As the first lines of this post's poem states a sign on the back of a taxi set me thinking.
DASHBOARD CAMERA IN OPERATION
I clock the sign on the back of the taxi in
front of me
I think about all that found art
hour upon hour of unwitting testimony to
being alive
if I were an actor how I would crave access
to such a store house of raw material
I would loot each shrug each sigh
I would steal your body language
and employ your every nuance
to make mine real on stage
All those hours of footage of people being themselves. Someone told me that Marlon Brando used to stand in phone boxes pretending to have a conversation so he could watch people, see how they moved. I think that all actors people watch. I am not sure if the poem is quite there - watch this space.
Here's The Zombies from the 60s, psychedelia never dies.
Here is another poem that was written on the poetry retreat I recently attended.
It had a difficult genesis as it required me to repeat lines in a specific order. My dyscalulia played havoc with that!
it
was written in the small print
nobody
told her any
different
they
glossed over the details
and
she never thought to question
nobody
told her any
different
she
just signed her rights away
and
she never thought to question
and
they got away with murder
she
just signed away her
rights
and
there never was no comeback
and
they got away with murder
hid
behind their fancy words
she
just signed away
her
rights
and
there never was no comeback
hid
behind their fancy words
it
was written in the small print
I have no idea where the poem came from. I took a line from another poem as my starting point and promptly ended up altering it beyond recognition. In this present draft it is now the second line. What I like about the poem is the narrator's sense of outrage. Thanks to Liz for setting the challenge.
Only one poem this post. Since my creative outpouring on the retreat I have been revising more than writing.
Here's Pollyanna with a song about chasing mammoths.
I have been looking at some old poems, lines I wrote over ten years ago and thinking that had I wrote them today they would have been laid out differently. This is a poem I have always liked.
I
keep watch
sometimes
I am invisible
pass
through the crowd unseen
walked
into
not
noticed
anonymous
in
another life I would have tailed you
noted
down your conversation
those
you stopped to talk with
reported
you for some meaningless infraction
here
you bump into me
I
am happy not to be seen
out
of phase
you
do not follow me
I
keep watch
You can read the original version here. All I have done is let the poem breathe and removed the rather staid punctuation.
Similarly with this one.
Stripping
Woodchip
Even
with an industrial strength steamer
the
paper will blister and bubble
before
flensing under scraper blade.
It
will take longer to remove than to fit.
Heavy
paste
no
worries if the paper stretched
it
will cover many things.
In
this case institutional green walls
the
shade of urinals and forgotten wards.
It
seems the whole house was this colour.
Did
it comfort the painter
knowing
every room was identical?
Was
the woodchip a stop gap?
Or
an illustration of limited thinking?
There
are no pencilled signatures under the coarse paper
no
record of identity or belonging.
The
job expands and takes forever.
I've changed the odd word. A flensing tool is what was used to peel the fat off dead whales [I know it's disgusting but the image works]. You can read the original here.
I am on a poetry retreat this weekend with the Secret Poets, hopefully I shall have some new poems for you next week. I leave you with Loch Lomond who are recording a new album as I write.
Today is the day we seal our fate, celebrate our new insular island mentality, and revel in our own mean spirited selfishness. It follows on exactly seven days since the Halton Bus Company collapsed. The Halton Bus Company could trace it's history back to 1909, and now it has closed. No more buses for a town of over 61,000 people. This is to be all our futures. Truly the neo-liberal destruction of our quality of life continues apace as our world heats up around us and we need public transport more than ever. To add insult to injury the crime minister and his elitist chums are favouring the south east over the north of England when it comes to access to extra funds for local government. It seems we are going back to the past, two hundred years to the oppression of the 1820s.
now that widnes buses have gone bankrupt...
cars
be dammed
he
walks the centre of the road
past
long closed shops
past
their blank windows
he
does not engage – ever
know
this
if
you cannot refuse The Weekly News
then
look no further than page four
avoid
the copyright free filler
Old
Widnes, Memory Corner
whatever
loser name they choose
just
highlights the distance
the
town has fallen
and
by default its citizens
abandoned
as they were on the starting blocks
of
this new brave future
when
he was a child
the
main street ran from Peelhouse Lane
all
the way to the river
he
walks not fast not slow
just
the perfect speed
for
a forgotten post industrial town
that
is marooned amid technology
that
was old last century
On a lighter note, I shall be reading at 2000 Trees Festival this summer. I am putting together the poetry for this splendid festival and am already looking forward to it. Here's Deaf Havanna, a band I have seen many times at Trees.
