses and trucks,
My old ramped-haunts,
Flightcases and trunks:
Catering, kick-starting,
The ragged crew;
I was recognised by
Old roadies I knew.
I left that hotel,
Paid borrowed Francs,
And returned to the venue,
To join the tour’s ranks.
**
Thirty years gone,
My youthful long shame
When travelled alone,
A guilt-hitch game.
I had robbed my account,
Spent hole-supplied notes.
Ferried-thrown to Spain,
Puked dry on that boat.
From Santander, rain,
Me a hitch-soak rat,
My hand in the air,
Lifted off the kerb’s trap.
The romantic notion,
Spanish storm’s rheum,
A clearing focus,
In Montpelier, blown .
A failed sojourn,
Stupid-Kerouac spun,
A toured lift north,
Teenage kick done.
You are now storm-struck,
no ‘met warning’,
there, blow-stranded,
all alone, tide-washed,
marooned:
An unfortunate Crusoe,
shaking with the cold,
it would appear,
following footsteps
in the soft sand,
often tipping away
to one side;
it could be another
drunken stumble,
except this isn’t
a rum island.
You are disconnected
from your world.
Your existence needs
careful planning,
ready the beacons:
Help will be here.
I have never enjoyed cold tea –
you know that slop-dreg last inch
My dad drank gallons of it
with swigged slurps – his sound
By God, he could drink it hot!
Gulped down – necked red-raw
Followed by a Silk Cut drag
until the throat cancer stuck
He puffed over nine miles of fags
and how many gallons of tea?
With a cooled inch left, I stop –
Everything gives you cancer
I have never enjoyed cold tea.
You know that slop-dreg inch,
lukewarm, tipped into the sink.
My dad drank gallons of it,
with swigged slurp – his sound.
By God, he could drink it hot!
Gulped down, necked red-raw,
followed by a Silk Cut drag,
until the throat cancer stuck,
and he coughed it all up.
Was it the bloody cigarettes?
He puffed over nine miles of fags,
And how many gallons of tea?
With a cooled inch left, I recall
the words from Frank Zappa:
‘Everything gives you cancer’
Answer me – Charles – take as long as you need –
do you know when you will accede?
Prince of Wales – dear chap – you may be disposed –
so instead get crowned on reality shows
Come Dancing – Chas – you would win in a puff –
plus Grand Designs – possibly not Bake Off
We’d all vote for you – ever so ‘umble –
You’ll be crowned King – of The TV Jungle
Our closest have lives to live and enjoy –
delayed redundancy in our sick bed-employ
Carers – co-sufferers – careers not chosen –
tend the disconnected – the mumblers and frozen
Altered – shameful – re-written contracts –
No wedded-bliss when we ill cannot act
Wives – husbands – family – relatives old –
airbrushed awareness as age takes hold
My prop – my chained-helper – engaged far too cheap –
Her offset disbursement being too tired to weep
When care is passed on – hear my atheist-prayer –
I ask her forgiveness for our marriage – unfair
E220119
E090819
Our closest have lives,
To live and enjoy,
Delayed redundancy
In our sick bed-employ:
Carers, co-sufferers,
Career un-chosen,
Tend disconnected,
The mumblers, and frozen.
Altered, unfair,
Re-written contracts;
No wedded-bliss,
When ill cannot act.
Wives, husbands,
Family, relatives old,
Air-brushed awareness,
As PD takes hold:
My prop, my chained-helper,
Engaged, far too cheap:
Her offset disbursement,
Too tired to weep.
When care is passed on,
With my atheist-prayer,
I ask her forgiveness,
For our contract, unfair.
Relegated, reduced,
to a half-size man;
me, wrenched-doubled,
over the pan:
I can still function,
albeit at some cost,
but the future is broken,
full stature now lost:
Ill-company offered,
now DX-altered,
by illness, unseen,
dopamine-slaughtered:
True diagnosis,
off thin slice of brain,
our minds then admired,
pathology’s gain.
I should get up
and find function,
but the town
hasn’t moved,
not since beer-dippers
passed at eleven.
No commute traffic,
to shine bezier curves,
across this dark room.
