What More Could You Ask?

Context elevates bad experiences,
An enthusiastic homage to… let’s call it eternity,
Mouth moving both ways,
Semicolons inserted for emphasis,
A magical pass.

Stacking words in the way of wisdom,
Kissing a path to memory, curiously lusterless;
Neuralgic nostalgia is a thorny back road,
Unbright, dusty, unPlankian,
And we could tread the purple road bright ahead.

Lock steps into wifery, objecting to
Reflecting one state of womanhood,
Harmonising adroitly into stillness,
Spilling meaning into the gaps between
Have and not.

Begging for scraps of song
Should not be our lot,
Pixelated into endlessly editable scripts,
Charged and charging
Into marked-up pages, endless and ephemeral.

We are leaking nightmares,
Plumbed into history, toxic with possibilities.
We can seize the waters, balancing futures,
Listening to the flood, forgetting pressures,
Stressing old-school remedies. Day after day.

We break down the meaning of names,
Settle liquid scores,
Talk of ambition’s blizzard and
Swing hips in glossy flossing,
Consider pianaoke.

Time to pitch, toned up creatures
Singing myths in the liminal, lurking in
The dark, harking back to when hunting
Meant something other than chasing
Grades and pay checks.

Resentment is a film through which we
Filter memory, waiving the right to our spot,
Clotted with the scents of home and pain.
Do you want the core of the artist, the
Consciousness, unconscionable; bitter and burglarised?

We earn art in the reconstruction,
Cupped in the moment, you, you, U,
Sneezed size breathing salt,
Slapped with sensations, tipped, tripping,
Tricked, cut down to size, a light touch.

We dream of legacies, embedded in larceny,
Rewarding failure, chronicling the
Chronically ironic, chasing the sugar,
Shifting market forces, contorting
Culture into a twist of dough.

We dream of adorning the menu of memory.


Another live-writing exercise, this time celebrating the open mic for Cambridge University's ICE Creative Writing course and their residential module on writing for performance. The same terrifying level of quality as last time I attended this, and another dazzling array of inspirations to draw from. As ever, the temptation to edit (there's some inelegant variation in there!) is high but resisted…

A Peculiar Commission

A friend messaged me this morning:

“May I be cheeky and ask for your professional poetry skills as I’m drawing a blank. A friend of mine is having trouble with a neighbour who doesn’t seem to realise that people can see into his bathroom and watch him masturbate.

“I’m thinking a limerick posted anonymously through his door might be a friendly way of encouraging him to buy blinds or at least close the curtains!”

And today’s been a right bastard, so I thought: yes, freeware poetry. So here it is in case any of you ever have need of a poem to tell a neighbour you can see him indulging in naked DIY.

Dear neighbour, please picture the scene
As we gaze out through windows pristine:
We’re glad you take time
For yourself – that's no crime –
But you might want to put up a screen. 

It’s good to take time to be tantric
In a world that can be very frantic,
But we just thought we’d mention:
It’s causing some tension
To view your self-pleasuring antics. 

Now please do not take us for prudes
And we really don’t mean to be rude
But we’d rather not view
Everything that you do
When you’re getting yourself in the mood. 

We’re feeling embarrassed as hell;
We didn’t know quite how to tell
You of our complaint
We hope this comes off “quaint”
And we hope this short rhyme finds you well.

Yeah, I know it’s not perfect, and there’s some ineloquent repetition, but hey...

Grant Me This - for #nationalpoetryday

I was asked to be one of the #BBCLocalPoets - for #Cambridgeshire - to compose a new #poem as if from the point of view of a local landmark or geographical feature of the area.

After putting it out to people via social media, the one feature that came out again and again was that of the river (in various different ways - as visual feature, bridge-bearer, punt-vehicle, houseboat-home, wildlife-habitat, etc.) and, as it stretches across the whole county, it seemed a good way to celebrate and inhabit the character of the county (bearing in mind that the poem needed to be less than two minutes long and "not political").

