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.

A Poet Is Born Not Mad(e)

I AM echoing in the indifferent air,
Clare rose from his maddened fog
and must have wept to see the mirror.

How long would it be before he was
To be toss'd into nothingness once more,
The cloud smothering him in his shroud?

What is worse, The tragedy of insanity:
Hos life's slow swirl into the maelstrom-
The bare knuclked fight into oblivion;

Or wretchedly waking to watch the vast
Ship of his hopes woefully wrecked
Against the rocks of his past?

Terling

In shaved light
The great leafed autumn
With its Klimt shimmers
And Palmer palimpsests
Is waiting to sleep.

Yet there is still surprise
Before the ground grows iron
And bereft
But for bare stalks:

We can hear in its breath;
In this sweet rot
The secret is out,
There is delight in this death.

The Razor's Edge

If I could I would pause you now
With your liquid laugh echoing
In the bathroom while you watch me
Shaving in the morning mirror.
Your face mimics mine as I stretch
My skin to smooth the passing
Of the razor's each sharp sweep.
Like Jonathon Joe in the verse
Our mouths are like huge Os;
So soon we are giggling. I'm swallowing
Foam and I'm glad drowning in love.

So let's stop and grasp what we share -
Small moments - let's not ask for more,
For how long before it's your hair there
And there's a lock upon the bathroom door?

Remembrance Service 1984

What a name for a boy-
Montague Rainbow-
To hear that young November.

A roll-call of the school dead
Dully read to us
As we shuffled and yawned.

But now at forty and more
He stays in my head,
No grand arch offering hope

Instead an oil slicked puddle -
A mess to tread through -
A name with no meaning left.