At the Railway Station, Upwey You would not recognise it now, surrounded as it is with neat homes, a net curtained wilderness winding to the Ridgeway. Yet as the wind wanes and Sunday men look up from washed cars, the air reveals notes played in a high register: unmistakably, a violin.
Month: Aug 2020
Can’t do more
Can't do more I'm pretty sure I can't do more than sit in silence with the night. Because if I tried I'd be denied these instances of second sight. But not the kind you'd likely find among the mystics of the land. More of the sort that's sold and bought like articles, second hand. There's no quality you'd find in me more mystical than entropy.
Immigrants
Immigrants
Outside the windows of our London flat
the city's waking to the cry of gulls,
escapees from the terrors of the sea,
converts to the urban thermals found
arising from the concrete and the glass.
They've made their way inland by using maps
etched on the liquid compasses embedded
in the secret places of their brains.
The river Thames acts as their certain road
from sea to city, as these migrants flock
to soar above the streets in crying crowds
mirroring the screeching crowds below.
Despite the curving beauty of their wings
as they hang in London's fetid air,
we want to persecute, to send them back
to dangerous seas they will encounter there.
Bluebell Wood
Bluebell Wood
You walk along the track up to the moors
above our house in springtime and in rain,
sloping from the east on winter winds
that later bring the snow and ice bound days.
But now the weather is softer in it's ways,
uncertain rays a sunshine can be felt
to warm our lagging limbs and penetrate
our hearts, soft beating, always faithfully.
I follow you now, winding through the hills,
climbing over stiles, through kissing-gates,
until on the horizon is a stand
of trees, luxuriating in the spring.
I'd love to fuck you, if you think we should,
upon the bluebells deep inside this wood.
The Plague
The Plague
There's a disease abroad. Our fortitude
is being tested daily on the streets.
The air is filled with loathing like a germ
that replicates itself in hidden ways,
attacking all the things we thought were true,
invading spaces we once knew as safe.
A virus spreads among us as we bear
witness to the horror it provokes.
We're like the hosts floating on the seas
in hope of finding safer, kinder shores,
unsure of our direction but attacked
and beaten for the crime of being lost.
Perhaps one day we will find a cure
but know the only vaccine now is love.
Millennium
Millennium And a child said, "What's a millennium for?" Her tousled hair a shroud of shattered glass in buildings of brown dust once called home. We saw her there, shoeless and unsouled by someone else's appetite for war. They have no names, their voices shrill champagne, producing more than we can dispose of, profiting in the marketplace of time, from the ruin their ravages obtain, to reinvest in their needlessness, their heedless acquisition of the fruits of our labour, love, unworldliness. Whoever it was invented time ignored it's circularity, the endless repetition we provoke. Unconsciously, the pages that we turn reject the notion of diminishment, the book that never ends, the chapters filled with errors we commit and recommit, unable to do anything but repeat, unerringly, the blunders of the past and, surely, there's no repeal, no exclusions from this acquiescence to chains of petty common sense that pin us down, victims of this war. Look, see the evidence of collusion, the slack-jawed acceptance of this fate; the Pleasure Dome overfilled with cake, the fanciful millions counting on a win, who want this or that to so enhance the days made unacceptable by pap, a place in the instant fames provided by a media mogul always on the make. The culture of the specious mobile phone, the phoney conversations that we make, an anomie of quasi-cultural norms insisting that we all stump up the cash. Here is the landscape of those putrid dreams mad politicians make so much of. A picture of consensual mistrust reformulated in a hooligan's fist. A phobia formed of old bourgeois terror fearing the loss of property and power. The hypocrisy of condemnation when the dispossessed mimic their ruler's lust for prominence pictured on a tarnished coin. The notion that the world is always ours. Here we find this death mask replicated by the fifty-eight found stifled in a truck. So let us ask what this millennium obsession is really, really all about. Can anyone truly know the answer how an arbitrary notion by a Roman king or, maybe, someone sitting on a throne doing the daily function we require, came to be adopted in this way, to justify this image of ourselves in this ultra-comic cosmic show? Perhaps the naming of time is a disease politicians and the rich employ to bolster up their privilege and power? Yet this argument is too absurd. It requires suspension of disbelief to grasp a fact so obviously at odds with promoted cultural norms that vaguely cite Judeo-Christian sages as the source of wisdoms we've received for countless years, drummed ceaselessly into our weakened wills. All religions' touts so mock themselves. You want to say the clerics should take a chance, recognise that truth can have no edge, no end, no absolute, no borders to be crossed, no arms to reinforce itself, no place. Where land is, there a people will walk, build, sow dreams of starlight in their children's cries. Laughter and grief have ever beset us all. How much a man needs or a woman needs is mirrored in their children's eyes, reflections in the deep pools we drink from, where the sun splits light, illuminating power, the hate of it. How much more is there than the sky, the places where the insects go, oblivious? Who brought down these dark ominous moons turned now towards us, teaching us envy and means to build fences of crazed wire? Could we have resisted the sea or did it seem like home, something we love ineffably, invested with it's ownness, unownable? Place your hands in pools along the shore where the tides recede revealing rocks we slip upon. We have no footing here nor ground to place our flags among the scuttling things. Draw your hands toward you, cupped to capture light, spilling salt as the deep sound soothes us still, beating like blood through our wombs, until we fall asleep like an infant, cradled in it's arms.