It was recorded yesterday, down by the Chesterton Road stretch of the river, and you can see/ hear me read it (somewhat creakily - this is my fifth week of severe laryngitis) here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p04b4cpv



I also went on breakfast radio to be interviewed and to perform some of it live in the studio. I am not a mornings person. It was interesting... :)

(If you want to hear what I sound like early in the morning with laryngitis, check out this link http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0482z92 - the segment starts at 01:46:55)

Full text below - enjoy! :D  (Credit needs to be given to Carla Keen for the line "Catch, catch, catch..." which I heartlessly stole from a beautiful poem she wrote about her love of rowing.)

Grant Me This

Birthed beyond borders,
I rise in the west,
Scrawl a course
Of eccentric penstrokes
Across this palimpsest.
With my sisters
I weave a drench of memories,
Stretching to the new day's edge.

I have carried you
On my broad back -
Gambolling new beginnings,
Fleece, stone, and corn meal,
Vellum and sand,
Two-tongued, poling solo,
Always with a weather eye
To the next angle.

You have inscribed me,
Drawing me deep into histories,
Gleaming lines sighing,
Igniting visions, lingering
In civilisation's litanies
For those who came before
And all who dream of
Divining mysteries.

I was named backwards,
Shaped by the town
Around which I curve,
A cupped palm,
A charm of siren sounds,
Enclosed and disclosing,
Ringing with myriad bell-tongues
Flooding this rich ground.

Cast me between walls
And I surge and curvette,
Beckon evolution's remedies and
Ambition's gravity,
Leaning into the gradient of Best,
Cresting sly wins at the
Narrowest of passes -
On your marks, get set.

I creak in the mornings -

Gasp and echo the endless
Catch, catch, catch…
Scratching glory etched deep
In the clutch and pull of legs,
Mist-rimed breaths, swelling shoulders,
Cold noses, and warm hearts,
Regardless of your team's net.

In the evening I chug,
Bank-huggers making fragrances
Of home - curtained and potted,
Dot-and-carry dance partners,
These happy-anchored vagrants,
Swaying, framed in gold paint,
Named for the way I spell freedom,
And tomorrow's chances

Your ancestors built me steps,
Bedecked me with loving chains,
Cross-stitching me with sighs and pigsties,
While monarchs, mathematics,
And dragons all stake their claims
As I stride on, lop-sided,
A reminder that, together,
We have made a grace of strangeness.

Marker

This angry poem needs some work but, whoever and wherever you are, it’s for you, and it needs to go out today. 

Sixteen years today
Sixteen years and grey hairs
Salt me,
Multiple choices mock me:
You’re recategorised.
Never mind,
I think she’d still recognise me.

And I’m joined every year
By more companions-in-grief
Reaching out,
Each one bludgeoned by
All the memories -
Sweet and bitter -
All the feelings -
Hot and cold -
All the exploded notions
Of continuity dashed,
Record houses now ash.

And she’d want to know,
So sometimes I tell her -
Even the things I never could
For fear of her fear,
Cringing from her pain.
And the rage gains ground
On these days,
Teeth worn to stubs where
None can see.

And I’m imagining the talk:
Me trying to outline
What we’ve got now
And what we’ve left behind.
I’m finding modern culture
Quite hard to describe,
Winding fists into
Minefields
In high definition

I’m surrounded by sound -
Some of it music so profound
That I’m lifted higher than
I ever thought I could reach,
And I’m preaching redemption
At every soul:
It gets better.
And it does.

Mummy, I’m a poet now
And yes, I still sing,
And I’m happy in my life,
And I thump drums
To guide others’ footsteps by
And - okay - no child -
But I’m proud of what I’m
Passing on.

