Tissue Of Truths

Little cameos,

pocket machines, sometimes helvetically perfect,

self contained, in moto perpetuo,

others unfinished with gears awry,

random spars of unburnished raw substance

projecting, unsignifying, in stark rebuke

of the maker's craft;

or puzzle boxes, matter, substance, vessel

in mock unity, in single voiced cacophony;

never-watertight essays in gifting complexity.

Observable yes, but exceeding observation,

as though extending unseen into metaspacial dimensions,

planetary dice that show differing glyphs

as their faces rise above the limb,

or cross the terminator.

Or sometimes nothing like that!

Sometimes great howling fucking screams of songs!

Incantations, superstitious OCD rituals

and incoherent vomitoria and ragged beasts,

and signals set in motion and repeating like tics,

and bombers dispatched beyond recall,

and violent scripts triggered by secret words

like 'mustard' or 'death'. Yes,

the gibbering of a madman in a reference library:

'What is sweeter than honey? Sexual intercourse.'

Sometimes muscle: tensioned sinew

or that heartbreaking valvetronic protein,

the heart. Heart of a youth,

singing her little heart out,

or terse, toned, twanging resonance

of an older, wiser economy, ruthlessly bereft

of tattoos or other crimes. A bell tuned

to answer recognition's clapper

with its maker's needful pitch.

Sometimes insensible bloody assault, selfish sharing,

anaesthetic shout, unpremeditated importunity.

Campanologist, victim, time-teller,

eavesdropper, die roller, listener, reader:

giver of meaning to fragments of code.

Chooser of meaning! Maker! Maker of meaning...

Makers of little cameos supplicate you;

generations of howlers crowd your antechamber

begging your indulgence, entreating you

to bestow the given upon their gifts;

to understand.

To grasp complete in all its overwhelming irreducibility

that sole specific instance of

the ineffable, inscrutable, untransmittable business

of being self, and other, and having to die.

Sometimes inconsequential jokes

or life affirming observations;

sometimes simply rhymes.

Always utterance, utter failure

of all other signifying means;

parole of last resort, beyond retort,

tissue of truths, reifying dreams.

Midi-Pyrénées, August 2010

As I'm very new to the business of trying to write poetry I hope I can be forgiven the occasional self-indulgence of writing about poetry…

Vasco

Vasco walks the bounds

inclines his huge old head

extending invitations to patrol.

Vasco is tallest

black as new tarmac

sunblasted like old stones.

What stories he could tell,

what bonds of brotherhood he could recount:

oldest, strongest, wisest.

Soon he will sleep by moist pebbles,

in dappled shade,

in sight of the old bridge.

Midi-Pyrénées, August 2010

Vasco is a resident of one of the villages we stayed in on holiday, a very large and old black dog (though not as old as the fictional version of him in the lines above), who my daughter fell in love with.

Do Little, But Live Much

Let's live with our whole bodies.

Let's eat-feel-think-drink-fuck-converse;

let's philosophise thighs,

exercise sighs,

recognise nurture as nature

and wildly house the humane beast.

Let's have intercourse. And paracourse and metacourse;

let's be coarse, exhaust ourselves with force,

with pushing limits, stretching muscles,

overclocking neurons. Let's tap the source.

Let's live with our whole bodies.

Let's break things that need breaking,

voice things that need speaking,

embrace things that need

taking and turning and making and burning.

Let's do living, and be doing,

and do little, but live much.

Let's live with our whole bodies.

Midi-Pyrénées, August 2010

I Saw A Thing Today

I saw a thing today. It was not you

but it resembled you precisely. It

laid open lines of salt in me that map

the travels of my heart and bleed, and bleed

away my days, and yet made me a man.

Though nearly fourteen years have passed it's still

today, will always be today, your face

my constant yardstick in the glass as I

come storming round the outside of the track

and reel in your myth of sage advance.

I saw a thing today. It was not you

but with your face it brutally recalled

the circumstance of my promotion to

sole bearer of your hedonistic cross.

And so I pay your dues, and take your wage.

And those undriven roads and unhung shows,

unwritten chapters of my life, are now

unsung laments, regrets abandoned to

the flow of current presence passing, present,

past. I pass you staring blindly on.

I saw a thing today. It was not you,

though it was empty like I feel on nights

when constellations barely speak their names;

though it bore traces of antecedence

that whispered shadows to my frozen thought.

