Man in The Moon

Reblogged from Three Men on The Moon:

There liveth none under the sunne

That knows what to make

Of the man in the moone.

John Lyly, ‘Endimon,’ 1591

An old grey man carrying

a lantern across the sky.

Do you expect me to smile?

To light the night and

warm lover’s faces

with beams of white?

Mouth like a crater, eyes trying to focus

but never acknowledging the metamorphosis –

Read more… 16 more words

Appearing at Wenlock Poetry Festival Three Men on The Moon

Lamplight

Lamplight

 

I want to get my dictionary

but it’s next to my daughter’s bed

and I don’t want to wake her.

The window is open and the cold

night lies like a wet compress

on my back, cars slice through winter

and the dog snores in the kitchen.

I write by lamplight

while my daughter twitches in her sleep.

My thoughts are magic-carpeted

across town to where a tattooed young man

sleeps in the arms of his mother

and a six-year-old girl watches

her father dig a hole in the garden.

A bottle breaks tossed into the road.

5th Annual Troubadour Poetry Prize

Announcing the £2,500 Fifth Annual Troubadour International Poetry Prize

Judged by Susan Wicks & David Harsent (with both judges reading all poems)

Sponsored by Cegin Productions

Prizes: 1st £2,500, 2nd £500, 3rd £250 & 20 prizes of £20 each
Plus a Spring 2012 Coffee-House-Poetry season-ticket
and a prizewinners’ Coffee-House Poetry reading with Susan Wicks & David Harsent on Mon 28th Nov 2011
for all prize-winning poets.

Submissions: by Mon 17th Oct 2011
for more information and entry details visit www.coffeehousepoetry.org

Ashbery’s Comet

Ashbery’s Comet

 

I’m here on campus so I have no excuse. Waiting

at the junction so no way out this side

of heaven. And I’m keeping my hours under lock and key

listening to showers pound on the atrium, waiting

for my excuses to show their filthy little faces…

 

there is no point rushing in, just let that whistle

break the heat, the August heat that
hangs like a damp towel over town and country

 

while I sit on the back seat sticky in ice cream, scratching

the thousands of grains studded into my sun-burnt skin

and blinking as the posts of the
past hypnotise and phomp

phomp, phomp off into the middle distance.

 

I never want to lose the ability to re-create

a car journey, a holiday romance or the path of a comet.

In Translation (Someone Gets Lost)

In Translation (Someone Gets Lost)

…you recognised my voice crazy as a chained dog

barking at the wind and you left me your accent to imitate

in this resort tarnished by rust, that orange blush

that calls to interpreters through the whitewash.

 

The gulls cry at the height of the season lolling

as they cross coast to coast searching for a bone.

 

I knew it was you, that smile slightly askew

your top lip basking in the glory of that borrowed moustache

you bought at Brandenburg Gate in ‘48 with Cecile?

 

We arrived at the church later that afternoon

in the half-light of a candle-lit mass, we wandered

the dull transept asked after the absent priest his choirboys

now safe but still numb. He’d gone to a better place.

 

We stepped out into the glare of the street

walked past the distillery hand in blasphemous hand

down town to a bar where American guitars

were being thrashed in the name of teenage angst.

 

An ex-school teacher friend who’d been bitten

and lost his nerve moved to a seaside town

to slowly slip under the waves, but now we’d found

him he dissolved tea stained and bitter

into the municipal pool, it was deathly absurd.

 

The guitars were stoked to ballads, they weaved

tales of drugs, cars and murder, but we stood

our ground on this mound of religious books.

 

A simple blues, slow and timeless meandered through.

You wanted to ask a question; I sensed the crescendo

building, the damage being done, the past was catching up

to us too quickly. We had crossed that rickety bridge into the floodlit dockyard.

 

The sun ticked at the boxes of fresh caught fish with eyes

as dumb as marble and with flaking scales of dried-out

rainbows that had been hauled over rusting

only to flap it’s oily death throes under a salty sun.

 

We couldn’t call it murder, we didn’t call anyone.

The priest had caught a steamer to South America

and your school teacher friend was reportedly seen robbing

a post office in Clapham. You couldn’t make it up.

 

The ice cracked like a poem being translated. Your skin

tasted of lemon and as you waited for August to click on

into September; our time of sweet berrying and leaf mould

we dreamt of the catching of the last train to California.

 

I spoke quietly

and for the first time it appeared that you were listening.

 

The transcript was published years later. The academic

who had interpreted those hieroglyphs spent years in jail

re-searching loneliness, loneliness and motivation.

An explicit version can be found on the internet with a salty pre-amble.