An autobiography,
pre-browser histories,
as I fell back into
that re-rattled sleep.
One night, unfolded,
sofa bed stiff;
lost lives here,
inside this room.
That single, repetitive,
Plague-bell stops,
Dream-hole losses,
God to the shops:
Christians, Muslims,
The Jews, and all,
Claim fabulous bargains,
For any lost fool:
Places of worship,
Sampled anoints,
Pick up a deal,
Worth double points:
Fill up your GodCard,
With every prayer,
Heaven’s Megastore
Awaits you there.
It was a path
from another time,
Your close enquiry
of an ant-marched line.
Crossing the equally
engineered rails,
We both avoided
the steel-trip trail.
You, eldest boy,
chatting alongside,
On the rough-route,
where Ruti had cried:
Your uncle asleep,
in this blown-thin soil,
Alone in this god-land:
an empty black voile.
Unlocked the gate,
metallic complaints,
I showed you the place
where your uncle waits,
your talk is erased
by the hand-carved curves,
Our name cries out,
among foreign words.
This day is unsteady,
No earthquake,
Just tremor,
As I am walked
By the pull-pull-dog,
Across the park;
Becoming more
Of a drag,
Heel-scuffed tarmac,
Her strangled,
Collared-coughs,
Announce our parade:
Coming to town:
The Flat-Footed
Quivering Clown
(And his comedy dog).
A smile from a child,
Delighted by the sight,
Of such a performance:
The dog bows,
As I am walked.
This is no country,
For the poor and cold,
No longer a place
For the young, or old.
No place either,
For different views,
No newspaper space,
Just imbalanced news.
The long-term forecast,
Graphics on-screen,
Low over Britain,
Sweep of right-blown freeze:
Extreme off America,
Frosting our bias,
The return of the Pilgrims,
Re-routed on wireless.
Accents trailed West,
We say we are ‘liked’,
‘Literally’ rained-down,
From You Tube’s fat pipe.
Our children consume,
Screen-feeding frenzy,
Imagery of bigotry,
Old-age the young’s enemy.
Britain lays broken,
Scots cast afloat;
The forecast is grim,
However we vote.
Damascus Gate, E. Jerusalem,
Security heightened, raised sights again
Age-ranged soldiers, armed in fear
A bullet-proof vest, no comfort here
Suspicion and distrust is the viral knife
It cuts right through each citizen’s life
All guns are raised, in protection of peace
Each bullet loaded for triggered release
High-tensioned snipers, safety catch off
Troops fenced-in from knife-lunged wrath.
We have learnt well, to hide our fears
Explains the Arab, as soldiers appear
Hands-high, shirt-pulled, embarrassed to state
This, our new toll, to use Damascus Gate
I used to look
Into mirrors,
Shopped reflections
On the sly,
Stare deep
Into loving kisses,
To catch myself
In her eyes.
But retina-love,
Now upgraded,
The selfie reflects
My being:
Long mirror-looks
Are over,
Screen-swiping,
The new seeing.
Sleeping downstairs
Ain’t fun,
You don’t fall asleep
With anyone;
Just the tick of the clock,
On the mantelpiece,
And the sigh of the dog,
As she dreams of sheep.
Reflux has become
Our threesome joy:
Upright to trick
My cough’s annoy:
My hack is enough
To disturb the peace,
Of rest-less wife’s
Croup-broken sleep.
7:16
Do not mix lager with bitter, for sure.
The eldest, clumping, above, top floor.
Grey sky-sheeted, curtains tug-pulled.
Fifty-two today, my annual award.
7:20
We need another, stiffer loo brush.
The fixed drain works – sucking gush.
That shampoo I prefer is running low.
Reflux-rising, this hack won’t go.
7:24
I must do laundry, perhaps this morning.
Neck hairs so need tweezered-pulling.
That switch does not turn off that light.
Did I lock-up the shed last night?
7:28
Cooled smell of weed’ll be hard to explain.
No screaming emails to add to my strain.
I’ve still to mount those solar floods.
Should’ve planted the daffs in tubs.
7:32
Driveway gates hang, more to my liking.
Today is bin day, it must be recycling.
