SO MUCH EMPTY SUGAR

I've been writing this poem for some time, jotting down odd lines as they entered my head. I don't know where the idea came from. It was just an image of two men talking, after being made redundant yet again, and one man confessing his secret. 

PRECARIOUS

He served he said

they called him sailor

he’d seen it all when in the navy

and told us so

in response to every turn of human nature

We worked the same gig

nine months on promises

then just before the big buyout

they let all us go

shut up shop and fled

The half hinted at rewards

so much empty sugar

spun of smiles and fine talk

messaged us the news

and that was that

Me and him well

we sat on the platform all that night

hoarding what we had left

waiting for the dawn

new day new chances

He told me he’d lasted six whole weeks

never made it past the harbour

bought himself out of the service

and lived his life on the ripple

a stuttering sequence jobs like this one

Then he asked me

how do you make your way

when the waves rise then topple

how do you stand in a sinking sea

I shook my head

I had no answers

It certainly isn't finished. Too many half set lines. I can't see a way forward at the moment. Like a fine wine, this tale needs time to mature. 

Lola and the Rhinos played their last gig last Saturday. We shall miss them.

Max Romeo died this week. His album War in a Babylon is a classic. So long Max thanks for the amazing music.

Until next time.

TALKED OF NOTHING IN PARTICULAR

Seasons greetings! This post's poem contains a dialect word local to Runcorn - baggin'. I can find no online definition. In the 1970s when I worked in the chemical industry the common term for the food we brought into work was baggin', so the room you ate your meal in was known as the baggin' room. 

At Castner-Kelner Chemical Works in the 1970s,

the baggin’ room of K-Unit Maintenance,

was not conducive to the reading of great literature.

No thick tomes, with dense plots

and serious titles were to be seen,

for we were not there to broaden our horizons

but to repair broken down machinery.

So we were offered no clues about those books

that may have helped us understand,

why we were there in the first place,

in overalls and educated only to a specific level

that meant we could maintain the unit

but that offered no other possibilities.

So every breaktime we drank tea

and talked of nothing in particular.

The poem is concerned with access to education and how in those days people's opportunities were less. The school I attended was designed to provide the workforce for the factories and manufacturing industries. Opportunities for tertiary education were more limited. This version is a draft. It may make it to a further draft, at the moment I cannot see what to do with it. Time will tell.

On that note I will leave you with a Bob Marley song.

Until next time.

FREE RANGE POEMS

I have always maintained that the raw material for poetry is all around us but that most of the time we don't realise it. A poet is a person who sees the possibilities and who tries to respond to them. Last Saturday I had the idea that the air is teeming with poems, they circle like airplanes waiting to land. This is what I did with that idea:

Poems Are Everywhere

a complex holding pattern

keeps the free range poems airborne

invisible they circle the world

we are oblivious

every now and then

one of us may catch

a whisper in the ear

a few may write down

the words they hear

and mangle the streamlined form

a fewer still will claim to know

the secret frequency with which

they could guide any poem to the page

but he was sceptical

and simply gave thanks

for every poem that chose him

It's a work in progress. I am unsure if free range adequately describes the natural state of poems in the wild. Also I am not sure if the penultimate stanza works- who are these people, hacks?

I suspect I took the word free range from the news that all free range chickens in the UK have been kept inside so long because of bird flu that they must be reclassified as barn eggs. Things fall apart.

Here is a song by the Mountain Goats that references another bird flu epidemic while lamenting the death of the reggae sing Dennis Brown.

And here is the man himself.

Until next time.

SOMETHING ELSE

I  was working on the allotment the other day, watering in the polytunnel, and that old blues song about never missing your water until the well runs dry came into my head. Over the rest of the after noon this poem wrote itself.

Something Else

He carried water to the well.

The yoke was heavy,

the water angry enough to slop.

That none had asked him to,

was for him, beside the point.

He may have claimed

it was for the general good,

or Phariseed his pious intention.

There was an unquenched fury

in his every step.

Some people live their whole lives like that.

I think as it formed that I was trying to capture the essence of passive aggression. 
I tend to write more in my head these days. To get the poem into some shape before I write anything down. I don't think it's a better way of working just different.
Here is Peter Tosh with his version.

SHAVING TIME

I was depressed to read yesterday that here in the UK universities employ up to three quarters of their teaching staff on zero hour contracts. Organisations using such shoddy strategies should be ashamed of themselves but in this present state of affairs they appear to regard it as a good business model. It is not. Humans deserve better.
Since the crisis of 2008 employers are expecting their staff to do more work for less money. Trans National Corporations pay pitifully little tax and contribute even less to the common good. Such a situation is not sustainable.
This poem was forming in my head before I read the latest shameful statics.

