faces raised to screens
eyes glazed at a hundred ways to leave,
and everywhere voices
with no bodies
and no souls.
and delays and layovers
that just go to show
that the waiting game has no rules
and not even really any players -
just waiters,
the bored, sick of their job ones,
who'll spit in your food
just to pass the time.
the heat seeps in
through my open window
and fills my room with needles.
later it shall cool
I hope
and moonlight shall replace the blades
and soothe and dress my wounds
with its balm
then tuck me in to bed
for the night.
there's no such thing as no thing
nothing at all
and here I'd found it
quite by chance
an overwhelming nothing:
a nothing so vast
it held me an age
basking in nostalgia.
nothing came close to this nothing -
it lay undisturbed
vast like the sky
and thick like the air that forms it.
there was nothing.
no thing.
nothing.
the sky fell in today,
through the skeleton
of a castle of sand.
was it maybe
lit by a spark of anger
that dwelled in the hearts
of the browbeaten
the downtrodden
the long forgotten
undercast of our city?
cause if apathy were water
you could tap it from the ground
and douse the flames
many, many times over.
but flames draw cameras
and £50 notes
that fuel the blaze
and the whole thing goes on
ticking
ticking
ticking.
may all the sunshine in the world
ring out today,
and beat down on heated street,
bringing birds out of dawn nesting,
and pale legs out of hiding:
beat your wretched wasted light
down on all this, dear sun,
for your rays shall not reach me.
the sky is ochre;
fat with the weight of rain,
satiated by the sunset,
and struggling to stay afloat.
i live my life in poetry
that makes most things alright:
i'm not one to get too angry
and not prone to get uptight.
i live my life an artist
no rulebook guides my way
and night carries my burning wick
deep into each new day.
i live my days observing
no two things look the same,
the street provides my painted scene
the houses are its frame.
i live my days a-pondering
the thoughts inside my head
with days gone by they're watered
with literature they're fed.
i live my life in poetry –
that's quite okay with me –
for another way to live my life
i simply cannot see.
o tainted dove
mere twin to winged vermin
destined to cast your doleful eye
upon all that is refused
and fallen.
no crutch for club foot,
nor shower for ruffled plume,
you languish, wretched among beasts.
'lo as you swoop
wings held back, tiny head held high
a minute phoenix rises from sad dirt
glowing all shades of turquoise
and king of the air
for an instant –
for an instant
too short
o tainted dove,
too short by far!
as club foot hits breadcrumb soil
you languish, wretched among beasts.
we could have saved him,
if words were not mere backdrops
to city life half-heard
through tinny white buds.
we could have saved him,
if we’d listened,
really listened and heard and understood,
the line upon line of angst missed.
we could have saved him,
if we’d asked
but they were just lyrics scrawled:
a lifelong suicide note.
we could have saved him,
if we’d connected art and artist:
put two and two together
and made five, just in case.
we could have saved him,
if that was the kind of thing we did
but decay sells papers
and we’ve all got bills to pay.
we could’ve saved him,
if we hadn’t fetishised world fame
and shone bright beams on meagre souls
and made them dance by spotlight.
we could’ve saved him
any of us
and now we wonder why he sleeps
and we cannot.
I've bled and I can settle
for the beast in me is quelled
my inkwell does run dry
and all my stories are dispelled
no words do populate my mind
nor stains my hands do blemish
no midnight candles shall I burn
no empty stretch I'll relish
I'll go to bed at night content
at never having penned
I'll turn my hand to stitching cloth,
relationships I'll mend.
will I then hear the blackbird's song
or see the night's last star?
Or cast blinkered eye upon the world,
and not see how things are?
Perchance I fight back from the gloom,
to praise the Earth once more,
but only onwards will reveal
what beauty lies in store.
now either way you look at this
your views, keep them to you,
for nothing, really, can quell my urge
to put in words what's true.
so forever I'm a writer
my gift is cursed as such
but suits in empty soulless blocks
don't appeal to me that much.
Now let me pick the blankest page
to sully with my words
watch final stars on morning glow
and hear again songbirds.
