2015-04-15

Coming round

Cartoon characters should
drink responsibly...
Not much to explain here, one I wrote from a prompt on a poetry forum in 2012.


Today I would avoid the coincidence of strophe breaks and full-stops in the first two verses, but otherwise still reasonably pleased with a sweet and simple piece.


(Note added later: this was also featured in a collection celebrating poets from the, now defunct, Critical Poet online forum.)



Coming round

Maybe I can say it in a different way: it's more
the angle of the orange street light that draws
a shadow between us as we sit with cheap wine
in the spare room and the evening and the dark.

It's more that the presents you brought me
were typical of your kooky creativity; while
the presents I bought you were expensive
and you, often, were thinking of someone else.

And on that day in June when it rained
tiny plashes in the dust and you said the
smell of dust and rain made you horny and sad,
I said it's more your sadness makes it rain

and then you laughed, but it didn't stop raining.
It was more my idea to drift away, not to fight,
but more your idea to keep my books
and CDs in your spare room—on shelves

I erected long ago in another country—so when
I want something I have to come by
with the bottle of supermarket Chianti, and sit
with you, the dark, the dust; now it's raining.

2015-04-09

Identity — a demo song from Hallam London

Hallam London and I have been working on songs for his next album, working title: The Sheffield Album.


I'm excited to announce that he's now released one of these as a demo track!


This song is Identity.  It's about all the miscellaneous bits and bobs of different personalities that we carry around with us, and the problems we might have making our different selves get along with the other people in our lives.


Hallam currently has it on his front page, in the link above.  However he'll change that when even more exciting news comes along, so here is the SoundCloud page.






Identity

She's taken my imaginary friend
and I'm upset I think I think.
Things get more complex, it's a trend
I hope that I can grasp before I sink.
He's left me for my spirit guide
I now doubt things I know I know
are real.  Keep calm.  I won't hide
my disappointment, everybody goes...

How can he leave
with the boy who isn't here?
How can he love the girl who can't exist
in this or any other world?


He's run off with two characters I wrote
short stories for so long so long
ago.  I think one left me notes
in margins but I may be wrong
and never worked them out anyway.
My other other self has gone
a partial person ought to stay
forever--so I thought, turns out I'm wrong...

How can she leave
with the boy who isn't here?
How can she love the girl who can't exist
in this or any other world?

Where have they done?  Where am I now?
There is so little of me left to show
and once I would have fought
but these days I am caught...
There are more people here than you and me,
though none agree what's real is real.
There should be someone I can be
to keep the gang together.  Seal
all the doors and count my shadows.
There's more and more of them abscond.
I need to be the one who's quite
certain where his fragments are tonight...

What have they done?  What can I do?
They think that I'm imaginary too
and once I would have argued
but recently I'm not so sure...

2015-04-08

The need to know too much

Another oldie, this time from 2010.


This is an attempt to talk about raw experience at its most fundamental level.  How can I know that what I experience is the same as you, even if we have nominally been doing the same thing?  Is "red" the same for you as for me?  How about "blue"?  How about "blue" for music?


So if we extend that to experiences I haven't even had; especially if we mean experiences that a highly privileged Western, 21st Century inhabitant is very grateful not to have had...


This is a poem from 2010, and possibly today I might have written it more subtly.  On the other hand sometimes a sledgehammer works better than subtlety.




The need to know too much


"There are some things we're
      just not meant to know..."

Aeschylus in overdrive, tragedies he wrote
and left them here to linger in the now. Was I wrong
to ask your story? You did not answer,
but held out the unsteady hypodermic.
I hear when you do not say: Friend,

you cannot read this in a self-help book,
or watch it with amusement
playing out in other lives.
You cannot trek for years to seek it



—and I do understand. There is nothing to discuss,
no elephant in this room for us to face.The only way to learn this
is by injection straight into my brain.

It is cold. I remain. Understanding nothing,
I resolve I will in future know one truth.

Sisyphus must still endure, but I was only told that.
I have stared, unmoving, at too many sunsets,
roses, match-books with the cover slightly torn...

Ready your needle.