A poem that was inspired by a song this post. The song is Exile written by Steve Knightly and originally recorded by Show of Hands back in 1987. I was given a pre-recorded cassette of the first Show of Hands album as a birthday present around then and I was always struck by the quality of the song Exile. Last week my brother in law was round and we ended up listening to the Kathryn Roberts and Kate Rusby album which ends with a cover of the song.
After everyone else had gone to bed I wrote this:
There’s No Going Home
so
in the end
you
make do with what you’ve got
where
you’ve ended up
for
the sun still shines
on
a clear night the moon follows
and
eventually you can sleep the night through
then
wake to face each day with thanks
It is a simple poem and, hopefully, follows on from the lyrics of the song. It offers, I hope, an older, more accepting take on the idea that you can never go home. I leave you with an excellent live recording from Show of Hands.
A recent poem I have been working on this week. Essentially it is a description of something I observed and the poem wrote itself.
Next to the surgery
which
used to be someone’s home,
the
bank [built in ‘31] missed out
on
its century of service by fourteen years,
a
digital casualty.
Note
the sale boards have been removed
and
the new signs proclaim wealth management.
But
whose? I wonder this Sunday
after
a Christmas Wednesday,
as
I walk past the locked off parking spaces
where
on public days like this one
the
community used to park.
Their
bin overflows and the gulls
have
had their own wing-ding,
bursting
the black plastic sacks.
Now
the remains of their office party
clutters
the pavement.
A
young greyling gull sidles up,
optimistic,
to glean whatever is left.
I
want to tell it not to bother,
that
the wealthy don’t leave rich pickings,
but
the bird is too young to know
that
no meal is ever free,
then
I realise this is all our futures.
Pretty bleak eh? The world is changing, communities are under pressure, the ease of the digital is transforming our high streets. We live on line and the fabric of our shared spaces suffers. As I say the poem wrote itself and all I worried over was the conclusion. Show not tell to the forefront.
Here's Barclay James Harvest, a band I saw a number of times in the mid-70s. This is Gladriel apparently on this, the original recording, John Lees plays the Epiphone Casio guitar that John Lennon played on the concert on the roof - The Beatles final live performance. Anyway it's a lovely song in its own right.
Here is Titles, I'll let you work out who it is a homage to.
I woke up on Thursday morning feeling that I was living in the final chapter of Christopher Isherwood's Goodbye To Berlin. The bad people have won. The callous, mean spirited, utterly ruthless, neoliberal, careerist politicians have acted with characteristic disregard for democracy. Words fail me. I can only see the situation becoming ever worse. We can prepare to wave goodbye to the National Health Service, the few remaining employment rights we have and get ready for the end. None of these politicians have the gravitas [or the intelligence] to save humanity from catastrophe. Be that from the environmental breakdown, species extinction or the ever increasing greed of the few.
Here is a revised poem.
the
silence of the great extinction
settled
on the shoulders of the survivors
as
if for the first time
they
could see all that had been lost
and
so set to refashion their world
shipping
in from beyond the stars
mechanical
birds to jewel their skies
and
fill a space long vacated
by
sinew and bone
feather
and wing
having
captured the thermal
see
how their propellers idle
as
they spiral ever higher
to
spectrograph heaven with their metal tongues
You can read the original here. I have altered the layout [thanks to the Secret Poets for their input] and tried to make the final stanza flow more smoothly. At this moment, if I am honest, I don't see our species surviving. We seem hell bent on making the situation ever worse. Hope packed its bags and left some time ago. I leave you with John Coltrane.
I described this poem in it's original draft as a moment of satori, which it is. However, when I can to read it aloud I could not get my mouth around the word simulacrum, which instantly told me I need to ditch the line, never mind the word. Thanks to Secret Poets for their insight once again. One of Life's Special Days
That
we should decide to cross the border
is
hardly surprising,
we
live in the debatable lands.
Twelve
hour passes are all that’s on offer,
because
our lives are lived
inside
the movements of our favourite clocks.
Still
we hope for something built to last.
Days
like this prompt memories,
because
in this place words reveal their power,
between
the shafts of light
between
the notes from the turntable
between
the breaths that form the words.
In
the quiet of our return a song plays
that
was written after you died,
yet
I know you are in the room,
have
followed us back across the lines,
wearing
a sad smile for what might have been,
gently
I move to kiss your memory.
