The Melody at Night with You.

And the buildings are cut out against the sky –

A perfect space to call us to the everyday.

The full earpodded rush of jangled music

Opposes  the mundane wish to get into bed.

Soberly I just want to erupt and dance in the streets

Make myself a mockery as the song assumes,

To sling my arms to the air and swirl delight.

These night excitements need to be cherished

Too often we are made poorer, necessary amnesia;

Batted aside by the ordinary, the rational and sensible.

We have no big G or little g Gods, no diety

To hallelujah anymore and keep us in line.

Any awe we feel is formula, weighed, explained.

The instant that fills the space – that now rush

Comes before we can think, it sings us into

An other, both utterly us and utterly new.

Nethergong

We three boys waited that night for the stars to arrive

While our ash damped fire fizzled to a finish,

They tardily attended like reluctant pupils

Attention seeking Vega pin bright -

A hole punched in the black blue paper of the night.

Slowly the others shuffle on late for lessons

Not one then a sudden milky swirl frothing up

And over the cup like classroom hubbub.

We strain, necks cricked until we catch

Ourselves wordless all ashiver.

We stumble torchless to the tent

Only a topped pine in the distance

And the soothing hum of cars speeding late…

A father, two sons,

How many times

Has this scene been seen?

Giving nothing less

Than the universe

And our own

Wonder in it.

Haptic

I.

When the conference confetti

has been swept away

What am I left with?

Awkward interrogations:

Am I making something

Or just

Making things happen?

Trying to grasp something, to connect

My hand to the back of my head.

To inhabit another’s thoughts

making mine more than before.

II.

Words. Words. Words…

We are hungry for sound,

Getting rough with it,

Feeling it bodily

Taking us to a dramatic

Elsewhere.

This afterlife of art

Making us adept at

Experience.

Exercising otherness

Losing and finding

Our self in that 

unrepeatable moment 

Of reflection.

III.

Culture is where we all grow

And encounter the unforeseen:

The thoughts that come up

Come out. And the edifice

We defend ourselves with

Is pared away and our souls

Boil over with the asking.

(This poem is an attempt to collect two and a half days of thoughts from the World Together Conference run by the RSC and Tate. I have used/taken appropriated the words ideas of, amongst others: Sirley Brice Heath; Cicely Berry; Jon Needlands; Carla Rinaldi; Steve Siedel, Frederick Douglass)

Altered Imagists #1

i

Winter like a naked anorexic.

Everyday a pathetic fallacy.

ii

In the sodium glow of the snow,

                                                           the fox clocks me

                                                                                             and with a flick of his hips

                                                                                                                                             he's slipped away.

iii

Like a rich man showering treasure,

snow soon turns in to a bitter miser.

The Js

“what thou lovest well will remain…” Ezra Pound - Cantos

I

At night when sleep doesn’t come

I think of my boys upstairs,

What will life be like for us?

II

My boys, My boys, of the little I know

I know this…I feel more

For your faces in the morning;

For your slipper of warmth;

For your glide in the evening;

For your calf-like grazing;

For your nuzzle;

For your soft nudge;

For your companion kindness;

For your necessity and pride;

For your air filling chatter;

For your inconsequential news;

For the head scratching

Fact of it all…

I feel more than any metaphor

I have put on the page.

III

In my head I think of my best self, wise -

Dispensing necessary adages age provides,

An old chum with his hand firmly on the tiller

Steering clear of life’s uncharted perils.

But my true self knows the duffer,

The bluff plodder whose luck comes

Only through graft and surprise.

Too ready to grab the brakes

At the first thought of a corner.

IV

Life can only be measured by its memory

Yes, we live but we always feel we die too soon.

Our lives mean through their meaning to others.

I’m not old, I know but youth has fled me.

These beauties on the tube do not look for me

But through me, my age an invisibility,

Their very youth an amulet against the grizzled

And what they think they will never become.

V

I wish my boys these girls (or boys)

That pedal into life on the very rivet –

Unfazed by failure and fear merely words.

Happiness coming from living and living,

Fuelled by the ineffable fact of being alive.

My life has been something else again

I know so little about Love and Death and God,

I live by the sea where any revelation

Is only ever temporary to be covered

By the next tide that hides all once again.

VI

Oh My boys…Oh, My boys…

All other stuff is meaningless, except

Death coming out of the mist in disguise,

In its soft hearse to surprise and appal us.

Let me be joyfull for you and with you,

But I cannot promise that any of this will be true.