Wobbling paper boy, on his mobile phone.
I’ve no wireless this far from home.
7:36
School kids missing, holiday times.
Listen, foul child, I can hear her cries.
Litter count so low on the twitten today.
Darkened leaves piled, rank in decay.
7:40
The cafe’s shut, too early it seems.
A slow recall-woken, disturbing dream.
My magnetic gym card, hard-wiped to work.
Absolute Radio, not the Ginger Twerp.
7:44
These trainers need time, more wearing in.
I sat-cycled, pedalling, much less pain.
This metal flask keeps tap water cool.
Treadmill’s quick stripes margin my fall.
7:48
Kate Bush singing, unrequited, heart-bled.
I sweat harder with hangovered-head.
Cycling again, easier when writing.
Extension repetition, aged muscles-fighting.
7:52
Running out of time for breakfast in town.
‘Bye at the exit, desk-dropped frowns.
Playing field to mow, lugged tractors await.
The bypass hums louder way before eight.
7:56
Another tipped fence, short-battered storm.
A shed roof bared, felt roughly torn.
Bird song increases along Linden Chase.
I wonder who’ll buy the old dear’s place?
8:00
Quick pocket-pat, I’ve got everything.
My stride shortened, still heel-scuffing.
Slid gravel re-routes me to a distant beach.
Fifteen Harvey’s bottles, deposit on each.
8:04
Soffits need painting, I cannot do heights.
The back door, and the frame, do not sit right.
This home, slumped silence, weight-swung times.
Eight minutes late, for Big Ben chimes.
With this condition
One is expected to fall;
I have, before,
But a stupid, pre-dx, trip,
Over string in your stable:
And that time,
You my eldest girl,
Held my arm to lift me.
Now, delivering you to your digs,
You warned me of many steps,
And refused my offer of a lift.
I am so happy with this deal.
Check out @MikeBellWrites and his growing body of work.
Sucked air to stillness,
Life hoovered-rooms,
Settled-down hallways,
A vacuum in gloom:
In repose, our stifled,
Slumped reaction,
We partitioned ourselves,
Finding distraction,
With screens and sleep,
Mine the latter,
Offsetting the thoughts,
‘Bout the missing,
which matters.
I have a problem,
with Parkinson’s,
I can’t drive my Landie,
for more than 30 mins:
My fourth incarnation,
Of this venerable beast,
But now I get pain,
Shot through my knees.
The Seven is easy,
Laid out in its coffin,
Steering that baby,
Pain is forgotten.
Italian immigrants
made the FA Cup,
Up in Yorkshire,
Association supped.
God Save the Queen,
National treasured ‘ware,
The FA Cup?
“Ain’t from round-bouts ‘ere.”
No, I am not drunk,
my stagger belies:
Surely intoxicated,
in others’ cast eyes?
My stood disconnection,
No visible excuse,
So I change direction,
To avoid abuse.
Sober as a judge,
But you, jury-dozen,
Could find me guilty,
Of mild subsumption.
Armstrong – out there
Liberty’s own spaceman
A descendent of Scots –
her home-bred alien
I stared – TV-squared
at the moon-struck man –
stepped into gloaming
on that alien land
I landed in New York-
spaced-out – years after
to build my designs for
city-folks’ laughter
But all I could hear
was The Statue’s greeting –
her blind stare to the east
hiding her weeping
See Moon Landings 2.
I have an investment,
Over forty-ish years,
Remitted regularly,
But now in arrears:
My faith in its future,
Is running short,
Reducing returns,
In its latest report:
Belief in its trustees,
Is gnawed by the truth,
There’ll be no dividend;
Paid benefit, traduced.
Easter’s falsehood,
Christianity cracked,
High-fat sentiments,
Tooth-rot wrapped.
A bitter celebration,
for prayer-soured-souls,
Not yet recovered
From Yuletide songs.
A slow death to be
Celebrated, good grief:
Today, in other places,
ISIS-crucified, retrieved.
Hot cross buns buttered,
Easter eggs laid,
We live with greedy Gods:
Slow-death, the accolade.
