GOES WHERE IT GOES

This poem is woven from a thread of autobiographical detail - an ache that persists in my back is its keen recollection. The poem is a lie - a fiction. It went its own way, I chased after it. Didn't even recognize it had a punchline until it had given itself one. [It didn't write itself, I am still to blame]



DAD DIED


Fat and muscular from an afternoon’s beer garden boozing,
on returning home, there in their slope back garden,
he assumes (because the kid can) that he can skateboard—
he can’t skateboard. He assumes the position he assumes
is sweet (the one he sees the kid adopt) onboard, wavering,
static, arms outrigged for balance. Yes! And with a nudging
pelvic thrust he makes to roll, to ride the paved path—
but it’s only the board that shoots off, out from under,
and he is thrown—lifted by the feet waist-height
and snatched down by the scruff of the neck. He is landed,
his spine bridging the jut-rise of a loose slab and cracking.

Breath is everything—he realises that—light, he’d survive without—
he could stay buried under the swarming darkness of rooks
and never surface—he’d sustain on dream and speculation—
he’d stay, be kept horizontal, a barge of numb flesh—never drink,
never again—if only he could just swallow one mouthful of air
to spit it out—he is ravenous for breath—but his jaws are biting
on nothing, not on anything that’s nourishing. His insides
are an empty bowl. And—though the sheer blue of the day
is shooing away the clamour and he feels pain (a distant
signal of discomforting tinniness)—he cannot make
the seeming nothingness of a breath fulfill him. He admits
o God, I cannot skateboard. With that, he dies. He is dead.

The kid laughs. The kid points and he laughs. It is funny
because the kid knows his dad cannot skateboard—
how could his old man think he could skateboard—
what a fuckwit. His mum is laughing—she’s full of the joy
of cider—and it was funny—funny slapstick—the twat,
what the (!) was he thinking. And it’s kind of awkward
when they both realise the nob-head is dead—that
he might be. It’s not until the paramedics pronounce
that they know for sure he has slipped away—that’s what
the paramedics say—sorry, love, he’s slipped away.
They will laugh at that—it’s what we ought to have had
on the headstone—he slipped away—they’ll laugh
and those with them will laugh—it’ll become
that thing they say when he is mentioned,
the scant explanation of the fact he is dead.

Breath is everything.

FOR s/s/s

s/s/s are Abigail Gilchrist, Jo Willoughby, Ashley David John, Letty Clarke and Michael Nunn (with a supporting cast/network of which I am one). s/s/s is a kind of artists collective (it is - they share a studio, relate their individual practice to the each other's practice, are supportive and [kindly, positively, generously] ambitious - and [gloriously] it isn't - they are a chain of kids holding hand racing about a playground, laughing, inventive, reveling, yet just as so when they leave go of each other and spin out, giddy with impetus, singular]. s/s/s are good people.

Me and Amy (Mrs Me) wanted to attend the closing party (a party celebrating the opening of whatever's next) of their exhibition in Chichester. It doesn't look as if we'll make it there (money being as thin as a mayfly's wings). Amy has sent s/s/s a series of 'heck yeah!'/'respect.' postcards - so, I'm participating too: with a poem sequence (heck yeah!).




i) for s (for stair)/s/s


stairs—
slide down them,
go headfirst
and flat
on your stomachs,
thumping surfboards
riding
on blunt waves
of tread, riser and nosing—
it doesn’t matter,
never has,
if they are carpeted
or bare-board
or fire escapes—
hammer at them
with your arses,
rodeo,
bucking bronco,
hiccupping,
falsetto—
if you must,
and you will have to,
go up them, upstairs,
as geckos might,
as birds with broken wings
must (with ramshackle tics
and flurries) or climb
like you’ve hundredweight
boots on your feet
(mountainous
trudging) or do
the rodeo/bronco thing
backwards,
reverse cowgirl (cowboy)
(cow-genderless [an aside—
sex seems to complicate stuff,
yet no stuff is ever sexless—
discuss in 20 objects or less]
[or more], more or less )—
but never shy
or undermine
the splendour
of the normal,
walk up or walk down them,
stairs are process
(of getting somewhere)
(above or below)—
pause midway,
sit, grandstand,
in suspense,
in between a here and a there,
stare (sightless
with thought)(thoughtful
with sight), spying
through the bannisters
or sandwiched by walls
(reassuring, cool
against your cheek),
halfway (present),
pivotal to past/to the future
(you fulcrums) playful
with being
as children.