I will no longer proudly show you all

the things I make and know that you will praise

them irrespective of their worth or skill.

I will no longer care if I live up

to measures forged in pain and pampered fear.

Perhaps I have resigned myself to your

continued residence within my skull;

perhaps I'll take you with me for the ride.

I saw a thing today: it was not you,

but it resembled you precisely.

Valencia, January 1997 and Midi-Pyrénées, August 2010

I wrote the first twenty-two words of this poem in the waiting room of a Spanish mortuary after viewing my uncle's corpse in an open coffin. A few attempts to expand on them followed, none successful, until now. Having decided recently to apply myself to writing poetry I knew I wanted to develop these words, and that I needed to engage with this subject, and while thinking about it, I noticed that the few words I had seemed to work in iambic pentameter; so I decided to use blank verse, which I love, and the rest of the poem tumbled out in very short order.

This Land Is Real

Who walked here once

under oak and elm?

Those ancient trees,

their names not even whispered among these beeches' leaves,

were the canopy, the roof,

the lid on lives played out in this land,

in this very place,

on this very sod of dirt.

Kings, warriors, great men

are remembered here in works of earth:

their names are forgotten.

Wives, mothers, real women

are immortal here in the toil that built those earthworks:

their toil is forgotten.

This land is real:

those that walked it, have become it. 

Cambridgeshire, May 1992

This was the first decent poem I wrote: it suddenly appeared in my head as I sat by the campfire, while living in a bender just outside Cambridge, surrounded by some fairly dramatic neolithic remains. It was five years before I wrote another line worth keeping…

Sun's Poodle

I need to work this shit out: 

I want the winter to be my friend.

But in the winter entreaty's lexicon evades me

and I carry summer's kiss blandly tattooed across my fabric.

The sun's poodle wavers, sidles gingerly

into an imagined crack between hibernation and denial,

only to find that fantasy is reified in times and places of its own choosing.

And it's so fucked up, it does my head in.

I am mis-classified.

By whom? As what? Well, when I've found a suitable image to contain these thoughts

I'll be sure to let you know. I am a lizard in the crack of a sun baked stone house's wall.

Sun's poodle puts his testosterone back in his handbag;

I am a cracked lizard in a stone-baked sun house.

I am the wall.

I am the fly the lizard hunts; I am drunk; I am mulling things over;

fuck it, I am the sun's poodle.

Limousin, August 2010

Back from holiday with new poems…

I've had a pretty idyllic trip to France, and done a lot of writing, as well as reading Neruda and having my mind blown comprehensively. It's amazing how a change of scene can empty your brain enough for interesting stuff to fill the vacuum.

So in the following posts are four entirely new poems, one old one that I remembered, and one that I finished, after writing the opening lines a very long time ago. Please comment and let me know what you think.

Three points of the triangle

I remember some years ago I wanted to write a poem on the theme of a triangle:

it was a time when my daughter was very ill.

She wasn’t ill all the time, but she had episodes, and between the episodes

she was pasty, unbearably translucent. It was not an easy time.

I wanted to write a poem about the symbolism of a place from which I could see three churches.

I used to take her to her grandparents (I forget now if her grandfather was still alive at the specific time I’m thinking of),

and on the way there I passed through three villages, and I thought about the churches of these three villages,

facing each other across the countryside,

and I thought they were like us, me, my daughter, and her mother,

three points bound together.

The threeness of our family seemed very important to me at this time,

because it seemed, especially when my daughter was very ill, that we were the only three people in the world.

But I could not write that poem, because when I think about it now,

there is no single spot from which those three churches are all visible.

A pastiche of Neruda

And so I came to think that I should write

poetry

and that I should take my inspiration from Neruda

(though most of me knew that all I could ever achieve would be a pastiche of Neruda).

Who I have never read.

But I have heard a seventies TV cop repeat his words. And

I have been transported (and other clichés)

I have been filled up by his words (and the deep nuanced voice of that seventies TV cop)

filled up as though by…

something

poetry I guess.

I have felt those playful, gnarled, burnished words caress me

as doubtless (I imagine) they were intended to caress some voluptuous muse;

and my pretty little ego has felt Neruda’s words making love

to this long gone, imaginary woman

and felt, like so many thousands of others have felt, that they were addressed to me alone, 

that this shared experience was utterly unique, and dared to think that I should write

poetry.

And I have written this shitty little poem about poetry

in the hopes that you will think me clever.