FIND YOUR WAY HOME

This post's poem formed in the hinterland between consciousness and sleep. It is interesting how many poets will tell you they have dreamed a poem. My first attempt at poetry, when I was twelve, came as I awoke. It wasn't very good, but it gave me the identity I still wear.

Today's poem mentions the choice we all have when an idea occurs, to simply ignore the message, that urge to write and go on with our lives. But we do not. Brian Patten said, when I interviewed him for this blog, that the muse will stop calling to you if you don't use the gift you are offered. He is a wise man. 

Another Poem For Christine

Last night I dreamt you had found your way home,

despite the intervening twenty years,

and the fact that I have moved more than once.

Of course it was a dream,

and the corridors conspired and turned in to walls

and kept us apart, though I walked miles until,

I awoke with this poem in my head.

At that point there was a choice,

stay in bed or write it down.

I chose, in the cold grey dawn,

to sit in this comfortable room

and write you another poem.

There are a number of other poems sprinkled over this blog about my late first wife. 

This next poem is about another regular, my father. He was naturally left handed, but in the culture he grew up in this was not acceptable. Throughout his life he would avoid having to write anything down and when he did he wrote in square block capitals. I have no real idea about precisely how negatively his education affected him.

there is a power in the left hand, hard wired as it is into the right hemisphere of dream and possibility, the nuns who “taught” my father knew this fact and so they beat him out of left handedness, citing the example of Judas Iscariot, a left hander who allegedly caused some bother back when, I know their trammelled minds could not take diversity, so they clung to a one dimensional faith, and beat the boy, who as a man was always embarrassed to put pen to paper

The photographs continue to have no correlation with the text, this fine specimen was on the wall of a bar in Manchester. 

Juncture 25 are reading in Tiverton on the 17th April. The last two readings sold out, so get your tickets quickly, here's the details:

The new Public Services Broadcasting lp The Race for Space is out and I have to say it rubberbanded me back to those space race glory days of my childhood. Here's Gagarin.

I have to end with an interview with the man himself back in the black and white days of 1961.