Poems 2010

The Golden Section

He thought of Piero Di Cosimo
And the crate of Breaker malt liquor
Underneath his bed
In the bedroom he shared with his
Brothers in their bunks
With Scritti’s ‘Songs To Remember’
Playing and thoughts of her rejection
Turning his guts inside out
That sensation, so hard to describe
Once it’s left behind with the set squares
And the copy of ‘From Giotto to Cezanne’
Bought for him at the beginning of term

He thought of that trip to the Pompidou
The walk past Pigalle’s sex cinemas
The sullen sarcasm and the snide one-liners
That spoiled that joyless journey home
To a cottage pie tea and the usual storms
In a house too small to escape in
To sulk in and to pretend it didn’t affect him

She knew it did, he couldn’t hide it from her
Or himself and his petulance intensified
Till he lost interest in everything to do with art
Two dimensional representations
Of three dimensional lives
The bogus restrictions and legalities of men
Conforming to patterns, to ideas of exactitude

Maybe they were wrong, these grand masters
Maybe they made it all up as they went along
And golden sections and divine proportions
Only made sense to those who seek reason
Above the abstract forces of love
So fuck Fra Angelico and fuck Picasso too
Because their shapes never made sense to him
And Miro and Monet and Mondrian didn’t feel
What he felt or see what he saw

He thought of that night in hers watching
The first ever episode of Brookside
Of crying laughing at The Young Ones
And how Channel 4 was exciting and
Summed up the new possibilities
Now open to them and the how
Those winter nights smelled different
To any he’d known before
The levitating rush of walking home
In his Israeli Parka and Adidas shoes
Flushed pink inside by thoughts of her
What could Turner or Titian teach him of this?

He thought of his theme of ‘landscape in Renaissance art’
The traditional subject matter subjugated to a minor role
The angels and the saints and the myths of old Abraham
Used as decoration more than anything else
The otherwordly depiction of ancient Judea as medieval Tuscany
Of reclaiming art from the Pharisees and the Papacy
But none of that ever got written and all his work was left
Uncollected during the summer as the YTS scheme beckoned
There were strange mountains and hill top castles in his heart
They remain there still.

Stedheads

They’re the new kids on the block
Down at the needle exchange
Replacing the smackheads
Sundry Hep C cats and HIVIPs
Young lads bloated into mutant forms
Parodies of masculinity
Praxilites wouldn’t have wasted marble on them
Or took up his chisel to carve
Such ugly, disproportionate torsos
Muscles not developed for swords
Or spears to ward off Medes or Spartans
But injected with just enough juice
To create an angry, spotty tribe
Of Young Frankensteins
Who compete for the mating rights
To oven-roasted, re-aligned females
Mocking Diana and Aphrodite
These bleached and inflated babes
Are selective and yet so predictable
So the stedheads stand in line and collect
Their supply of plastic syringes
To puff them up for another week or two

Three Film Poems (after Denis Joe)

The 400 Blows (Francois Truffaut, 1959)

The boy empties out the garbage
The left-overs of his small life
Conversations with adultresses and cuckolds
He keeps his secrets in
Seeks freedom in those streets
Surrounding the Sacred Heart
The freedom of boyhood
Untied from the adult world
With adult rules and lies and slaps
He drinks stolen milk on frozen roads
Cherishes the weightlessness of youth
Mechanical and emotional detachment
From solid ground and family bonds
The joy of escaping gravity itself
On the beach he looks us in the eye
A look of triumph that says
‘I have time and I have strength
This world cannot contain me.’


Exterminating Angel (Luis Bunuel, 1962)

Destroy the weapons of culture
To build a bonfire
And with chicken feet and feathers
Sacrifice virgin Valkyrie
To free yourself from this spell
Trapped inside your system
Whisper Masonic oaths
To ward off Ursus roaming outside
Opium dreams; the tolling bell
The screaming damsels
They look to you for protection
And yet you are not men enough
To withstand this brief interlude
When your wealth counts for nothing
Destroy the weapons of culture
To escape your self-imposed prison
‘We are justified by necessity’ she says
Contemplating the sorcerer’s murder
And murder will follow for a generation
Fevered reams and a Paradisi sonata
Breaks the spell; one form of voodoo
Replaces another, one prison
For another and as you gather
Inside your castle, your cage
The sacred lambs assemble