In the presence of the dispossessed
In the presence of the dispossessed
In the presence of the dispossessed,
their grubby sleeping bags lining the streets,
some asleep, others with hands outstretched,
their eyes averted or a challenging stare
thrown out, this feels a lot like impotence.
Who do we give to, all or none at all?
A few, then smile and try to ignore the rest?
Comply with requests for only a few pence
to buy a tea or shelter for the night
or walk on by, aloof from their despair?
Whatever we do it makes no difference.
A handout or two is neither here nor there
when what's required is a struggle for the right
to shelter, food and warmth, replacing fear,
a common purpose meaning that we care.
A struggle to upend the status quo
that ensures the needs of capital come first.
To stop the fact these folk fuel the fires
that forge wealth and profit for the few
but leaves this human debris lacking light.
I see the night
I see the night
For Tom Leech
I see the night coming silent as moonbeams,
not across the face of the sea,
nor along the haggard brows of mountains
but closely,
found in my thoughts of you.
I see the star pausing at it's height,
not above the birth of a saviour,
nor pulsing, nor flowering at night time
but starkly,
among our withering faces.
And I feel your heart friend, dearly,
not in the memory of madnesses,
nor quickly, nor fleeting in fancy
but fiercely,
found in a furnace of dreams.
The Telescope
The Telescope
All his shifts being mornings and afternoons,
with no nights included on the roster,
winter was the only time he saw
night sky at Swanwick station. The summers were
daylight blazing even at half past five
after his ride directly from the south.
Not that direction matters more
than the season but the repetition
of his attending work mirrored the way
the seasons turned, and as for direction,
it could be said in truth, that he had none.
None that is in any conventional sense.
Ambition, career, hope were as strangers,
but not the night sky, where direction
had one clear purpose: to point towards the end
of the universe and imagine our place within it,
this blue ball bobbing like a buoy
in an ocean of space.
He'd heard of a US farmer
who'd burnt down his farm to harvest the insurance
and had spent the cash on a telescope.
The farmer got a job at a country railroad station
to spend his nights scanning and splitting the stars.
So out he went and bought a telescope too
to see if Orion's upright stance was more
poetic than it's Midwest posture, recumbent at dawn.
He climbed the bridge to be closer to the stars
and holding his scope like a broom he swept
the sky clear of the litter in his mind,
seeking not an answer to what life is
but to gain a feeble grasp on what it means
to sit like this on a tiny speck of dust
spinning silently and alone.
One night he thought for a moment that he'd seen
further than he ever knew you could.
It may have been a trick of light, a platform
lamp's rays caught in the current of his sight
but, for a second, split like a star in a lens,
he thought he spied right to the edge of time.
For there, legs astride as his, head huddled
over a glass, stood an apparition
like himself, staring back, searching through space.
17 Licks
17 Licks
Small fish swim down stream
from deep pools where they were hatched
spawned a million times
This small dish of rain
shines like a plate of bright sun
caught in flagrante
Coal fires flame inside
the belly of an engine
rising to full steam
Rails glint in moonlight
frost covers up the edges
of a cold platform
Where the blackbird sings
slow dawn slithers up to see
who has breakfast first
Foxes scream at night
fearing us and attracting
friends for company
When you sleep my love
dark night coils around your form
keeping safe your heart
In a tree house topped
by green leaved branches bending
in the wind you sit
Full of praise for fun
the small comedian laughed as
he died of stage fright
Pigeons sit above
the heads of travellers splat
by white spots of shit
Where contention reigns
sanity is not intact
conflict batters peace
Shoes that do not fit
pinch the toes the insteps swell
the feet start aching
Drinking in a pub
though costly and frowned upon
socialises you
A morning of rain
before the grass can be cut
an afternoon's rest
The black dress you wore
we were drinking in that bar
your legs smooth and brown
The sun on hot sand
burned onto your feet as you
ran into the sea
The garden you dig
deeper than the depth of earth
grows from inside you
Poems, Polemicks and Licks 