I pondered, late last night, whether the book I'm currently working on would be my last. What if, after I'd scratched that itch, I wanted something else? So I wrote this and was reassured.
this stifling box of air
taking me home
takes too long
by far.
too much air
makes breathing hard and
the weight of
london above me
its foundations stretching hellwards
scratch my consciousness
as I rumble along.
the dry tone down the line
i listen until it clicks to silence
it’s phone-off-the-hook Sunday;
engaged.
cubicles in club toilets
doors all tattooed shut
the colour of blood denotes
engaged.
he’s sorry, he says
it just really isn’t a good time
when pressed, he says he’s otherwise
engaged.
families stored
in containers,
like shipments of food
in transit.
hemmed in by wire,
they ride bikes
and play games -
the shadows of setting men
thrown long across the pitch.
(written following a visit to the Barbican for Richard Mosse's 'Incoming'.)
today
i smelled the Underground
smell as it used to smell
aged five
sooty and inviting
exciting
the way boarding a train should smell
when the domes of St Paul’s towered high
over the city
and the Shard was but
a jagged figment of thought
a rush of pigment on an artist’s impression
an altogether fresher
less jaded by the nine-to-five
eager to arrive
desperate to strive
London.
it got me thinking:
as blurs form like smog
not one day on and one day off
but gradual
lying and mystifying
and pulling all I know into question marks:
was I five, or was I five times that?
and where then lies the line
of cruel historian’s pen
between my London of today
and that of then?
but one smell told me:
the Underground marked that boundary
sooty and inviting,
exciting.
I know all the words to this city
but none of the actions to go with them.
Will different words
take me different places?
Do I greet in English
and give away my tourism?
Or stray into hometown Dutch,
and let my accent do the same?
Or pick up French,
that rusty fork of mine,
and prod people with that?
In three languages
I'm still lost for words.
Instead,
I speak the language of everyone I could ever wish to speak to,
and order a beer.
the seagulls are
all aflutter after trains:
their movements swift,
their cries held high by arches.
earlier on the shore
I watched the starlings
turn in and out of sight
before coming to rest
on the skeleton pier.
(inspired by a day in Brighton and Lisa Holdcroft's atmospheric drawing of the seafront. Her website is here.)
Credit: Lisa Holdcroft
two stones meet upon a train
and in a million miles of track
will not share a word.
her rock face ashen
crestfallen
then his hand
first on her leg
then the neck
then the back of her head
teasing out a smile
as a rock turns to sand.
they'll be alright, I tell myself
as I alight.
in this city of writers
there’s not a notepad to be found.
it’s given birth to Mr Godot,
and old James Joyce,
but I’m banged up in this hotel room
with thoughts like a hundred moths
to a flame.
the walls stare down on me
mocking me with their blank canvases
socially out of reach.
Now, if I were famous and I wrote on a wall
they’d cut it out, frame it, charge people to see it.
But I’m not. Yet.
They’d probably charge me,
bill it to my room called something boring like
“room maintenance”
(even if it was a bloody good poem.)
So my tired, inspired eyes start to scan.
Tear open a teabag to write a tiny haiku
Or write stories along the streets of the tourist map
Or type a novel on one long roll of toilet paper.
But it wouldn’t be the same.
Outside, the trees tap the glass.
It’s 1-0 to them.
Tree beats human in this twisted artistic game of rock-paper-scissors.
Except there is no paper.
Just the white of the room,
white as the morning you wake up to find it’s snowed and you’re the first one out into the garden.
The shower curtain,
the lampshade
the ironing board
and who the hell needs all these towels?!
all these things I cannot write upon
as if my thoughts in ink would make them worse
not better
as if there is no place for fledgling art in this world of ours
but there is
and like some poetic superhero
it seems its now up to me to give it that place back
So, with marker held between finger and thumb
I start:
"in this city of writers," I write
"there’s not a notepad to be found."
when the fires of this new world burn low,
would you sit with me
and roast marshmallows
in the ashes?