 

I read it late one night in my cell listening to the gulls

fight with their demons over my bunk, circling the bay.

hanging in a warehouse

blue crush
yellow tip 60-a-day

newsprint soft
hand hard

winter new
world through

the dark
window

guard the brown
red

maroon stain
in an off-white

overall hang it on last night’s

hook so
close to home

coffee
nicotine Mets

streak
extends to ten he folds

the Times they re-set the tables

for the morning

A History of The World in 100 Objects (Part One).

A History of The World in 100 Objects (Part One).

I can’t get the winter off my boots, a determined

Sludge holds on thick and grey, so I kick start January

Against the frame, ferret out the only place

I can go when the snow lies heavy on my shoulders.

Everyone has a favourite Beatles song, unconsciously

they Imagine John Lennon frozen like a giant

popsicle, stored in the cultural refrigeration section

of the Guggenheim, where at midnight he breaks

the seal and floats down empty corridors calling out

for a pencil. There would be a plaque above his casket

that read: sorry no flash photography – we don’t want

him turning up blurred and grainy on the internet.

* * * * * * * * *

Holden has died where the crowds are daffodils

and a trip to the store would seem unnecessary, shopping

comes to your door. I will die this way too – a solitary man

shopping on the web for groceries, setting traps for reporters

nailing myself to an evergreen on bank holidays.

* * * * * * * * *

In a coach station a 60 watt bulb is reflected

in the grimy mirrors and casts a vague outline

of trouserless women on the cubicle doors and men

who stand in lines like Trojans and fart in the face

of overwhelming odds, their swords hidden

in the cigarette smoke and flatulence.

* * * * * * * * *

You are a digital representation of exactness so clear

I can feel your silence. Somebody’s daughter trapped

in the skin as it collapses. Listen to the lover in your ear.

* * * * * * * * *

A mist that curls around heath and tower

a fog that waits under street lamps

a broken transmission from space. And

we want to mark our passing in stone, plinth-like

standing in sand, unaccountable, invariably shifting.

Wenlock Poetry Festival

link: http://www.wenlockpoetryfestival.org

This is poetry without edit… Larkin vs Ashbury.

“to oppose is to live” – Kaneko

…the day has been compressed, now all that exists

is a sentence ‘I wouldn’t bother’, the day has all

but gone but these few words have soaked up my life

like a sponge; I went and bought some Ashbury

immediately. My lips worked at his Americanisms, his

voices of a modern world so interwoven that the road-

mender and the waitress began to talk ‘Is he ok do you

think?’ Acquaintances passed looking back into empty

pool rooms and snugs, tasting real ale in the sawdust

memory of it; while I tried to get my tongue round Parma-

gianinino, failing silently then imagining the CCTV footage

and the M15 expert interpreting me ‘It’s language Jim, but

not one I’ve heard of’. More Larkin than Lorca, griity humour

born of death, the waiting for it, the considering of it… a boy, now man

gets off the 41 on the High Street carrying multiple carrier bags. Back

to Ashbury, describing in detail a reflection in a painting, a man experimenting

and there I am in the back of a spoon misrepresented, distorted, the wall

behind me spattered with coffee and cola, the spot light on the track sun- like

bouncing reflections off my mis-shapen baldness, Larkinesque, Larkin

via Dylan Thomas interlaced with Python and The Clash… where

was I? Ashbury quoting Vasari and another bus stops opposite

no acquaintance just familiar faces and the reflections of them-

selves they carry past each window, switching between scene

settings on a camera phone – sepia, sunset, none. And I’m off

on a journey, a journey someone else is making, it involves sea

docks, boats, gulls and slight waves on a diminishing day -

I shouldn’t read Larkin, I quickly begin to sound like him, wise

as a lover, a cat with a creamy beard, pools winner, who’d have

thought Hull City away! A 20-1 outsider, I dream of a body somewhere

between Racquel and Nigella, but without a smile. I close my

eye. ‘It’s dark, the darkest I think I’ve seen’. The poem finds

itself, chooses its own path and decides when its finished, except

I’ll wrestle with this bugger until one of us gives in.

Ashbury vs Larkin. Its over. Win-win.

National Poetry Day

So hello,

In the coffee shop and yes I can see my reflection in the window.

Who spends their time looking out of windows, recording thoughts about random and irregular things.

And when we look into the window we see people walk on the other side of us. And when we read poetry we see, hear, feel the people from the other side walk through us. 

“Things floating like the first hundred flakes of snow
Out of a storm we must endure all night” – Wallace Stevens ‘Man Carrying Thing’