ii) for s/s (for slide)/s


slide.
most of it
let slide—
for it never,
not ever,
not really,
never certainly,
slips away
from you—
once thought,
it resides
(made real,
a something),
retrievable.

thought of/about
(head-spoken)
(or said out loud),
it ghosts,
comes back
to knock
and to rattle
around you—
most often
it’s an unwanted
haunting (you might
[not that you should]
devise a form
of exorcism—
some ceremonial mode
of critical self-appraisal
[say boo to a goose]—
note: self-abuse
is another fellow’s
lovemaking (the art world
like the whole world—
you already know—is
lively with wankers (
mutual masturbators),
but art is a peepshow—
so what can you do?)

slide—the playground slide
challenges you to climb it
(doesn’t it)(must have once,
even if it doesn’t now
that you’re so mature)
(you remember
the running on the spot
of your ascent)(the faintest
grip of plimsoles
on highly polished steel,
the little nubs of surefooted-ness
that assisted in your conquest
of that fleet slant sheet)—
stuff gets done—
stuff gets done—
life is all accomplishment
(the abandonment
of the abandon of sleep,
the getting to all those
necessities of surely unnecessary place,
holding your head up/in your hands/straight,
etcetera)—living is an achievement—
if art and life are one,
you can’t lose,
you’ve won
[erm. worst rhyming ever.
but i let it slide.
it’s more of a Casper
than a poltergeist—
the second worst rhyming ever].

let it slide.
let it be.



iii) for s/s/s (for space)


space. the minute yawn of a pore in the skin of something
is there to be filled. the scruff bank that shoulders or corridors
a rail track is barely occupied by the daydreams of passengers
and fly-tipped stuff and wild flowers-and-grasses. the margins
of any text (a text of urban/suburban/commercial/rural
architectural sprawl/upheaval/splendour, the text of a love affair,
the text of a politician’s open mouth, of a slug’s slick passage
along a pavement, of the trees beating against trees on trees
in the mosh pit of a high wind) are vacancies. all space
is headspace. we blow space like bubblegum into balloons
of encompassing with our breathing. space isn’t ever
in short supply—it will seem it is—the whole concrete
otherness of all that’s out there will close-in and it will
make you feel tightly (screw tightly) confined—there are
no restrictions, no lack of room (stuff abides wherever),
there’s no diminishment you cannot jemmy open.
space is what you’ve got. it’s between your ears. throughout
your fingers. where your eyes live, live out, even in the dark.
(darkness is one of the vast realms you can travel)(undoing
is another—undoing— taking an eraser to something,
putting right a wrong, or unpicking, or undressing.)
there is play in everything and everywhere—fulfill it,
occupy it, leave it empty with a sign in its window reading
‘vacancy’. space is what there is and what can be done.
what is and what will be. space—the final frontier,
jeux sans frontières. [stair / slide / space]

REOCCURRENCE

Thoughts and themes are often revisited. Here are two poems - one old and the other new.



LANDED


The tide withdraws the sea—its shallows tugged away—
the trick of a tablecloth yanked out
from under a table setting—the brine is split
against the prow of his heels (he’s facing elsewhere,
intent on what is beyond what is behind)(his back
to the land—to the people landed,
spilled from a net to flounder)—he feels he is
traveling backwards, the sand coursing (lick-
ticklish) from beneath his feet, forming talons
from between his toes. He is withdrawn,
being taken from the water, from the distance—
the apparent absence of—the uninterrupted,
the yet said, the wide-openness. And Gulls jeer
and wail lament. The overpopulated bay sounds
violent—with clashing blades and rifle reports
and fistfights of revery—somewhere to be escaped—
and those that can they swim for it (for elsewhere)
(splashing away, intently). He has been told
he is not to go in above the knees—so, he does not—
he assumes he will, that he must, someday transgress.

He does not stay to be left behind (nothing more
than something dumped amongst the oil glutinous,
salt-gnawed, wave-beaten, sewer-foamy, shingle-
worn belt of things a low tide deposits), he turns
and walks—pads inland, up the beach, not once
looking back (as well he might, as others do) to see
the sink-weight of his passing fade to sift-dryness
(the furthest footprints deep set in the dark-gloss sand—
diminished to a shine impression on the rippled firmness
of midway—and now, at his heels, nought of him is kept
by the engulfing baked-rawness of the loose sand)
(approaching the rising dunes)(he is ignored)(forgotten
by his own thoughts of leaving)(of withdrawing).