The farmers gathered-in
their ploughed-up pleads
on the basis that
it is you who they feed
The UK defies
now sows “neonics”
Hurrah for the UK
Up the Great Brits
We have the seed power
to put bees to their death
Send in the pesticides
until no queens are left
Now privatise lost pastures
Builders plough the fields
Profit for Landowners
In for the kill
When Britain has poisoned
all Apis mellifera
not one buzz
in your local area
Embrace with love
the immigrant bees
We’ll need their hard work
to sow last hopes of reprise
Trump’s fingers
are VERY short,
that’s why he always
will resort,
to valuing his name,
beyond compare,
and trump, loudly
It’s all ’bout my hair!
You can judge a man
by the width of his smirk,
revealing, briefly,
his mind at work:
Front bench foolery
can be explained,
whilst the country’s soul
is slowly drained:
Hang out with Gove,
and his ‘Game of Thrones’,
there’s much to watch
on mobile phones:
Posh-born, benching,
for many years more,
smiling, sucking,
on us, the new poor.
We meekly retreated
From the Picture House trip,
Me, in distraction,
Rewound, tightened grip.
First, I slipped-out,
From the retrospective;
I hid in the Gent’s,
Stiff limbs to forgive.
Fatigue staining my heart,
When I hide this broke,
Intermission then beamed.
We left, for my health.
Hand-held,
‘Cross the High Street,
You guided, then a pull;
Early journey home,
Is a feature of all.
Returning, slow-trod, loose-stone fooled,
The Plan: Cut through Manor Park,
A crow-fly route home, after drop and run,
Of the youngest, at the club, for sleep-over.
Ale-oiled, but now slower than before,
Less erect than the white picket fences
(Stolen designs from steam-train times),
And on to the north side of the estate:
Sodium-lit, briefly, crossing Browns Lane.
Leylandii shivered, even fully-dressed,
A cold wind, this high: I assume sight of Brighton’s
False sunset (light-pollution of the cloud line).
No lamps again, blind man’s sticked-trip,
Over drop-plotted, crippled, kerb stones,
Negotiating shadow-buried service slabs,
Momentarily lamp-lit by the Tesco’s van.
Then realising that she did not know:
My ‘dead’ phone, no signalling safety.
Our friends’ homes dark, ‘Do Not Disturb’, etched,
But the third (brightly) welcomed me in:
Heidi called you: ‘Mike’s on his way’;
Pre-mobile, our movements were plotted,
By land line, reverse-charges, red boxes,
Or a known-home: ‘Sixpence in the pot, ta’
Now: Stepped-into, sat in sofa warmth,
Manor Park vouched for me, as safe:
‘Returning via the grocery store,’ assured:
I declined the offer of a lift,
Needing to keep to my odyssey:
Not quite Three Peaks, but my own one hill.
Lime trees, Manor’s old branch-line, routed me home,
Under their wind-whipped original function.
“I am America. I am the part you won’t recognize. But get
used to me. Black, confident, cocky; my name, not yours;
my religion, not yours; my goals, my own; get used to me.” MA.
Muhammad Ali,
one Muslim, one love:
American, Islam;
hand in glove.
Beautiful pugilist,
Stung like a bee,
jabbed by illness,
to slow shuffled-freeze:
Inside he flies
above canvas floors:
Cool sweat of boxing,
slugged in his pores.
IDS ‘fell’
On his blunt sword;
The first exit:
Brexit applauds:
You cannot vote
Austerity,
Then claim to
Work effectively.
Mr. Ed Reardon,
Please don’t retire,
Your lifestyle is one
To which I aspire.
Your harrumphing is music,
To my hair-filled ears,
Your asinine observations
Underline my own fears.
If you need a room,
To rest your head,
A place to lay
Elgar’s bed,
Drop me a line,
On the evil net,
And I’ll fix up a space,
For ‘reasonable’ rent.
Ed Reardon’s Week – Series 10, The New Thirty, Episode 6 – @bbcradio4 http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b05y0m0p
I am now allowed to:
Leave dinner parties early,
Sleep mid-afternoon,
Stop mid-morning,
And not rush;
Along with
Assisted Boarding,
Oh, and unsure looks:
Whispered kid-queries:
‘Why does he shake?’
