I bake this daily bread –
but my art is reduced –
Another phase – it’s like
his daily poetry / Every
slice slumps – my knife
exposes inner risings –
these harvested loaves
sit better in my gut than
bread off a shop’s shelf

(A nod to @tonyhoags_LPS)

I am – I think – also wounded into speech –
by limped-off difficulties – by disconnections
away from my pages – I admit my ply of lines

of instant fixes – of weaved words into verse
My tipping point – there by daylight – re-set
after dull errors and other such mistakes

it is my NHS-wrap of lightly cast plaster
to mend – gripping – my snap-bone moment –
or – the tip of talcum on to sweated flesh

I am no more hiding from the heated fallout
of my dull errors – those bombed mistakes –
my day-to-day words are just housekeeping

I fear monologuephobia –
the fear of repeated words
which is a dreadful error
in my error-prone verse

If you wrote poetry
I would read it
because I need
to know more
But my typed words
are lost to you –
the one person
who should consume
these lines
of half-honest reflection
which are set out
for any browser’s eye
They will not reach
between heights
unless they are clicked
and read

With the hard rainfall
is a clatter

it is bubbled
across my flat
but tipped roof
on this
my right-angled shed

where work flows
but words fix
lines almost glued
caught like slo-mo drips
in a work of other’s art

I wake late, again,
seven-forty AM:

I learn a new word
(of the day):
‘Imprimatur’

and
I feel, almost,
a poem
coming on.

I drink tea, in bed,
as we discuss how much
this day will cost.

I read the news, in bed,
on my phone,
and then
I read out last night’s
poem.

Thick, propped
in the black-slapped
under-belly
of Brighton’s Komedia,

for an evening
of Henry Normal
(other Northern Poets
are available):

I sit stool-high
(beer table handy),
an American asks me:
‘Is this guy funny?’

Before I respond
her English friend
offers explanation:
‘He’s friends
with Steve Coogan.’

I am in the place of making poetry,
as Causley did, a revelation when
greengrocer-ed by school kids,
and then he described the act:

We will explode if its not written..
Appease the angel and the demons..
The poems have to be written..
Life goes on..

‘On Being Asked to Write a School Hymn,’
(this verse disturbs our tamest poet),
such creation was Causley’s response
to being exhausted, to being re-awakened,
daily re-set, after school, by the writer’s clock.

In 1982 Launceston appealed to me,
stone-faced before the town was laid,
found in that broken-back paperback ‘Collected.,’
which I stole from Surrey Libraries.

Now I pit my reducing self
into making poetry, which sits unread,
unpublished, not in bound paper,
re-edited only when I come across it:

I am making the words
to fit the verse of this hammered work,
but I use no blistering tools,
just the weight of big hits on tin ears.

[Poem #866]

Morrissey, Cave,
and Leonard Cohen,
I played, and played,
Cash’s country songs:

Later Heaney’s
and Walcott’s islands,
were my stations,
instruments silenced:

My craft continues,
in the voice of men,
this voice is sonorous,
as taught by them.
 

[This poem was deleted
on my handheld device,
there is no ‘Undo’
much like my life.]

I am not northern enough
to be a radio poet –
not a McGough, a McMillan,
or a Normal kinda bloke.

I am not street enough
to holler as a slam artist,
not a Sia, Poppa E.,
or even Kate Tempest.

I am not black enough
to rhyme [with the best]
not MC Drake –
nor a Kanye West

I am not angry, outraged,
able to bark,
like Attila the Stockbroker
or John Cooper Clarke.

I am (Attila said)
‘that other poetry.’
In which case I’ll exult
with my southern dignity.

‘Rhyme remains the parenthesis of palms,’
possibly misquoted, by myself, not the man,
that islander, playwright, poet, and giant,
gifted in language: ‘one of the chosen.’

Born under flesh-stained colonial rule,
he ran fast ‘cross the pink law of the Empire’s tongue:
stood huge on a platform, with Seamus and verse,
to see off the trains commuting their words.

It was the tidal returns, the moon’s low fold,
which refilled the pen he always held:
that implement, squat, was his quick mouthpiece,
the wordy, Saint Lucian, commander of language.

Along Brodsky, and Heaney, he will loudly reverb,
as his silent waves rise on sand-scribed words:
and the triumvirate will laugh at their own bawdy jokes,
in their office of tongues those three foreigners spoke.

With these lines, today’s commitment,
I revisit burials I have turned from,
the lowered place of shovelled history,
which, even under my reduced recall,
are things that shouldn’t have been:

Those minor indiscretions
which if dug up, levered, exhumed,
and stinking of the past’s decay,
would make you think less of me:
Those shallow graves best undisturbed.

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

Mr. Heaney
he sent me a note,
saying, indeed,
I could use a quote:

I filed it somewhere,
that index card,
one he had hammered,
typewriter-hard,

But I have misplaced
his ribboned permission,
those shift-key words,
a limited edition.