Later, he will dream of this, the slippage of the sea
from beneath, making his way up the beach,
diminishing—a reoccurring dream—one dreamt
long after he has swum out and further out
and almost beyond the reach of any shout to call him back.
It is a dream he flounders awake from, salt-wet and gasping.


                                                                        [2013]



GOWER


Bare-arsed, we kids, palominos, red-raw pintos, gallop
barefoot, white-shod hooves pummeling down
tremulous sands, to the sea. Our lips flensed
from milk teeth by the blade-fury of the stampede.
Our little hands a murderous rage.

Our parents are wind-broken, corralled behind windbreaks.
Their eyes mimic the rows of caravans that overlook the bay.
They’re anaemic as the foam detergent set adrift
from a sewage outlet. Our parents are for glue—
every muscle and easy breath of us says so—

mam and dad, you’re for the knacker’s yard.

We are seahorses, our blood is a rodeo of brine—our parents,
they have just a pinch of salt cellared away in their genitals.
Foldaway beds are their Llangennith, Rhossilli, Oxwich,
all gull cries and Mumbles and whinnying breath
as they trot towards an incoming tide.

Our only ebb is need of sleep, as violent as any wave
that overwhelms—it leaves us conch’d on the beach,
folded towels for pillows. But our dreams are those
of gods, possessing everything, the whole expanse
of today, tomorrow, of all these holidays.


                                                                [2007]

NUMBER TWO (S - WHO KNOWS IT MIGHT WELL BE)

 

Writing a poem is talking to yourself talking to something else - someone, to you. There are wise people - some of them poets - but the wisdom is in the reading. The following poem is one of those that plop out of me - likely consequences of a church upbringing (I was going to be a priest - that onetime calling lurks inside me). I'm not wise, I know nothing - I ask loads but getting little in reply, little I'm keen to accept, I ask it reluctantly. Often I just talk to myself, pretending to talk to somebody else, to something (like resorting to prayer).

ISN’T IT


No, sunshine, life isn’t fair—otherwise the oceans
and all the waters would be still, calm as glass—
the trees would grow-up level-headed.
No, nothing is equal, not the way good people
would like it to be—life (the stuff of it, the living of it)
isn’t divvied out into matching or equivalent lots—
you get what you’ve got—you get what you get.

But—the disquiet of an ocean, the swell
and rough and tumble of its waves' inequality
keeps things fresh (oxygenated) and stirs
like breath in the lungs of others (things
like rain gathered inside of clouds
that will fall from them filtered of saltiness).
The difference in trees—those differences—
even among the same types (between
members of a family) are each an ecosystem
supporting similar/unique (bespoke) ways of life,
experiences of being (maybe,

maybe think of it like this—it (all of it) breaks down
part by piece by part into planets, an infinity
of disparate/oddly familiar worlds—and they too
are broken down into bits each whole
in their own constitution, their self
-sense of existence). (None of it is fair.)

Only, despite life’s unfairness, it’s sum
is balanced. Is there refuge—a heaven—
in that balanced ledger? Sometimes,
not always. There is no accountant,
and that is the wonder of it. Isn’t it?

YESTERDAY'S SUN

O THREE/O FIVE/TWO O ONE THREE (ONE FIVE ONE SEVEN)


Proper summer is recalled today—the whole of the sun,
the whole blueness of a cloudless sky, the heat
(full as the blow from a lav’s hand dryer).
Today is Friday (a Friday, for you, reader, that’s passed).
Lewisham is lightweight in its short sleeves and cheesecloth skirts,
standing/sat on the pavement outside of a pub.
This flat, where I am (elsewhere in time) has no outdoors,
no grit or slab or scrub of a garden, only windows to open
(meagre openings)—I’ve slid the voiles to one side
to allow in as much as will come indoors.

There’re three pigeons (two spread dun and one checkered)
having some crazy race down the median of Ryecroft Road
(or it's three crazy pigeons having a straightforward road race)
(cut each other up—spurt—stall, are rear-ended).
Happy as Larry they turn down Courthill, downhill,
out of sight—no finishing line, they’ve no end in mind
(I choose to believe). The steps outside the Hansbury
are a grandstand—of meaty banter and varying thickness
-es of tobacco smoke suspended in the viscosity of warm air.

