2021.9 Impington

This is where I stopped before,
left leg trembling, hip socket whingeing.
“I, er, just need to sit for a bit.”
No need to tell him this was the furthest
I’d walked in months,
running the gauntlet of fears
known and unknown,
just to leave my house.

And now, solo, I’m crouched on this
misshapen heap of concrete,
luminous with several types of safety
(and the vasodilatation of the seriously unfit),
having spent the last 15 minutes
waiting for the 20 minute timer
to signal my retreat,
too fast for my own good,
It seems.

Birdsong twines with cut grass,
conversation courts a
cutting engine of some kind,
the Busway hisses with tires
large and small,
and some offshoot of the A14
grumbles with an unaccustomed
rush hour.

Normalcy sidles closer.
I am gross with inactivity,
this venture exceptional
where it used to be my daily
(later check reveals it’s half as far),
waiting for my cycling muscles
to grudgingly unwind
where they used to fly me,
prompted to this pass
as an excuse for poetry,
too conscientious for my own good.

Before I opened these notes
a dog trotted by,
good boy,
vest emblazoned with Best Friend,
tended by a man carrying his
every possession,
sleeping bag a flag
as he moved a well-worn groove
to semi-rural safety, off-track.
I no longer carry cash.
He never asked.
We nodded.

Soft drops dance on this screen
As the manual saw picks up
Its master’s cough
And I remind myself I’ve always liked
the glottal taste of rain,
trained myself to enjoy its
caress as a blessing through
many years spent second-guessing
Welsh weather,
too stubborn for my own good,
too good at making virtue of necessity.

But it’s time to go home:
to boxes
and still air
and silence.
I won’t mind it
this time, creaking to my feet.
Besides: I’ve always worn a mask
For this.

The prompt for today was to take a walk and write about it. I cheated and cycled.

The Busway, Impington. Bicycle poet’s own.

2021.6 Web

It’s the precision.
Moonlight stepping strand to strand
delicate as	her hands deft on the keys
dark glitters on the edge
the edge of	hands gather notes like a
	“Charmed to meet you.”
	“Where did they dig you up?”
exhaustion saws at the edges of him	Smiles
He is soft-ragged, a breath
Moonlight like a sarabande
Strands echoing in
Where?
It’s dark and there’s only his breath
but there’s a tune somewhere beckoning
why?	“They should have left you there”
This isn’t my story	tell your own
kind	“I’m not kind. I’ve never been
	heartbeat dropping heavy through his ribcage into his guts	“What did she say?”
Nothing.		There’s nothing here.
It’s been days.	How long has it been?
Time is snatches of breath between
Sleep doesn’t		“I’m sorry.”
	“I won’t give up. I
Can’t see anything but	you.
There’s dust now.	“You know what they say about dust”
Dusk was her time
Shifting between states
But it’s night now.
The precision mocks him again, all straight edges in unfiltered light	“Say it again! Say those words!”
	Face screwed up like.
	“Face it, I’m no-one’s idea of
Heaven
His laugh caws from him, splatters down among the straight lines	Destination unknown.	“Dehydration, in the end. Simple. Well, not simple.”
		“Why didn’t he say anything?”
It’s funny, really.	“Now, there’s a word with a lot of meanings.”
Always.
He tries to cough. There’s nothing but himself.
Pain is a distant thing. He Drifting.		“Nothing to be done.”
Caught.	Diminuendo.	“I’m sorry.”
	You said that already.
DC al Fine

This came from the Day 6 prompt, but that’s all I can tell you, as I pretty much just wrote the images as they turned up while listening to the playlist, then arranged them like this.

Image from Smart News; I've not been able to find an attributed source.

2015.5 Dawn

This is not my first all-nighter, 
and it won’t be my last by 
any stretch of the imagination, 
consciousness grating on 
flayed nerves, 
bursts of radio static 
in unconsidered colours, 
twenty-seven and already 
deeply familiar with severed realities.

It is, however, my first
by National Express
(though not my last)
as I’m passed from pillar to post,
mostly through the ghost towns
of the ancient coach stops
dotted across the bleary landscape
I am starting to call… not home,
not yet, but a beacon to
my bruised heart,
choosing this quest to sain me.
Sain Us.