Red Road (Angela Arnold, 2006)

Those lives that pass before your gaze
They are as real and lifeless as yours
The drunks and the dogs that you follow
They live here, they are not ghosts
Haunting your screen, haunting your life
And the druggy, plate licking prick who
You follow, befriend and fuck
Has his own demons (and virtues) too
And his murderous spunk
Cannot fix what has been broken
Cannot resurrect what has been lost
The litter blows and collects
On the car park, outside the shops
These lives are as real and lifeless as yours

Dead Venice

We made a wrong turn at the Piazzale Roma
This year our hotel was right next to the Rialto
We couldn’t go wrong, we thought
But we did
Or, rather, I did
We came here the year before
For my 40th birthday
In December, out of season
Cold but somehow
More Venetian than the summer
Our hotel was hidden away
Down the narrow back allies of San Cassiano
We walked for ages trying to find it
Now we were lost again
But it’s great being lost in Venice
Because being lost is the best way to explore the city
Its squares and churches, its shops and its people
Every passageway and strada leading to a fresh gasp
As a new piazza, palazzo or campo
Opens up before your tired feet
Yet the Venetians look wearied by tourists with loud cases
Clattering over bridges
Arguing as they study maps of their city

------

In the map room of the Palazzo Ducale you can marvel
At the extent of Venetian power in the middle ages
And the maps of the city itself have barely changed in 500 years
The buildings and the street plan remains unchanged
From the time of Canaletto
Casanova
Byron
Ruskin
The stones of Venice still stand as a monument
A testimony and a damnation of commerce
The same bricks built on blood and water
That connected Venice to Italy
To Europe
To the rest of the world
Stained by venal self-interest
In Venice I almost wished I’d been born Catholic
(or at least crack on to be Christian)
To take that ridiculous leap of faith
That would enable me to enter
A world of Holy virgin
Earth mother cults
Popes and Saints
Shrouds and prayers
Incense and miracles
Superstition remains seductive
Even to the scientifically minded
Reason?
Fuck reason for a while
And let’s put on masks
And play make believe
Just for now
For a few days only
Let’s have a carnival
And succumb to our senses
Or step inside one of the many chieses
The Madonna dell’Orto
San Giacomo dall’Orio
San Guiseppe di Castello
San Nicolo del Mendicoli
Santa maria della Salute
S. Maria gloriosa dei Frari
The names themselves offer some hope of eternity
Let’s offer votive thanks to the living and the dead
The arrogance of the atheist
The humanist reduction of everything
To rules and formulas and symbols
E=MC 2

--------------

On the Vaporetto ride to Murano
Where the glass factories still
Churn out multi-coloured lampshades
For tacky tourist Euros
We almost got off at the Isola di San Michele
The island cemetery
Thinking it was Murano
On the way back I wish we had got off there
Because Murano was pretty boring
Pretty but boring
And the cemetery looked idyllic
Set in stone and surrounded by trees
(Bonaparte’s idea to part the bones and stop the rot)
The dead of Venice lay in their lagoon
Their common triumph still standing
Across the water
Imagine their world
Their sense of curiosity
Their greed
Their virility
To set out from a sinking city
Founded by a defeated people
To set sail and to conquer
The seven seas
Sailing and trading
Enslaving and taming
More timid cities
Less hostile lands
The ghastly gilded Basilica di San Marco
Was carved from these bones
The bones of Venice’s victims
I think of the cemetery across from my own home
The place where my own ancestors are buried
Under polluted soil and chemical air
Maybe I should visit them first
History is not made by Great Men
In Great Cities
With Great Names
Who are immortalised
In marble and bronze and oil
With squares and churches and streets
Bearing their names
Those who become heroes
Who make money and who defend money
In the name of God or democracy or civilisation
Never get there alone
They tread over the graves of the obscure masses
And piss on their headstones