A detailed, scaled-down Harlem Globetrotter (circa
1973)(a little Meadowlark Lemon) pedals on by on a
titchy  BMX, relaxed as a codeine smile. The coolest
kid. Regret—Je n'étais pas l'enfant le plus frais.
(I do not speak French, so I’d be well surprised
if ‘Je n'étais pas l'enfant le plus frais’ translates
as what I wanted to say)(but what I mean to say
and what I’ve said is often mismatching). O,
the summer of ’73—in my stacked Doc Martens
and cobalt flares, the pudding-bowl pageboy
(blond as Brit Ekland), the rub of a nylon Batman
and Robin the Boy Wonder t shirt sparkling sharply
with static electricity against me—wanting to be
in Gary Glitters gang (thumbs in pockets,
lurging my torso, dipping to the right, one two,
dipping to the left, one two—a marching stomp
and punching up at the belly of the heavens above).
In Gary Glitter's gang, yes—and writing to Saville
to fix it for me. Hindsight is not wonderful.

Vibrant as sunburn—incongruous as sunstroke—
one of two fellas (the one the other calls ‘me black’)
is clopping on the spot horsey like—he has
a sticking plaster Adam Ant across his nose—
now (this is almost—not quite—realtime reportage)
he is demonstrating capoeira (Idalina Norman Wisdom stylee)
(his trackie bottoms swivel lower, breaching
the downward curve of his arse cheeks before
he hikes them true). Their laughter
is bright running water. ‘Laters.’
About them, motors catch on fire
with squint solar flare, as do the eyes
of the houses around. Today (that’s back here,
reader) is burning—you can taste (I can) the smoke,
eat the ghosts of charcoal briquettes.

RUMINATIVE REPORTAGE

Funny how things seem inevitable, yet impossible - I've been trying to write something about Thatcher (Maggie, Maggie, Maggie) - it's something I've played with for years (Out Out Out). I had a love/hate relationship with Maggie that was all fear and loathing. I try not to hate, always. Maggie Maggie Maggie - Out Out Out. But I've not managed to say what I feel a need to express about Maggie and me. Yet, inevitably, she (the it-ness of us) flops out (accidentally on purpose) like a 70s male celebrity's penis.

So, this week I visited the Sleep Clinic...



SLEEP CLINIC


The reception, airless with sunlight,
is weighty with lack of room—
just the five chairs (sturdy, square affairs—
wheels on the back legs in case,
so they(aka you) might be tilt and carted off).
The lushness of the sunlight, its caress,
and the breathless lightheadedness
of confinement (seated) (waiting
for the consultant) is pre-sleep like pre-cum—
attempting to defer the inevitable becomes
a Tantric prolonging of succumbing
to that spurt breath of dropping off.

Sudden cumulus fella—colour of butter, nappy rash
and window putty—speaking and saying ‘mother,
seven of a morning she was down at the stove (streaky bacon,
black pud, Wall’s bangers, button mushrooms, eggs)
(fried bread) done up to the nines, hair zhooshed,
immaculate—painted—lippy were the clue—tartier
the better it was she felt—well, she fell pale and drab
with her infirmness—still, and to the last of her,
she’d get breakfast on the table’.

Seven of them, brothers, sisters—not one of them,
not one (none of them) ever helps out—
all of it falls to her (legs to bosom caged)(a Zimmer frame)
and to him (adjacent)(‘tache, Magnum-esque—thinner
and ginger)(underlining her statement with crick nods
and mouthed disgust)(or wrestled yawns).

The nurse is in a knockabout farce—
a blue fluster, he double-takes each peek
at the clipboard he totes, and dithers
(one way) then dithers (yet another).
He’s caught between being Charles Hawtry
or being Kenneth Williams. He flickers.
Hiya—I’m Rob—Bobbie, Bob—
you can call me whatever really—
we’re going to take a blood pressure,
a blood oxygen, height and weight and that—
okay? Good. Rob-Bobbie-Bob’s hair
is somewhat cherry and he is Oriental,
skin the colour of pine furniture—
and he’s skinny as, he’s a camp matchstick
(waiting to be struck?)(No. No. He’s okay).
He cleanse wipes everything we/he touch/es—
the wipes swirled in his hands
like he’s screwing up a dove into a ball.
We are all unclean.

Between North and South (between the wings) flamenco.
Flamenco. Wet-slaps and firecrackers on stone slabs.
Guitar. Tocaores, toque. Cante. Palmas. Baile. Gitanos.
The dancers hands the wingtips of two hawks’ sparring flight.
How she smiles—a genuine smile. An open fire of applause.
I might dream of her. Apnoea of applause.