But some of the chatter
Is noise for its own sake
And hate still holds sway
In too many hearts
And I worry that we’ve
Parted ways - those who
Sing of common spirit
And those who bang gavels,
Gabbling “common sense”
Rhetoric of division,
Flinging new walls higher

And while people are dying
Others are crying about lions
And decrying the desperate:
Let them eat cake
Let them bake in their own ovens
Let them them scramble and fail
Let them be inconvenient
Let them be the graffiti
On the marble bank fronts,
An affront to propriety,
No ladder for them -
Let them stay right there,
Let them bear the marks of our
Boot heels

We can clean that stain off
We’ve got all the chemicals
You could possibly want
And we’ve dropped taxes
And edited credits
And let everything that was fought for
Be no more than two pages
In a textbook

And look! The cat is dancing
Look! The puppy’s laughing
Look! The meercat’s grip tightens
We’re enlightened -
We’ve got an app for that.

And in the meantime
Changes are grating,
Prating ingrates
Scraping more for themselves
Off others’ plates
And we’ve seen this
Sort of thing before -
We can grade the score,
Draw the lines from
Then through now to
Eventual rebellion
We’ve got to draw lines,
And draw the line.

And I’m so psyched that
Love won,
But there’s still a lot to be done
Like: a metric fuck-ton
When equity is sneered at
As unfair,
Where religions who preach
In love’s name
Declaim against each other
And prop up ancient laws
And pour scorn on
People’s safety.

When rapists of all genders
Are engendered in silence
And nurtured in shame
Where game-players
Rake in cash that must
Make nurses sick.
Where pricks think
That hoisting a hastag
Will make more of a
Difference than this
Fucking poem.

(Because at least it’s more
Than seven score letters
And pre-packaged emotions.)

But you know what will
Make for change?
You know what will
Heal us, make us free?
Actually, it’s not a question:
You know how redemption goes
And how love flows
You know you’ve got to show
That - instead of tribe,
We are a species
Instead of species,
We are creatures
Instead of creatures,
We are the breathing,
Bleeding, needing,
Reaching, yearning,
Learning, teaching,
Evensong of starflesh,
The coalescence of
Scattered suns,
Spun-glass perfection in
Every cell and
We are all relative
And who fights more than
Family?

And that’s why we’re feeling
Jealous, see -
We know that we could have
What’s held up
As aspirations
And we flail at neighbours,
Those within our grasp
And it’s not fair.
I know. It’s not fair.

And maybe we can’t reach
The thieves
Who fleeced us yet,
But we can spend every second
Of the next set of years
Being the people we can be,
Arms hard around each others’
Shoulders, boldly loving
Everyone who needs it,
Staunching those who bleed
Instead of aping eejits
Clenched in greed.

“Pay no attention to them”
My mother always said;
She meant well,
And, to a certain extent,
That works,
But we’ll be cursed
If we let our gaze drift
Too far.
Too long.
Because they’re not them -
They’re us.

This is forty -
Caught up in all the things
I haven’t done
And am still yet-to-do,
Brooding on inequities
But feeling that I’ve got more
Power than at twenty-four,
A bigger voice,
More choices,
And more responsibility
To share out the equity
Of my comfortable life,
Strive for verity,
Stand firm,
And affirm love,
Even to those who have
Eschewed it.

Sixteen years to the day.
You told me you were proud of me.
Now I am too.

(But - like I said -
We’ve got some work to do.)

Written for the anniversary of the delicious Fen Speak last night:

Party

“Get set,” they said,
“And remember that fortune favours
The loud, and grasping,
Success the promulgation of the
Selfish gene.”

We said: “No”,
Rolled up sleeves, and
Rolled bones, smiling
To see the tiles tip
For true hearts,
Wise words,
And generous company.

This is a dance of wits
And wisdom,
Gifts from the infinite
Distilled and shared
In hand-fast rounds
Of like minds,
And matched hearts.

We’ve watched the circle march,
Sometimes from farther
Than we’d like,
And kick quiet,
Swinging feet,
Greeting each gift
With a gentle: yes.

Get set.