----------------

The year before
We’d celebrated my birthday with a meal
In a fine restaurant
And though we hadn’t booked
I still wore a suit
I felt less embarrassed than I would at home
Because Venice is elegant enough
To cope with pin stripes and a pink shirt
(no tie though, I drew a line there)
I’d eaten goose with fennel and pomegranate
Followed by fried seafood, served on brown paper
Which, if it had been served like that back home
Would’ve been met with horror but felt right here
That old inverted snobbery is hard to shake off
We drank too much wine and felt pleased with ourselves
How sophisticated we were
What bon viveurs
What swells
And what’s wrong with that now and then eh?
The next day I’d indulged in cuttlefish
Cooked in its own ink
An unappetising mess of black pasta
That I threw up in the night
Blaming the cuttlefish and not
The whiskey
The beer
The limoncello
Or the bellinis
We’d supped in Bacarro Jazz
Just off the Campo San Bartolomeo
Where the piped dinner jazz muzak
Made a mockery of the Blue Note icons
Bird
Monk
Miles
Trane
That decorated the walls
Black jazz, black ink
Black pasta, black vomit
We were up early next morning
We travelled from the hotel to the vaporetto stop
From the vaporatto stop to the Piazzale Roma
From the Piazzale Roma to Treviso airport
From Treviso to Liverpool
From Liverpool to Runcorn
Foot
Boat
Coach
Plane
Taxi
I puked all the way home
I spoiled myself and I spoiled the experience
This year, I’d behave

----------------------

We went back to the same restaurant where we’d had the seafood
It was still charming and busy and they found us a table
Even though we still hadn’t booked
They still served the seafood on brown paper
But I had monkfish this time
Something was missing though
(And not just my suit)
The fish market was in the same place
The Campo Della Pescaria
The same place it had been for centuries
Before we discovered it
But it didn’t provide the same sensual rush
As squirming prawns and slime shined squid
Mixed with the banter of the dapper old men
The Piazza di San Marco wasn’t flooded this year
It looked smaller somehow, less impressive
I’d even go as far as calling it mundane
The Christmas light netting hanging over the alleys
Didn’t have the same effect
The moment of discovery was gone
On our last night we’d eaten early
By midnight my wife was hungry
And sent me to look for food
The Rialto was dark and deserted
Save for a few handbag hawkers
The young black and Asian men
Hassled and outlawed by the authorities
Yet really the last remnants of the true Venetian way
A few bored locals wandered around
Everywhere was shut, save for a few fast food joints
I bought two slices of cold, microwaved pizza
Served by cheap, possibly illegal Asian labour
Venice, that Monday midnight, was as seedy and silent
And empty of life
As soul-less and wearied and downtrodden
As home
That night I could as well have been
In Runcorn Old Town
Outside the kebab shop
Waiting in the taxi rank
Opposite the old hardware shop
Now boarded up
And covered in flaking posters
For funky house nights

------------------

All places, however great
Become boring in the end
All beauty fades eventually
All sights and smells and feelings
Vanish to the prison
Of nostalgia and sentiment
And rot away
Fame and wealth
Power and empires
Reduced to fake designer handbags
And pizza boxes blowing across the piazzas
The braggadocio of the gondoliers
In their black hats and bomber jackets
Ghostly memories of the morning light
As we sip our coffee outside the hotel
Watching the Japanese tourists get stung
Forlorn waiters stack away chairs for another night
And wait impatiently for the summer
When visiting pilgrims descend
From all corners of the globe
To pay tribute to a myth of a city
To attempt a resurrection
By breathing new life into its decaying lungs
Tonight
Dead Venice
Is as dead as any place on earth


Rosemary

You commit the words to memory
Count the beads on your rosary
For you’ve seen visions on your walk
Listening to Smog and Jim O’Rourke
You’ve seen devils in the paving stones
Felt cold marrow inside your bones
So reach for reason and rolling backa
Spray your hair with holding lacquer
To try to fix your thoughts in place
Try to focus on her perfect face
She can save you from yourself
She can nurse you back to health
Incantation and sacred verse
Three black horses for your hearse
Burn a candle, keep it lit
Wash your crucifix with spit
Wave away their screams and cries
Bill Callahan can sing you lullabies

a whole bunch of poems

Peak Poem # 1 : High Peak

He stands there
Face folded in and flattened
Rock face and rucksack
Wind washing away his words
Over Glossop’s jaundiced roofs

The path winds away
Freeform or furrowed
Trench-foot soldiers marching
Towards Pennine pre-history

