Had this one in hiding for sometime, thought it was worth an airing…

Promenade Lovers

Tight as whelks that suck on rock,
hands locked like limpets,
they stroll in the wet dark
along the promenade.

Sides touching, flank to flank,
breaths flowing as one breath,
hearts berthing together
as their feet fall into step.

Mingling with the merely single
they sprout one umbrella not two,
a jellyfish cast on the seashore,
exotic – red, white and blue.

In the wet and dark they
twine in togetherness;
tenacious as barnacles they cling,
deep in a snug-as-seashells kiss.

I was struggling for something to post today, as recent times have not been times of any substantial creative output. So I had a dig through some older poems, and thought most of them might need some reworking before posting here!

In any case, I found this one from the mid 1990’s. It’s a love poem of sorts – but a realistic one I feel, containing the nerves and uncertainties that can prelude a relationship – is it the right person, should I take the plunge, what if it all goes wrong? If I’ve learned anything over the years it’s that nothing’s permanent – including relationships and feelings within them. Maybe the only “constants” are uncertainty and impermanence – but if that’s the nature of things, then it’s perhaps a natural thing, in balance with the weather, the seasons, the tides….

Tides

Almost close enough, your voice,
Like the stretch of sea that touches shore
To dwindle and fade to perspective.

Gulls would know in their squawking ignorance
That tide always returns to sand –
To roar and soak and take residence;

Why do I stand here, a wise man with net in hand,
Doubting the inevitable cycle of waters,
Doubting nature – if only because I must be a man,

Unaware of my hand in front of my eyes,
Unsure of the imprint you make in my mind when
Rockpool creatures in their dark would know it?

Then your voice like a bottled message
Rescues me from silence, hits shore, tells me
That tides, low or high, are planned, are perfect.

As the clocks go back, the nights draw in, fireworks fill the air, Christmas decorations threaten, and the air gets colder, I thought it was appropriate to bring this poem to a wider audience. It has gone down well at readings in the past, I only hope it goes down well at my new Writers’ group tonight, as I have decided to take it along. Normally I would take a recent poem, but I think the season demands another airing!

Darkfall

Almost November. Someone pulls
A drawstring, tightens sky,
Murk seeps into streets
With a smell of smoke as crisp as leaves;
Stars start to look colder.

The country is at war:
Flak every night, boom of munitions,
Enemies sizzle in midair.
Cars are targeted as fallout and shrapnel
Keep the wise within.

Rain offers an uneasy ceasefire,
Killing off squibs and forcing retreat.
Desire smoulders in front of TV sets,
Interrupted by a sinister knock –
Not witches, these days, but killers.

Without this darkening, pausing
Of the world, we could never
Learn to treasure summer,
Not appreciate the skin of safety
Our windows, walls and doors provide.

Just two months, then it’s Christmas.
Afterwards, days will grow healthy again.
Today it was twilight at 5pm.
In this dark, just walking home is fear,
And fear is every passing stranger.

Another travelling poem, written when I was actually travelling – physically, that is. I’ve passed through a lot of stations since I wrote this, physically and philosophically, but I sometimes think this pilgrimage will only end when the engine stops.

Pilgrim

Day snakes
Along miles of track,
Trees either side sprint
Into distance,
The engine pulls me with its drone
To a place I might connect with.
It is an arrow
Splitting through landscape,
Tunnelling the innards of hills
Digesting the day into darkness.

What am I,
Hurtling towards
An unwritten future?
The hands have scraped
Past the hour
A million times before
But never like this,
Slowly, cautiously,
Their quartz world
Unaware of me or distance.

What will I do?
Close my eyes and hope
The transition will be instant?
Lose faith like a dying rocket
Scratching at the sky?
Clutter my tongue
With pregnant narrative?
I move, shrill as a rising note.
Another station gone,
Another to arrive at.

This is from when I was travelling back and forth between home and and my University town, must be about 15 years ago now (how time creeps on). Not a major poem, I was just feeling miserable today, thought it could be worse and dug this poem out.

Hopefully, at the rate I update this poetry blog, I will have started writing again by the time I exhaust my back catalog of poems. For anyone interested, I’m finding it hard to even contemplate sitting down to write. I think the spark may be gone, but I’ll keep trying, and in the meantime I do have all these odd little poems I wrote back in the days when I could string a sentence together…

Itinerant

A tear spoke in his eye
As he approached,
As transient as the travellers
Waiting for connections
But permanent here.
Not much to ask for,
A cigarette, a light,
But wanting too much more.
“Too old for this,” he said,
To sleep on the streets,
His only hope the hope
Of not collapsing
Today or tomorrow.