Dead-weight, rouche mourning drapes,
long-fitted, allying the room’s beams,
accentuated by the dusty refraction
on the glitter ball, still, yet working:
Ghost flecks off the mirrored-planet:
Look close, a sphere of a thousand selfies.
I hold my phone up, like we do, to be
there in the room, on record, uploaded,
few particulates of life are ever captured,
by these devices for palm memories:
Polaroid proved it, before our kids were born;
quickened development misses exposure.
On the wall an almost life-size John Peel
stands in this room, analogue approval,
for every act to appear here, upstairs.
Education privatised,
for the good of the rich,
a decade on,
no state’ll exist:
The outsourced partners,
former Tory grandees,
now academy owners,
providing ‘reasonable fees’.
The ‘three R’s’ re-branded:
Rape, Rob, and Rent:
our futures are sold,
whilst the present is bent.
Ahead of me – one empty sat-down seat,
centre-back, in this well-attended free bus,
cushion dipped by time, worn by re-visits,
and other weightier-trips across Brighton;
first leg of our return home from the stadium.
We left five minutes early, off wind-groomed pitch,
to get my old boys’ seat, back to the racecourse blow.
Five-a-side, a match before me, no kicking-off;
two bus-faced rows of old men on bench seats,
aged choristers, wearing no wings, winter-wrapped,
and, my guess, a combined span of seven hundred years,
taking me, quickly, to the birth of The Renaissance,
and to Jan van Eyck – not a football manager.
My two boys, lost in the standing coats, look so young,
bus-jolted, but enjoying life, beyond these grim choir stalls.
Just one of the five, down the left, singing aloud now:
‘One goal, should have been three!’ grimly thrown.
I look again at the aligned church-shined toes,
brogues, Clark’s boots, and other comfortable soles.
Steamed up, under-powered, as we climbed over Falmer:
Then, Woodingdean’s winter illuminations:
Misted-view of a bruised bus stop, naked, no poster,
pub lights, still beaming pre-ban smoky yellows,
and angry traffic lights outside the Downs View Hotel.
This journey, to the whine and song of the diesel engine,
over rattle of chassis, clanking like an ill-fit armoured suit,
and an under-pinned stutter of gears and transmission;
I could be tunnelling, Underground, returning from Chelsea,
another lost night at Stamford Bridge, of over-paid play,
on an overloaded tube, instead, this winners’ free bus.
The last hill-grind, up to the racecourse and car park,
relief among the two teams, their bladders held tight,
for that final long release in the loo, before bed.
I stand up, as we shunt over the potted road,
My walking stick matches that of the older players.
Marrakech welcomed us,
a warm hold,
lifting flight-numbed senses.
Bella and I ventured, briefly,
her unexpected beauty strummed
local boys’ heart strings,
and I was alongside, nonchalant-ish,
landed, an hour before, into this.
We expected the slap of heat,
but not such
deep hospitality abroad:
Our host, with his command of English,
beyond our first-grade French,
provided our alien-ness a place,
in le Perroquet
Blue’s cool blocks of peace.
I wish to return
to that riad,
dip my toes in the tiled pool,
and sit, rooftop, alongside
targeted satellite dishes,
hear the prayer songs of Marrakech,
to see the sky there run high
over impossible nests of storks,
And to feel that city’s dirt
in my pores.
‘Diversion ends’,
States the sand-bagged sign,
But Uckfield traders
Are now resigned,
To falls in sales,
Thirty-percent losses,
For the thirty-two weeks
Of gold-paved promises:
Wider pavements,
For the shopping hoards;
Will they love Uckfield
When the paths are broad?
East Sussex mandarins
Have planned the change,
Which explains why
The town’s enraged:
‘Uckfield’s open’
Is the rallying cry,
But diversions remain
And trade drives by.
We should all look forward
to dementia,
there’s nowt else certain,
that’s for sure:
Once embraced,
by this progressive disease,
it’s a drawn-out death,
of old memories.
History, recent years,
clean erased,
our marriage would be
disengaged:
So with presence of mind,
here, my living will,
at that point please,
fine wine, and the pills.
MIKE BELL | 10,000 Poems 