SHAVING TIME

Today, as every other,

it's the 6:30 am hurtle,

50 in the 30 zone.

Zero contracted,

a quart of tasks pours

into his pintpot of hours

He juggles rent and food,

fuel and debit,

hand to mouth.

There is no trickle down,

there is no end,

it will get worse.

Bleak, is it not?
But bleaker still is an article in Science that reports a study into the 94 ecological processes that are the basis of healthy marine, freshwater and terrestrial ecosystems. Unfortunately 80% are already showing signs of distress and response to climate change. You can read about it for yourself here.
We appear incapable of treating members of our own species fairly let alone of curtailing our destructive behaviours. There will be a price to pay for our actions.

he swapped his wife for the radio

by acrimony not by choice

and here he is in the night

twisting in memory soaked sheets

balancing recrimination

against sleep

the pressure of the night

compress the voice on the World Service

dream switch

to a grandstand view

of his hopes falling at the first hurdle

then dead horse heavy

he is trapped beneath

it will take years to get free

I have revised this poem. You can read the first draft here. Discussing it with the Secret Poets led me led me to expand the middle stanza. Hopefully this makes it clearer.

Bob Marley came to mind as I wrote this post. The lines: think your in heaven, when your living in hell seem to me to sum up the perspective of those with the power. 

Peace, love and unity. Until the next time.

AN OPEN SECRET

I think there must be an election on here in the UK. I answered a knock at the door yesterday and was asked by a canvasser if the conservative party could rely on my vote. I impressed by her optimism. You would have to be be an optimist to think that a man wearing a Marcus Garvey t-shirt would ever be considered a supporter of a party that has seen the number of food banks soar under its misgovernment of this country. No Marcus was for justice, equality and liberation for all, not just rich people. 

I was discussing poetry with the mighty Oscar Sparrow recently and we were describing our respective creative processes. I was impressed by the metaphor he used of interviewing words for their suitability. My own method seems to be linking different concepts and seeing where it takes me.
This next poem came from a song title that mention a tightrope walker. Once I had the basic idea down all I had to do was research the physics.

A tightrope walk is an open secret.

Physics explains her graceful stroll:

tight leather shoes to maximise friction;

a taut wire, secured at each end;

a bent pole held in her spread arms

to lower her centre of mass

-which at all times must be over the rope;

plus a head for heights is all.

So she places one foot after another,

and may or may not look down.

We walk a changing line,

bereft of the security fixed points grant,

few see us when we fall,

or sense the small triumph of a day gone well.

Truthfully we are the stars of the show,

but the spotlights are on her

and we applaud the steady, slow procession.

Now an older poem that I have been revising:

Selfie in Black and White

The Magpie told me,
the purpose of this life was to choose.
I want to tell her I'm in it for the poems,
but she knows that already.
So I look at some old photograph,
black and white me,
and decide it's the percentages that count.

Still a work in progress I think.
Here's Burning Spear singing Marcus Garvey.

And here's the whole classic album.

HUMANITY RENDERED INTO DATA

Where do poems come from? I have no idea. For me it’s an unanswerable question, akin to pondering what was there before the big bang. Something that. Instead I think that when the poem calls you simply have to say thank you and then try to fashion it into something workable. I suppose that’s the poetic process turning the personal, the specific into something universal.

I’ve been vaguely pondering this because earlier in the week I was just falling to sleep when I had an idea for a poem. Experience has taught me that you have to get it on paper or it will evaporate with the night. I turned the light on and spent half an hour or so trying to capture the thought. Then I slept.

I am at my best first thing in the morning. When the house is quiet before anyone else is awake.  I have been working on the poem and have got it in reasonable shape. 

Before going any further though I feel that a little background is necessary. Museums in the UK have collections of human bones, all museums do. There has been a move amongst the people from whom the human remains were taken to request them back. Over the last two centuries or so many disrespectful acts were perpetrated on indigenous people around the globe. One of these was to take human remains to exhibit in museums. 

There has been some repatriation in the last ten years. The majority of the remains of Aboriginal People have been returned to the first people of Australia. Which is a start. Little enough and late enough but a start.

Plea

Plundered spirits caged in display cases,

their humanity rendered into data,

serial numbered scientific evidence,

they are excluded from the Dreamtime or heaven.

Wherever they should be, it is not here.

You would see your father buried,

or a neighbour, with due ceremony.

Why not return these people?

End their misery

and heal ourselves into the bargain.

As I say I have no idea where this poem came from. It simply appeared in a rough form and I took it from there.

I want to end on an up this week. I’ve just found on youtube the full video of Bob Marley and The Wailers in 1973 at Capital Rehearsal Studios. This is a real gem. It is worth an hour and twenty six minutes of your life. Enjoy.