A tear scribbled down his cheek
As he showed me his hands,
Tattooed when things were different maybe,
Love on the right,
Hate on the left,
His life tossed between the two,
And the travellers
Complaining about the delay
Indifferent to either.

This was written during what friends have been calling my “window period”, when I would write lots of poems from the perspective of looking through a window. This one was conceived while looking out of a window on the 4th floor of Manchester Central Reference library, it was raining, people were going about their business. It struck me as some kind of play or movie I was observing from a detached perspective…

Tableau

Faces. Pictures. Lines of light
In downpour whipping
Up emotion, splash of feet

Departing to warmth, to love;
Flume of traffic, spark of tyre
On surface, grind on grind

Of movement, drill of cogs.
Just these, within this window
Frame, then blink, snap,

Splice to some new, not entirely
Unconnected scene. But undirected,
Just the ad lib of players

In perpetual rehearsal, reacting
To reactions, flow on flow
Of drama without beginning

Or denouement. Then cut, dismiss,
Leave just this littered
Screen of pavements,

Specks on empty frames,
Over and over flap of reel at end,
The incomplete flicker of rain.

This is from January 1997. A poem about walking in the dark, colliding with the dawn…

Darkest Before Dawn

Movement, just there, branch
Like a windscreen wiper
Over moon. Ineffective.
Then stillness till the screech
Of car beyond
Reminds me of houses
And all that goes with them.

Pennines, slumbering jurassics,
Backdrop to the carnival
Of streetlights
Pitched along
The midway of the valley.
If only I were out there,
Looking back at where I am!

How we hold the past
Like a scrapbook, defacing
The future with memories!
My feet paused here last summer
And a snowfall later
The star-and-shadow sky
Looks much the same.

And however far my feet might
Take me, the return
Will be just memory in reverse;
Even though my hand
Can blot a constellation
It is only for my eyes –
I cannot halt the time

Or change the motion of the skies.
If only it would all stay still,
These moments might collect
Like evidence, a photofit of being.
Too soon, the sun, edge
Rising to slice at sky, opening
The wrists of morning.

I wrote this about a girl I once knew. She was agoraphobic. I tried to imagine what it was like and this poem was the result! An illustrated version of this poem first appeared in FLUX magazine, an arts and culture magazine I think is still going and on sale in the newsagents of Manchester 🙂

Agoraphobic

The world is too vast today,
Tops of buildings
No nearer than nebulae
And dizzy as stars.
How you must envy the girl
Who does not fear the sky,
The clouds her wig
In procession of pleasure,
Intimate with blue.

Love is always too far,
Distant as colour from monochrome,
Perfect as the world that waits
To suck and spread you out.
How you must envy the man
Who sits and shivers
In his dark, hating the walls
That squeeze out atmosphere,
Unafraid of openness.

Your view is cinemascope,
Lens at every angle,
Surrounded by voices
That hush and shush you
As eyes hammer nails into flesh;
Light drags you this way and that,
Kissing you and kissing you,
Greedy as a vacuum
And as merciless.

No choice but to ripple inward,
Hit the deck as life snipes,
Crawl from the crowd
And find some womb to hide you.
How you must envy the walking
Who do not suffer hurt from space,
Who do not need to fear,
Who do not feel the stretch of emptiness.

It’s the middle of the night, and I remember during long periods when I was unemployed and frustrated, I would emulate Marcel Proust by maintaining a nocturnal existence. I’ve always been of a nocturnal bent, really – I love the interesting pause in the world when everyone else (at least locally!) is asleep, and I am free to wander in midnight’s kingdom with my thoughts and dreams. Here I am in the middle of the night again, I’ve been working on my business all day, it’s become really late, and I’m getting that middle of the night melancholy feeling. So I thought I’d dig out this strange little poem which dates from around 1997 or 1998. I haven’t written any new poems yet. Maybe I will. Maybe I need the catharsis that comes from shedding the old poems, like shedding a skin, getting rid of them in a sense, moving them from the hidden confines of my hard drive…

Interregnum

Old sorrows in the night,
Rain like a galaxy at the window
Under streetlight, web of darkling
Fantasies my cold soul,
In its madness, spins.

