Poetry

caravan

I dreamt of the afterlife
I dreamt it’d be very nice
Sitting in a caravan
In the rain

If you’d been good
You could read a book
If you’d not been good
You didn’t get a book

And everything
Forever
Was the same.

Kitchens

We lived to see our kitchens become unfashionable,
Stood in showers carefully checking our testicles and tits,
For lumps,
While the furniture around us turned into the wallpaper
From our parents' young photographs,
Our memories became bigger
Than our plans,
Our Christmases were mostly
In our pasts,
We wheezed when we laughed
But it never stopped us laughing
In our unfashionable kitchens.

summer

Summer brings a Christmas of memories:

Mobile library, Shell petrol station, the slideaway,
The rope, the camp, lollies, walking to Dalton,
The suitcase prepared -
In the event of nuclear warfare.

At the windowsill,
Reading the Tron novelization,
Return of the Jedi soundtrack
On the alarm clock cassette radio: ‘The Battle of Endor’
The smell of cut grass, sports day gone,
Birthday to come,
Going to bed and there’s daylight glowing from the ceiling.
Thinking:
Why can’t it be this way forever?
And the cut grass answers:
It’s gone.

Birthday Poem

I got to saying it so often
I thought it was true
‘I’m 19 in here,
Not really 42’

But something has changed
(And by changed I mean died)
In here I’m 42,
Stupid to deny:

I’m sadder than I was;
My body looks like shit;
I use semi-colons;
I think about getting fit.

The long grass of summer
The huge skies of drink
The cigarettes of conversation
Being on the brink

Of the rest of my life,
A panorama in widescreen...
Now everything
I’ve already seen.

So this is the way
It’s going to be:
In here I’m 42,
Though I’m really 43.

birds again

It is
Hard to believe
Birds don’t spend their lives going
‘Wow I can fly!’
But they don't.

They think of it
If they think of it at all
The way we think of running
Or walking
Or really high jumping.

forever

I said I would love you forever
And you wondered whether
Forever was one of those periods that ever-
Y now and then changed I said 'never'
Wherever you are I'll be close by loving you forever
But you insisted 'how long is forever?
And when you say never do you really mean never
Or are you a little like the weather
That is there forever
But changes altogether?'
Well, now I think we must be clear
Forever lasted for a little over a year.

joke

Getting old is a joke that starts when
You're twenty five, when you begin
To say 'I'm getting too old for that'
But the non-fat joke gradually wears thin.
'Not at my age,' you say,
'It's a young man's game.'
But when you're not looking
You're saying the same
Thing but now it means
Something completely different
Little complaints about your health
And adolescent policemen
And before you know it
The joke begins to mean
Itself.

the birth of the universe

it was 13.75 billion years ago
the universe began
here's me 13.75 billion years later
on a train
reading about the big bang
reading about atoms and matter and dark energy
and the whole shebang
on a train
stuck between
Stoke and
Birmingham

river

staring at the river
takes me back
to thinking about when
I worked at the shoe shop
the top of Dalton Road
must be twenty five years
ago now

wondering a little bit
about what waves actually are
movements of water obviously
but different bits of water
even though it's the same wave
I earned not much more than a
tenner for a day's work
always asking if they needed shoe laces

it's like light being a wave and a particle
or something in a football stadium
when the football gets boring
there are little bits of twigs
looks too cold today for fish
i bought a talking heads album
True Stories and that was my day's wage gone
proof of a salesman is sundries
Margaret the manager would say
after all, they're here to buy shoes
twenty five years ago
waiting to get home
to play my LP

the journey

This journey
we're on
the next step
weighs
as much as
the horizon

the useful unusefulness
carry along
from the fruit
we don't eat
to the footwear
we wear
our longing to
complete
but at the same time
not complete
this journey we're on
take one more step
knowing that
one of these steps
will eventually be
the horizon

but not
which one

Dead men I have seen

I haven't seen many dead men
And no dead women at all.
There was Granddad.
The priest said not to think of him as being dead
He'd gone into another room
And we got ice-cream for being good.
There was a man at the railway station.
Walking by police men. standing. waiting.
Around a lump under a blanket.
Only when I got back did I see the shoes.
The toes up tell tale shoes.
Guess what I've just seen, I said,
When I got to work.
And no one guessed. I just told them.
I don't want to talk about the other one.
Not in a list.

All the pisses of my life

Oh the pisses I've had
Standing in the pub with
Friendship roaring through the walls
By the side of the road
hissing in the long grasses
The trees I've pissed against
The faces I've drawn in the snow
The porcelain I've rang like a bell
From Adamant to Dolomiti

Oh the pisses I've had
Beery and Wagnerian
In length
Off the railway bridge into the
Darkness below
The coffee pisses
The work pisses
The sigh, the long liquid sigh,
The train loos
Swaying unfortunately
Ill timed
Into the station.

Oh the pisses I've had
The throaty gargling
Hydraulic drilling
The stuttering trickling
Almost finishing
And now the three o' clock in
The mornings
Looking at the paint flake
Of the ceiling
Listening to myself breathing
Thinking about the pisses
Of my life.

books i bought earlier this summer

the books I bought earlier this summer
sit on the shelf
some of them read
no longer new
smelling of fingers
thumbed, pages turned down,
crumbs of old sandwiches,
a single dark teardrop
from a nose bleed

some started, officiously, dishonestly
bookmarked, like a phone number ostentatiously
written down
I'll get back to you, yep

some are now an annoyance
a book I bought because
I was in the mood to buy a book
any book,
or had some passing mania

There'll be a time, not yet,
that these books will be old
and will have belonged to a different me
someone I'll feel sorry for.
I can feel it now.
I feel the weight of my future sympathy.
It's oddly comforting.

The day of the funeral

The day of the funeral
We left the washing on the line
Not thinking it would rain
But it rained
Fat drops of rain.

Returning to the house
We saw it through the kitchen window,
Hanging, bedraggled and wet again.

Do we wash it again
Or leave it out to dry once more?

How dirty can rain be?

The Truths

In the room next to the kitchen
We'd left them talking about curtains
But something had wrong and we
Could hear the cracking fire makes
When he grinds his teeth, smoke
Gripped under the door and heat
Bent the walls.

We waited until next morning.
The room was burnt clean.
They'd got down to brass tacks,
Back to basics,
Fundamentals,
Bone and carbon.
We had the dental records to hand.

Bookmark

a white, green and high blue photograph
slips from between the pages of a paperback,
you, with your arms and gut, looking like a gangster,
behind you, at an angle, a rectangular slice of East Anglia,
you smile fixed betweensatisfaction and anger,
because someone, you know who, can't work your new camera

Thought

Far out on the lonely sea
Deep dark in the middle of the night
A seagull floats on the water
Bobbing in the blue star light

And do you know something strange
That is strange but true
That little seagull right now
Is thinking about you

Links.

I've had poetry published in various small publications which have since come out on the internet.
Here's:

The Letter
One Day (Like Many Others)
All Those Days

Here's an old article I wrote about Shelley.