Horserace of police (mounted,
unmounted) across Westminster Bridge—
apnoea of batons on riot shields,
of horseshoes on metal—
boiling water poured onto an anthill of students.
The bridge was sedate
when I crossed it (not then,
the bridge was a crop-burning of students
with great black smuts of riot police lifted over them)
(the bridge sedate when I crossed it just now)(earlier—
not now). And Margaret is dead. I will not,
will not dream of her. Parliament should dream of me.

The General Lying-in Hospital lies in Lambeth (the lie-in
hospital)(lay me down)—it’s outside—white as lard
with red brick wings. Nearby the Thames gurgles
with the spit ballooning of babies‘ voice—
and the teething grizzle of tourists. The rockabye
turning of the London Eye soothing, moving teensy
by teensy bit full circle.

The ASMR of the registra’s voice—the
autonomous sensory meridian response of me
to his ticklish splish-splash voice—tic-tac-toe
of his typing—his steady looking (at me)—
ssshush... ssshush.

She is dead. I did not have to assassinate her—I used to think
one day I would—I would have to. There she is,
falling, bursting floor by floor through an impossibility
of hotel rooms—she is sat on a toilet,
her knickers cuffing her ankles (royal blue nightie hiked
lifebuoy about her midriff)—mid shit—those boiled egg eyes,
hard-boiled and filthy with ignominy, drilling and killing
and billing each guest she passes—shitting from a great height—
never trust the Irish she says to Peter Mandelson (who is lurking,
lurching over the chasm of her passing through)(surely,
secretly, Mandelson is a Tory?)—she wears a rising crown of dust
and debris—and she doesn’t die. She could not be killed.
She has not been killed. She is dead. The theyness of her alive.

Pushing his arm into the cow’s posterior of
my having nodded off, Hawtry-Williams
RobBobbieBob shakes me loose of rumination
(via rumens, reticulum, omasum and abomasum,
stomachs of sleep)—

Attend. Date. Overnight. Stick of celery, hummus. Confirming.
A few stone. To swing a cat. Okay? Goodbye.

At night I die in my sleep—momentary deaths.
Exhausted by swimming under(heavy)water
or the implausible beating of my arms as wings
(the effort of achieving the impossibility of taking off)
and flying—the wrestling exit out of the dragging
pause between exhalation and intake. Nightmare
weights of horror on my chest (Incubus) (Succubus)
like a double decker bus parked there—terminus.

The Sleep Clinic.
The Monday after Thatcher’s funeral.
St. Thomas’s on the Southbank.
Yyyyawwwn.

                                                                                [29/04/2013]


                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            

TV SOMETIMES FAILS YOU

Yeah. Sometimes tv it fails you. Other times, tv is there for you. Nowadays it mostly fails, not because good tv isn't being made, it's because there's too much tv to be filled.



CHANNEL HOPPING


A rapids, a coursing, a lunacy of faces,
the bowling and leaping rumble of them,
the spit and licking spume, the gush—

the pucker-pout of their guppy mouthing
like the pucker and pout of boiling gloop—
pouting puckering poop-holes—

idiot water shambling, childish and piss-ish—
going as it comes as it goes—blowing
feckless raspberries of fleck wetness—

people—people on tv—people like us—
not people like us, people not like us,
but people like them—shifts of flatness—

the thinness—such a horrendous thinness.

OFFCUTS AND SPROUTINGS AND SUCH

Living gets in the way of life. I'm struggling to write poetry just when I have a need of it—of its knowing unknowing-ness that makes sense of attempting to find sense. My head is full of other things. I can taste the breadline like I've only the crusts of the sandwich to go. It puts things in perspective—I can't find room to chase and wrestle words in amongst the stresses and alarms of getting by—yet, right now, poetry is momentous to me.

I fall back on the poetry of others, on writing prose and making images—positive distractions, proactive doodles. Poetry takes more, gives more—to me. Poetry is closer to thinking, to thought—as it occurs within the cell of an individual. It is not philosophical thinking, not greatly. It is not emotional flurry, not greatly. It is some inkling account of what it is to be. To be. A peak through the keyhole of a being (a peak in and a peak out).

Argh. It's something like that. And, however successful, the resultant words always fail, seem poor—to the poet, to me—compared to the fullness and expanse of my being (in here).

So—what I'm posting (below) are weaknesses and failings and incompleteness-es, but they are also evidence of flailing and travel and need. Let them drown in the light of day. Or burst into air like flying fish or something. Yes—something.