It used to be all fields round here
No, it used to be forests
And deserts
It used to be seabed and sanctuary

She sits there
Legs folded over and furnished
Scrubland and salami
Rain rinsing away her sins
Under serpentine passes

The gate stands upright
Barrier or boundary
Landlocked anarchists meeting
Reclaiming lost history

It used be our land here
No, it used to be nobody’s
It still is
And no hand can sign ownership


Peak Poem # 2 : Map Re-birth

Its foetal position
Demarcates the borders
Curled around for protection
Against the forces of man
The world outside the womb
Cotton, steel and clay
Water, soil and blood
Boxed in by design
The contours describe the past
Glacial ghosts haunt these hills

Water
Soil
And blood
Water
Soil
And blood

Belief is no substitute
For this landscape
Carved from chemical re-alignment
Molecular moors, amniotic streams
Lifeblood
Brotherhood
As it should be

Kinder Scout
Bleaklow
Saddleworth Moor

Death has visited here before
Human stains
Yet life remains
Water
Soil
And blood

As it should be


The Fisher-Man

He is not a fisher
Of men
Not this fellar
He is a fisher of
Fish



Sand Tracks

These silver trees bear witness
To our vanities and self-delusions
Here in the old quarry where I carved my name
And where G.F. Ormsby carved his in 1903
Where a cross stands at the foot the cliff
Garlanded in the colours of the boy’s regiment

Wayne O, MUFC, 1995

This valley of aspic sand, excavated
To construct vainglorious totems
For desert Gods yet unborn
When these fossil rocks first fused
Before there were men or Gods
Before our fathers even left the sea
What marks of men are left once the snow falls
And the leaves drop as silent as ghosts?


Calligraphy For Beginners

He pretended to like calligraphy
Thought that was the kind of thing
That’d impress her, make him look
All cultivated, when in fact
He could barely write his own name
In symbols every pre-school kid knew
He painted a few Chinese and Arabic letters
On a scrap of phony papyrus
Meaningless to his eyes and hers
Yet in that act of duplicity
He discovered the real beauty of art
Of line and form expressing
Not truth, as much as abstraction
In this appreciation he took shape
And wrote himself into history


Hide n’ Seek

Go and place the flowers on the stone
Whisper those incantations here
I can read your lips, I can see your thoughts
Go and dress that grave for tea
Buy it cheap wine
Feed it best steak
There’s a few bob left in that old tin
He won’t miss it, he never does

The girl in the photograph died of TB
When she was fifteen
Right here in this room
In nineteen thirty three

The linen cupboard smelled of damp
The plaster was jaundiced and cracked
A draught blew in through the window pane
I caught a fever there myself when I was six
Saw the ceiling rose ensnare a fly
Thorny tendrils crept down the walls
And took hold of my feet
She looked at me lying there and said

‘Is it time for me? Is it time for me?’

Go and place the flowers on the grass
Sing your lullabies and lovesongs there
Dress your daughters in lace and frills
Feed their bellies and their minds
There’s a fiver in the old man’s coat
Hung up under the stairs
He won’t miss it, he never does


Who Are Ya?

Hard stone.
Cold water.
Harsh light.
Dull shadow.

He joins the crowd and feels alive.
He claps his hands and shouts and cheers.
He elevates himself, anoints himself.
God is in me, God flows through me.
Hear his voice and feel his power.
Hard boiled. Soft focus.
Vague outlines.
See the shape of the man against the multitude.
I am here. Here I am.
See me. Hear me.

‘Who are ya? Who are ya? Who are ya?’

He leaves the crowd and feels dead.
He puts his head down. He pulls his collar up.
Against the world. Against himself.
God has deserted him. Where is God tonight?
In this house. In this body.

Cold blood. Hard tissue.
Hard stone. Cold water.

I believed in you because there was nothing
Before you or after you.
Before me or after me.
Just a vague outline of a man
Lost in the loneliness of other men
‘Who are ya? Who are ya? Who are ya?’