I am trying to stay awake in
the grey, migraine strip-lit
flicker that is Luton airport,
20… 20… 2002? 2003?
resting, restless, on slippery surfaces
designed for anything but
relaxation, consuming sugar
against the drooping eyelids
that might see me miss
my destination.

I am reading a book, slim-yet-dense,
never guessing its part in
consuming obsession ahead of me,
and yet the Now-Me can’t remember
if it was Volume I or II.
I’m convinced it was I, yet the
crackling synapses of that dreamtime
bridge the distance, flip the pages of
the man solo save for a stray boy
straight into the beached doorways
drifting between times
five years later.

And, let’s face it, I made that
cash-saving escapade more times
since than I can easily reckon,
the beckoning of Milton Keynes
summoning me from the safety
of Wales, a controlled skid into
a different way of existing,
resisting silent pleas for
the belief that I could be more,
twice four-score miles
from childhood seasons,
bilingualism, hills, and sea.

We’ll never know –
I walked through the door willingly,
fleeing pain and… me,
and found a different verse,
some words worse, but others new,
knew myself for poet,
preacher, teacher, larger, kinder,
reaching different peaks,
but losing song, and, dragons fading,
I strode on, alone, into the Wastelands.

So, this comes from the Day 5 prompt and, as some folk have also reported, I never followed through on the actual prompt, but got sucked into the image that accompanied it, which reminded me of a book some of you might have recognised from the fleeting description – The Drawing of the Three, by Stephen King. Except that the memory it summoned up in me was of a crazed all-nighter when I was reading the altogether different first book, The Gunslinger, so you get to experience a shred of my mildly synaesthetic, sleep deprived confusion.

I mean, to be fair, I did find this image on the Google Image search originally!

2020.12 Wild Ride

This was going to be something completely different, so I’ll have to write that one another time, because I put on my “Wordless Writing Mix” and, instead, this turned up (I’m fine…). The first part of said mix can be found here.

You are dropping, the pre-beat skitter of sensation
Making you weightless.
The anticipation crests, dips, hints at
Its own resolution, rhythm insinuating itself
Until it thuds through you.
And you realise: you knew it all along.

You’ve heard it before, know where the
Hiss like a gentle ripple of feather against the
Inner skin of your forearms starts,
Each separate drum pattern like a different
Fingertip tapping, insistent,
Shimmering in your nerve endings.

This next bit drifts, earthily ethereal,
And you don’t care that this makes
Precisely zero sense to anyone else
It’s your track, your experience,
Your associations, the thud
Underpinning the drift

This music hails you,
Reins you in and sets you free,
Fleet, repetitive, wordless,
And everything you need it to be,
Summoning forests and starscapes and
Those times you danced until 6am.

It, too, bids you farewell, blended into the next
By a master whose choices speak the language
Of Everything In Its Right Place,
Fingers crooked to beckon a deeper layer:
The book you haven’t finished writing yet,
Pages of historical imagery glittering between these notes.

It blocked out sound when you couldn’t make your own;
Wordless, it was the voice of controlled insanity,
The hallucination pinned in pages
And pages, and pages of people you’ll never meet
More real than anyone you ever will, sometimes,
Heroes and bullies and victims and saviours, some of them the same.

The darker layers ground you in the nighttime scrambles
The gambles with gravity made by people
You can never hope to be, given life by your keyboard;
And surely they’re bored, waiting for you to
Tell them what’s next, stop them from endlessly
Teetering on the precipice of the call to descent.

While you eddy in self-recrimination,
The music swirls to an end, no resolution met
Except the resolution to resolve.
Your foot describes revolutions beneath your desk,
Pent in the need for tactility other this virtual frisson;
The lesson still eludes you, like the almost-words you hear.

Kyrie Eleison? Is that it? Or something less sacred,
More profound, grounding the liminal in the reminder
That humans colluded in this acoustic miracle where you
Sough across the cosmos, in tune and out of sync
With your inspiration, metamorphosing the metaphysical
Into the metatextual, with a staggering lack of shame.

And maybe that’s all that’s needed: a sharing,
And you’re getting good at sharing without touching, aren’t you,
Breathing separate air and yet resonating across the distances.
As Above, So Below, you learned that theory far too long ago,
Feeling the void at your core thrum, somehow,
In recognition of the thing the music sings about.