RIGHT TO THE EDGE OF CERTAIN THINGS

The once-white rubber toecaps of my Converse Allstars
jetty out over the brink of seawall along the esplanade.
The full weight of The Solent is tilt against the sea defence,
its stone blocks welded to the knapped flint of brine
by a trashy seam of foam—the comb teeth of groynes
just visible. I’m being kneaded by a bluster coming ashore—
my seaward jeans and jacket, my fat gut, slicked back
to warble loosely at my sides. Here, there’s no depth
before the horizon—no expanse, no vacant lot to occupy
with grandiose thought—to stare out into, moody and that—
there’s the Isle of Wight—there in my face. I’m not daring
or am I willing or risking anything—I’m not even showing off—
I’m participating—taking part. A momentous canopy of raincloud
is approaching—I’ll soon be engulfed by its shadow that sails ahead
of its full drenching darkness—I’m awaiting.

Earlier, in the Wimpy over the arcade, next to Pirate Pete’s,
after a quarter pounder with onion rings—with the plink
and wooing melodies of all the slots soundtrack, I realised
I’ve forgotten what punches and kicks feel like.
Good. I ought to rejoice. But—overgrowth and weeds
of fear seem to have taken hold of me since last I knew
for certain the oomph-void and sting—the warm, wet flannel
of a bruise flowering—the brightness of syrup motion—
the burrowing kiss of knuckles and the door-stop
of a toecap wedging me open—I used to know
what it was to survive—I understood what survived,
hymns of smarting tenderness and savage remorse
and sickening assurance sung throughout me—the taste
of my own self. I want something of it back, something
of what it was to be hit, to strike out—the bodily extent.

***

Plies of interlocking branches deny the sunlight that booms
within/against the easy heavy stillness of the snow,
ubiquitous elsewhere. The forest floor,
almost as easy a stillness, is grey, as always, in the dimness.
The density of firs like hands cupped over ears—
a deafness shambolic with the effort of moving, of respiring—
bodily noises only. An elective mute—the act of speaking
a cruelty, too great a violence to commit where/when
everything is held just so—between the heft canopy
and the understory of the woodland, outside of it
in the newness of the snowscape.  A far and nearness,
with and without—

still, all these years on,

the shifts of solitude that day, each a revolution of being.
The eek footfall of a besmirching walk
through a norm whitewashed, one Tippexed out—
joyful heady with the overthrow of a typical state,
yet, all of a sudden, over-aware of moving on
—what’s immaculate lasting a nanosecond.

***

THE JACK DOUGLAS


Grrr. GRRR! he gravels. His hands are murderous,
startled rooks outburst from cover, knifing,
throttling, eviscerating the air,
a blood-splattering frenzy of gesture.
GRRR. Grrr-rrah. The sharp-suck sourness
of that electrical shock said to be discharged by dance steps
on the topsoil of a final resting place...

SWITCHING

I don't usually post video works on A Great Bloody Wave, they go elsewhere (on my other sites). But thought I'd put this one here beside my poetry. It's called Switching. Switching from one state to another, a tree switching in a high wind. The soundtrack is a manipulation of a folk tune, I mess with audio too. That's all I've got to say really.

THE WORDS

Don't get me wrong, I'm not a fan of Valentine's Day—I was never anyone's secret Valentine, ever. I prefer Pancake Day, I really enjoy Pancake Day. But—but but but—I'm all for love. Love love love. So, here is a poem for today, or any other day—and it was written for my wife (there's sloppy for you):



14/02/2013


Again, words—words again. Again,
it’s words you get. The same old—
the same old words again. And again.
And again, it is words you are given,
like it or not—words is what you get—
words, want them or not.

Here, these words are for you—
for you alone—these words—
these words are now your words—
they are your words—your words—
you have received these words—
they are now yours.

Yes—yes, these words and every silence
in between these words is yours.
The words—you are used to the words.
Words, words, words! Used again—and again.
And, again, the same, same words—
there are so few words that will do—
that seem of use.

The silences vary.
Each silence differs.
Every silence

is without precedence.
And these silences
are yours.

The words and the silences are bound.
You cannot receive one
without the other. You must have both.
You get both. Both are yours—
the words and the silences, bound.

Words can be as easy as breath—
as uneasy as breath—
as absent

An absence of words can be a deadness.
Words will always signify there’s life—
some life left—some breath yet
to be breathed—something

Something.
Something.
Something.

Here are words. Again, yes. Yes, again.
Here are words.
The words.
And the meaning of these words
is not limited to the words—
there are the silences.

The silences make the words mean something—
something they have never meant before—
there were never before these words—
these words and these silences are something
unprecedented.