Purification

When it comes my time to die
Play James and Bobby Purify
To wash away my sins forever
And dress my feet in finest leather
Tie the laces tight together
Fix my tie and clean my teeth
Pretend that I had true belief
Make me look all spic and span
Lash my body with fake tan
Light a candle, say a prayer
Place a pebble on my chair
And gather round but never sit
Pretend that you once gave a shit
Hold your nose and count to three
Deliver up my eulogy
Bite your tongue and hide your hate
Tell them all how I was great
And ask the priest to sanctify
With James and Bobby Purify

For My Nans

Sweet Annie Nolan
Sweet Annie Jones
Sweet treacle toffee
Sweet senile moans

The bungalow’s half empty
With everything she owns
Sat in the day room
She’s all skin and bones

There’s racing on the telly
And nobody phones
There’s cricket on the courtyard
Traffic in the cones

Ladders in her stockings
Sitting on the wall
Kettle in the microwave
Barely there at all

The milk is in the dryer
You hear her deathly moans
The ash is on her apron
She’s all skin and bones

Sweet Annie Nolan
Sweet Annie Jones
Sweet apple crumble
She’s all skin and bones


Ataraxia

The night comes, slowly
The clouds dissolve
The sun dips down towards the horizon
The light still shining on the waves
The day disappears as we turn
Turning but not feeling ourselves turn
And the breeze feels colder now
And the waves sound louder now
And I turn away from the sea
And I breathe heavily
Because there is something of death
In every sunset
Each sunset
Feels like a wake
A farewell to the future
A mourning for the day’s light


Meat

The hut where we waited
For our dad to shower
Smelled of sweet grease
Of sweat, soap and steam
We’d sit on the wooden bench
Adjacent to an entire wall
Plastered with pornography
A pink pussy mosaic
The dockers would smile at us
As they dressed, half-naked
Scrubbed clean of the chemicals
They’d unloaded to be taken
By trucks and trains
To ICI’s Castner Kelner
And Rocksavage plants
They’d crack jokes and tease us
But the wall of flesh fascinated me
Sat with my younger sister
Trying not to look at all those tits
But sneaking quick blimps
Before being taken to the pub
For a coke and a packet of crisps
Waiting for me mum to pick us up


The butchers where we waited
For me mum to be served
Smelled of sweet blood
Of sawdust, skin and sinew
We’d stand next to sides of beef
Hung on the white tiled walls
Exposing raw flesh and fat
A pink-yellow mass of food
The butcher would wink at us
As he wrapped without looking
Parcels of mince, chops and sausage
In crisp brown paper
To be taken home and cooked
On silver black rings
In thin steel pans
He’d wipe blooded hands on a striped apron
But the bubbles of fat intrigued me
Stood with my younger brothers
Trying not to stare at the carcass
But sneaking sly glances
Before we were taken to me nan’s
For plates of cold mince and runny spuds
Waiting for me dad to finish his beer


Sunblast

From the radio
Cuneiform inscriptions
Transcribing Gilgamesh
Outside the women’s college
Headscarf matriarchs
And young concubines
Forbidden no longer
Express their supplication
In elegant camouflage
If you count all the leaves
On all the trees
In this small car park
How many would there be?
And if every hieroglyph
And clay indentation
Told a story so familiar
To those we already know
Would we be less impressed
With the ancients?
Their mysteries and rituals
Just another way of hiding
Another form of deceit
Written out to transform
Thought into symbolic shapes
From the café
The drone of smalltalk
Drifts into dead air
And hangs over the street
The same streets as Nineveh
Cobbled together with myths
To make sense of the world
I can smell the blossom
I can feel the strength of the sun
On my skin, in my bones
I can hear the great rivers
The Tigris and the Mersey
Flowing through to the sea
And that is enough for me

Route Sign

The coast road took us along past Porlock
Up into the hills where we paid a toll
I was indignant at paying it
This surcharge on beauty
A tax on our limited freedoms
(Such as they are)
At the sea we threw pebbles
Took the lift up to the café
From Lynmouth to Lynton
Drove back in the rain
Took wrong turns in Exmoor
Unfamiliar terrain
What surcharge on beauty
What tax on happiness
Can spoil a day like this?