The emptiness shouts in layers, the kind of colourful
You only find in camouflage, and still the tunes press on,
Unstoppable as guilt; as loud as your sleepless companions:
A formless sense of failure, and the fear of being found a fake.
Never tell me all artists feel the same way –
They’re delusional in their inadequacies, I am not.

And now even the intimacy made by the use of second person
Is broken; as inconsistent, in the end, as the internal rhymes,
The six-line stanzas, the clattering stabs at insight.

And it feels like cheating to end this on a neat highlight,
Next best thing to happy ending,
When the best you can hope for, playlist on loop
Is to hold out for your favourite track coming back again,
Fast-forwarding where it’s needlessly uncomfortable,
And binge on comfort, purge the words,
Binge on comfort, purge the words,
Binge on comfort, purge the words, hope the scourge
Of self flagellation cleanses wounds that can start to mend.

And if not? You can always press play again,
Submerge.
Fade to rainbows.

This image was the first thing that turned up on the image search list when using the search term “Glittering Void”. It’s apparently a still from this completely soundless video.

2020.2 Buzzing

“Humanity at one of its finest moments, in the pinnacle of creativity.” – YouTube user Turtlefeathers, on the 2010 video “Eric Whitacre's Lux Aurumque (Virtual Choir)” as quoted on page 197 of “Economies of Collaboration in Performance (More than the Sum of the Parts)” by Karen Savage and Dominic Symonds.

I have language issues, sometimes –
They arrive on the back of processor lag,
Me gabbling, attempting to parallel process
All the remaining words to say;
Turns out the human larynx
Doesn’t work that way, tongue tangled,
“Wurbs,” I say,
You nod gravely, parrot it back.

They flock, soaring and diving,
Sometimes outlining with crystal clarity,
A dance that changes,
Echoes in heads –
You forget the sense,
Retain the sensation;
Other times derailed into chaos,
Panicking at the claxon,
Unbuffered by Maslow.

Eat a sandwich.
Get some protein down you,
Eat a biscuit, drink some water.
Listen, if it was that easy,
I’d’ve done it already;
Instead I’m unsteady,
Rushing through on our old friend:
Adrenalin.
Because that always ends well.
And yet. And yet.

I can categorise the people I like
On several factors:
One: I can speak quickly enough
In front of them that my mouth
Can keep up with my brain.
Two: when they shoot for the blank
In the stammer, they land it
(by a broad majority).
Or three: stand back and let me
Catch up with fluttering synapses,
Humming gently to fill the silence.
That’s nice.
Three: three: three: thhhhrrrreee…
Four: they don’t take offence
At clenched fists, missed eye contact,
Never grab me by the wrist.

(Never grab me by the wrist.)

Sometimes there’s a big, blank space
For the word because there’s too many
Candidates, all circling, clamouring:
“Me! Pick me!” as I…
[I… what’s the word, the perfect word?
Cup left hand, clasp air, flicking eyes.
Something of wheat and chaff…
Yes!] winnow for perfection…
Except the moment’s gone, the rhythm
More than syncopated,
And dehydration doesn’t help –
Brain pickled in its own unhealthy juices.
Useless, useless, useless.

Shhhh…
A breath. Take one.
Don’t hush me.
No – not a gag, an amplifier,
A byproduct of the silence
Is that the words can ring in it.
I grumble, unconvinced.
Eat a sandwich, you glorious idiot,
Switch off your alarms,
And charm yourself to sleep with
Cheese and bread, forgetful of regrets.

(I agree, but type this up instead
As birds chirp, sky silvering into Saturday
While I softly splinter.)

2018.4 Druth

When I left, they let me.
No-one followed, And I
staff in hand made my own path
Sky-clean and stream-wandering.

I bordered on nothing, nodding
its feather-brush, touching and untouching.
I dark, it follow, wending and
unending. We peer freely, touch
with reverence, the grey is

And I

Forest is sky - the touch untouch
fronds against light and dark speaks.
It is more than maybe but
Not too soon.

If I, feathercloak fly it will be
Taken of taking, touch of untouching.
I gather. Cleave close to edges
Edges speak where the centre stays silent.
S   I   L   E   N   T   C   E      S   I   N   G

I prefer here that is not-there
Ivy shoulders; smoke skin,
Gather the edge dark in my hands
Wait patience as song for them to stop
feathering, gather my arms from mist
so I can eat.

I still eat, though its weight can be
bruising and nor of. Some of the
It’s very light, but quiet is dark so
edges of song drift feather bright

We were leaves once.

