untitled

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

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

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.

On the Bakerloo

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. 

the politics of language

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 music of the beach

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

Credit: Lisa Holdcroft

in this city of writers, there’s not a notepad to be found.

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."

lone figure on a beach, just before Christmas

you stoop, 
feeling the cold in your knees.
you are old.
you may not have many winters left.
you are examining something,
something far older than you are.

you peer at it
turning it over
in your hand
in your mind
still for a minute
unmoved by the wind.

your gaze shifts
you’re not looking at it anymore
you’re looking through it,
through all the stones on this beach,
through the centre of the Earth
and out the other side into nothing
clawing back memories breeding memories
as if by picking up one stone
you’ve revealed another
then another
a whole beach of associations
stretching back to the beginning of time.

you face the sea, 
and now throw
as far as it will go.

you’ve turned away
before it lands
with a tiny crown of salt-water.

Aldeburgh Lookout - Poem II

the sea is the same
and yet
never the same
for to give it just one name
puts to shame
its depth of being
and insults our seeing
and does no honour to the being of sea.

today it champs at the bit
white horses straining at reins
rushing up the beach
seeking shingle.
townsfolk keep their young indoors,
shops shut up early.

now daylight fails
until the only band of light
between the black of beach
and unlit night
is the row upon row of mashing teeth
and the spit of the sleepless waves.