I've been listening to a lot of Iberian music recently, especially Ketama and their collaboration Songhai. Here's Jarabi.
Songhai were amazing, the combination of musicians just works. Electrica Dharma have become a firm favourite in our house recently.
Another revised poem today, once more thanks to the Secret Poets. This is the third revision, you can read the earlier drafts here and here.
At The Leechwell
Did
we believe less?
Was
your faith the greater?
You,
who turn away,
make
the sign of the cross
at
the sound of the bell
as
we walk to the well,
burdened
as we are
by
the double curse
of
disease and The Fall.
Cold
water,
cold
morning.
No
cure,
no
change,
no
blessing from above.
We
turn back towards the leper house,
moving
slowly through the spaces
that
our lives once occupied.
The layout is the most obvious change, that and the substitution of leper house for lazar. The Secrets were of the opinion that it made the poem more immediate. There was also discussion around the double negative of disease and The Fall. Those of a more grammatical bent will appreciate that the Fall and disease are not a double negative. Again it made the poem more accessible and for that I give thanks.
A poem I was moved to write by something I observed at the Sidecar gig. No matter how absorbed in the music I am part of me is still taking in my environment and watching Ryley Walker at Sidecar the other night I was aware of two people arguing to my left. That is the genesis of this post's poem.
Blink
and miss it beauty
the
kind that winds you in
falls,
lifts, time changes,
a
labyrinth in sound.
She
moves, eyes closed,
spins
on the spot, amazed,
almost
synchronised
but
here’s the Minotaur,
patience
paper thin,
as
you can tell by his face.
She
flees through the maze of people.
They
will stand by a wall
and
she will talk and he will listen
as
the gig ends without them.
He
buys her a tour shirt
some
kind of peace offering,
to
paper over the cracks only they know.
I
am standing behind him
in
the merchandising queue thinking
it’s too little, too late.
The photographs are of murals in Vic, Catalunya.
On Wednesday I went to Bristol, to the Fleece to see Ryley Walker again. If anything he was even better than last time. Here's some footage of him playing Roundabout, sterling stuff.
I was in Barcelona last week. I went to visit friends and see Ryley Walker at Sidecar, a little club on Placa Reial. On the Thursday the heavens opened and it poured down. The first poem was written after it had stopped.
Barcelona 15.11.18.
it
feels as if the sky has broken as our car surfs through the downpour
raindrops
the size of dinner
plates
splatter the road
the
traffic lights fail
as
lightening cracks overhead
Old
Testament weather you proclaim
and
it is difficult to disagree.
This next one I wrote on the train travelling south down the coast to visit friends for the day.
and
there is always some bloke
man
spread and bellowing telling his friends he’s on the train
convinced
he’s the Samuel Pepys of the digital age
as
he relates in mind numbing detail the
contents of his sandwich
we
slowly progress towards the point when he will say
that
he will be with
them in a minute because he can see the platform
as
he departs a strange silence will fall until
another
observant male informs
the carriage that he is on a train
Originally it was a prose poem but when I came to type it up it seemed to sit better on the page as free verse. It may change yet. I shall leave you with some Ryley Walker. Sadly there is no footage from Sidecar, but here's some from Madrid.
A couple of poems about the past. The first concerns a book I read in the early 1970's, that promised to be a guide to astral projection. Now you can find out the technique on Wiki How.
Astral Projection
We
pooled our resources,
bought
the book together,
a
common strategy in those days.
Whoever read it first,
tight
lipped until the other
slowly
reached the final page.
I
want to say it was a primer,
that
it opened my life fantastically,
but
it did not.
Active dreaming could
not be learnt from that book.
In
Bali, several lifetimes later,
every
night while I slept
I soared over Somerset fields.
That
was the nearest ever I came.
This next poem was sparked while painting. An image of the white bands of paint that used to be painted on the main road in the factory where I used to work just popped into my head.
Castner-Kelner Poem 2
There
were these white lines of paint
on
the main road inside the factory gates
where
the company tested
its
domestic paint range.
Every
week, it was someone from the Labs job
to
check how they fared
under
the industrial traffic and tainted air.
That’s
how it was back then,
a
huge complex system that gave lives meaning.
Employment
has coarsened over the years,
now
zero-houred, I do not have that security.
We
let it go too easy.
I do think we have lost job security since the 2008 Crisis. The gap between rich and poor is growing and social mobility is a thing of the past. I leave you with Anna Ternheim Keep Me in the Dark.
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