And we. We are featherdark light
And I am forgetting where my
old name talked.
It talked and talked, lode and loaded
the words hot and

Yet

Song.

Silencesong is feather soft, leaf edge
against me and we walk,
Darkness and I cry sometimes
Laugh sometimes, edge drift like
the smoke I remember
And quiet is still and I can hear
on the edge of breath

My other heart. A new hearth
For the silent song.

Bound no more. I am.

2018.2 Cycle

It all crowds my head. Your heat flickers inside me
And there’s no release, no means to breach this
I am lost in the white noise crackle, dappled in the harmful,
Gullet full of other people’s bile.
And I want to help. I really, really want to help
Help me. Help me stop this. Help.

Stop.

Step away, but that’s not far enough
Say it clearly, cite the parallels they’ve learned to adapt to -
Kitchen utensils as a measurement of capacity.
Acknowledgement
Affirmation
Just one more thing.
No more.
No more things
No more citations, no more debate,
No more inference that my interferent noise is not great enough
To break the signal.
No more, please - I’m not a debate, my existence
My existence isn’t theoretical, charity, a lack of clarity
I AM NOT A TEXTBOOK EXAMPLE.
Google terminology
Google visibility
Google why jokes are important, actually
Google “kicking down”
Google cultural signifiers
Google privilege
Google check your fucking privilege
Google those who’ve been able to say more clearly: this is not a joke
Google the statistics
Google the death statistics
Google the deaths
Google why me opposing your entitled bullshit here is as important as opposing state-sanctioned bullshit in [pick a country where human rights are a big issue and insert here]
Google why my existence doesn’t invalidate yours
Google why words are important
Google the fuck out of why I’m calling you out.
Google us. Read the fucking names.

Breathe.
Just fucking breathe.

Mount the bike,
Take the time,
Spend the excess adrenalin,
Make physical pain the coin of distance, of deliverance, of perspective.
Make.
Make cloud patterns
Make nods at joggers and dogs and kids on scooters
Make a third personal best on that curve north
Make good headway against return headwind
Make faces at other cyclists, and returning geese, and cows, and

Is that a hide or a bomb shelter?
Is that a war memorial or an abandoned pump?
Is that

This is broad lungfuls
This is the body’s heat, whispering into entropy
This is glissades of temporary
This is

You are.

Breathe.
Signal.
Manoeuvre.
Return.
Breathe.
Be.

Now, what were you saying?

2017.5 - First and Last

Not all gods live in groves
Not all skies burn.
We sought an answering pulse in the world
Stretched skins to echo
Sending an embrace to everything
Seeking answers in flesh and breath

And we found it in the rise and fall
And in the glory of the simple
Teeth chattering on that
First cold morning
One minute past dawn
And no-one told you
The way the colours would blend
And bleed and the way that warmth
Blesses.
The way your skin stretched itself
Over cramping muscles
And suddenly
You couldn’t stop
And there was nothing,
Nothing between the sky
And the bottom of your lungs

At the top of the hill
You couldn’t hear anything, at first,
Over your own gasps,
The protests of creaking bones
Too long still
And pushed to flight
And drinking in height
And the drop of earth
And the promise of rain
Seen three hours away.

Measuring distance in time
You are an alchemist
Blood flushing blue-white fingertips,
Stinging the tops of your ears
When was the last time you felt that?
When was the last time you knew
The size of your ears
Where they finished?

And when was the last time you heard
The praising skies
Echo and answer each other
Longing across the flocking distances
Bright as wingflight and
You wonder if you should want to take a photo
And you will never take a photo

This moment is textless
A grin stretching skin
Into a peerless ache.
And soon.
And soon the descent, slow and rueful
And yours.
But now?
But now you sing,
A diaphragm-deep gulder
Bellying the words before words
And this
This freedom?
This will tuck, a fold of always,
Rising to the surface
Each time you see such colours,
Each time your hear your own gasps,
Feel the span of your ears,
Freezing hot,
Each time you do not take a picture
Of the sunrise.


Those tricksters at Lies, Dreaming Podcast generously supplied some idiosyncratic prompts for NaPoWriMo. One struck me, at first because of the name, and then because it was a link, and then because what it linked to was so stunning, including what lay beneath. The poem above is a free-written piece that was the result of writing while listening. I thoroughly recommend it.