The sky is my fretboard:
A million notes I play like chaos,
A thousand twangling nothings
That stir the heart like pain
And overture the morning.

This stillness, its grief:
The quiet mind filled
With the prophecy
Of dawn seeping upwards
Like a lapping tide.

And there, that edge of sun
Like a rough blade
Hacking at the wrists of clouds,
Lets out its slick of red
Spraying light like an artery.

New sorrows start the day:
Rain like a bloodstain at the window.
Under the chill sun, meanings twitch
At curtains, birds gather:
Familiars, hieroglyphs, portents.

I deliberately didn’t post anything on Valentine’s Day. It would have been far too distasteful to dig out a love poem and post it just because a particular day demanded it. Last post was a simple love poem, this one is about something more specific. Just one of those nights with an epiphany, an awakening of sorts. And the starfish, sometimes, still lingers…

Sleepless in Surbiton

Shadows patrol the ceiling like the bulks of boats
As fish might see them from their dark.

You float beside me, stirring now and then
Like a buoy that signals the edge of deep water.

Rest won’t come to me, maybe because
I haven’t learned how to dream here yet,

Or because, close to your seaweed hair, I know
That this last sinking is all I will have left of you.

Our bodies turn and touch, two pebbles
Stirred by the churn of water, snatching breath.

If you wake I cannot tell, can only sense
The flutter of your heart, frantic as oxygen escaping.

And then you turn away with your deepening secrets,
And I look at you, lying like a metaphor

Of sand presenting itself to the ocean, and outside
Blackbirds signal dawn like gulls on a dreary spit.

And I slip from your side like a tide going out,
Leave in those rockpool eyes, this starfish of my heart.

A simple little poem, probably best consigned to the poetic dustbin, but since it’s 12 months before it would be appropriate to publish it again, I thought I might as well include this very short old poem from my student days (we’re talking about February 1990 here!). I am still working up to actually starting writing again, any new poems will be published under the poems 2006 category. I really hope I can start producing some high quality poetry again (assuming I ever did before!)

Letter in February

She likes the snow. I am gladdened
By the warmth it gives her, the little
White flames of beauty clinging to her hair.
She is mystery, and comes from
The home of the snow. The flakes are
Her nostalgia, an intricacy of memories.
The snow is my love, irrevocably drifting.

I wrote this poem when I was supposed to be working. As the title suggests, I was in an office at the time. It’s quite a sad and desperate piece, but then the futility of humdrum daily life can often be quite sad and desperate. I’ve been very busy lately running the business that is supposed to give me more time to write, but this poetry blog will get there. I already changed the name, and put it in my own name. There’s ego for you. But I think putting my name to the work is a fair exchange for sharing them with the world for free 🙂 I do write more cheerful, less serious poems, but I have to admit I do have tendencies towards the melancholy. It’s a habit I’m trying to break, though!

OK then, Office Hours. Dedicated to the millions who look from the window of their office, and dare to question the 9-5 slog…

Office Hours

Sky snares attention,
Roofs lean towards the perpendicular
Of desire, shadows
Serpent in corners,
Billow and writhe
In peristalsis of fire.

Surely some tenderness
Waits in the fingers that press
Hot wax
Into the blindness
My days describe?

Chill teeth
Nibble in the guilt of winter.
I have no bones
For the nipping dog to shake but mine;
My clacking life portrays its end
In the thousand little failures
That the hours cast up.
And I have done little
But bleed since the wound
Of this
Place opened.

Whose hand casts the spell
That diminishes success?

When will love fill this mirror
Where I hang my emptiness?

What future can declare itself
Against this endlessness?

(circa 1992)

I’m starting with some old stuff. This one’s about thinking and writing, and that’s all I’ll say…

Vision

A footprint on the moon? Yes, a step
In the once-happeningness of pilgrimage;
Then, the furtive overlapping of cloud.

My heart tills an alertness of love,
Setting store for tomorrow’s troubles.
I hunker down by the field of drought

To see what can be kept, what withers.
Seasons choose wetness or dryness
But human frames adapt, improve and swell

The harvest of mere accidents.
Still among scatter-crow panic I drop safe
In a hearth place of anywhere.

This hold of mind. This net of being.
These lines I press and furrow, my smudge
Among the the fingerprints of vision.