Tunnel Visions

Black stone
Green rock
Red brick
Silver rain
From one world to another
From one life to the next
The light blinds me
The dark scares me
Black reflected back on glass
I feel the need to reach out
And touch what I know isn’t there
Feel the cold, infinite space
Between myself and the world

Shadowlands

is this the sum total of your shadow-life?
your dull reflection of time wasted in shade
hidden there, head against the roof tiles
singing your song, the same song you've sang
since you were a child, since songs have been sung
the old ones fed you these words, these tales and lies
and you lapped them up, these mahogany myths
as you stared at the Christmas baubles and the Grenadier Guards
the smell of the gramophone and the pipe smoke
the county lines changing around them and the aliens up the road
harsh accents, harsh faces
shaped by different times, harder than theirs
you thought you had known safety and peace laying there
on Christmas Eve with the hot water bottle now stone cold under your feet
the transfer set moonscapes and desert lands scraped shadow men against shadow lands
the pencil pressed too hard here and there and the transparency
pulled too quickly, so that heads and limbs were missing
half men walking on a barren soil that felt as real
as the field outside where the tough boys playedyou looking on, not tough enough or brave enough to join in

'oh here i am sitting in my tin can, far far from home'

you sang the song sat in the old cherry tree and you liked it there
high enough to see the top of the shed roof and not be seen
alone, yet happy enough in solitude and the songs of loneliness
not so far far from home, not here, the shadow of the house
cooling the garden, deadening the roses and crab apple bushes
the wind cold against your face, hot treacle melting in the pan
solidifying in the tray black and brittle, now hammer shattered
you place a sharp triangular lump in your mouth and suck
black spit dripping down the side of your chin and in your head
it's 2030 or 1869 not 1973 and the map of the world is different
the old house isn't there and the cherry tree is gone
and the old songs and stories are yet to be sung or are long forgotten
and the Christmas bauble reflects back only the room of the record sleeve
the Grenadier Guards no longer ‘talk of Hector and Lysander’
there is a cold wind blowing through the forest
there is a ridge of ice where the river once ran
there is the sound of birds and the homes of men
but not the birds you know, not the men you recognise
the room is empty save for the old bed frame and the sideboard
old wood and he knows this is now his time, his myth-time too

Welcome to The Big I Am & other musings

As Sam Cooke once sang (I paraphrase)

'Don't know much about poetry'

It's true, I don't! This isn't simply hiding behind a phony facade of self-deprecation or wallowing in my own ignorance, it's just that I've never had the time or the patience to read poetry, never mind study it. At a stretch I could recite the odd passage from 'The Ancient Mariner' or 'Reading Gaol' but that's about it. I've attempted The Wasteland, skipped through The Prelude and some of it I get, some of it I don't. But then, what's 'to get?' If any art needs 'explaining' then it has no value.

And yet I like to write poetry or rather, my own intepretation of what I believe poetry to be, which isn't some exclusive, elitist artform that revels in it's own cerebral superiority but a condensed form of literature that concentrates on feeling, sincerity, emotion. I suppose my recurring themes are landscape, memory and mortality; the usual shite! I try not to shape or re-shape the pieces once they've appeared on the page (or screen) as I feel that interferes with the spontaneous process of unloading often subconscious thoughts and feelings. Therefore most of what follows is half-formed and gestating; but that's the way I like it. Cheap manifesto to follow....


THE BIG I AM

Quotationgoeshere (Plutarch’s Life Of Pericles, Paradise Lost or Prelude? Ask Pete)

Vanitystance Pt 1

He held himself in great esteem this architect
Of words
And sound
Comparsions to Eliot (Billy not Tommy)
Dancing toe to toe with
Minors (sic) and assorted
Suns (sick) of the soil
Building Gothic arches above
Their heads for shelter
For warmth
The heat of intellect
Burning through their thick, insolent
Skins

Vanitystance Pt3

Clever eh?
Cleaver eh?
Slice through this shite one more time
Chop away at all the pretence
Sever those metaphorical sinews
Holding poetic muscle together
Flesh on bone
Skeletal self-delusion
Find contentment in your mediocrity
Maaaan!
Look at you; the de-constructivist!
Knocking down walls, already
Ruins (ruined?) (self-attack being the best form of self-defence)

End bit (Pt2 ah-ha!)

Latinbitgoeshere

Or…perhaps….

Yeoldegaelic (dedicated to Irish Tom)

Impressed are we?
That says more about you than
It does about me
Mememe
The Big ‘I AM’