2015.6 - Life Lit

My brain got blown at some point this evening. I think it was when I was sitting in SHINDIG, which I was MC'ing, listening to Henri Salonen improvise with Adam Vallance to the latter's grandly simple piano compositions while watching Gytha Lodge's words turn up, projected across the back wall, as she - in turn - improvised a story in response to what she was hearing. That's live literature right there.

So I decided to write a poem in response to what I was watching and listening to. It's another stream-of-consciousness piece (necessarily), but there you go…

It's late, so I can't really tell if this would make sense to anyone who wasn't there as well/ isn't me, but hey…!

_________

Why are you still here?
For the hateful-sweet father groans
In contrary motions,
A evanescent threnody
Echoing in its own silence.

We wonder why bruises feel sweet
When pressed again,
Why salt water tastes inspiring.
It is because we've survived,
And are surviving.

Our choices appear to be:
Shuffling along boardwalks,
Or battling the wracking heave
Of dark oceans;
And either way,
There is the sunset -
Equally distant but gifting different
Perspectives on hope.

We are all driven by beats
Often hypnotic
But heard more clearly some times
Than others.
We are never locked in entirely
There is always a portal
That has (maybe) not been
Thought of before.

Even the instruments we've been given
Can be sounded differently,
Turning corners,
Making water from rock
Fire from water,
Air from fire.

And we will gather companions,
Sometimes only of our own
Imagining,
The safe places from which we stray,
Kites to the world's winds,
Tethered in love.
And forgiveness.

Sail on, dear heart,
Chart the arpeggios of wind
And water, the chords of
Fire and stone.
You are never alone
While our words together linger.

2015.5 - Gifts of Groaning

You are a taste in the throat,
A shape in the hands
Born of the ways
I waited for you,
Pulled through my palms
Like a star rope,
Sticky with expectations.

I cleave to, heave-ho
The mainbrace of our sailing weather
Uncertain if we're better together,
Shipwrecked,
Or a crystal split,
Calling us history, clever wrecks,
Wracked now by waves.

My mind now is heightened,
And I will call all the ways we spoke
Brave, or knavery,
Depending on the direction
Of the next fourteen seconds,
Because I don't want to be
A port in a storm,
Formed for idleness,
Repairs, and slow regrets.

_____________

Written as pretty much a atreawm of consciousness after reading Poppy's latest poem, so I've no idea what flavours she brewed there… Thanks, Poppy!

2015.2 - Riptide

We are in love
With our own misconduct
Running down corridors
Knocking on windows.

We are a fast and heady
Whirlwind of limbs
A tangle of notions
Flung to the fates.

We are bramble:
Sweet and scratchy,
A patchwork clan,
A gad-about-towning

Crown us and gown us
With the clouts of
Our own demise, but
We'll surprise you

A stumble tumbles
Into a dance move,
A suture for our
Brief frowns

You might surround us
But we'll astound you.
Don't try to trip us,
We'll only skip,
Hop, and jump,
Surfing our love
For this hurly-burly world.

________

The first two lines of this were taken from Spike Daely's poetry blog - https://spikedaeley.wordpress.com/ - go check it out!

#5 revolutions

i am every truth i ever heard
words blurring into
birds flight
enlightened sky
nights delight

i am every word that ever found me
deeds hurling into
heads mending
ends meeting
in the light

i am every truth that ever left me
weft heading into
warp drives
a pilots night
heads might just

i am every maybe that unmade
frayed weaving as the
lights leaving
birds leading
me to night

i am every night that words made true

#14 Chatter

This one came out of nowhere and is broadly true except for the actual "fact"... :)

And I can talk all night
About the Big Things -
Life and Death,
Earth and Sky,
Sea and Fire and Why,
But if I try for the small
And intense - the dense,
The less unseeably immense,
Your guess is as good as mine
On how to describe them.
Like the time you finally
Told me that you loved me
Next to the bins at Tesco,
An al fresco statement
That just sits there -
Bereft of all attempts to
Get in, explode and analyse deftly
Except that its weft
Definitely anchored you
Truly to the warp my life is
The infinitesimal start
Of hearts as a
Still-frighteningly close weave
That leaves me breathless
When I reach out,
Look around to the train
That trails behind
And winds round corners,
See how much more is left
To be clattered together
Line by line...