POETRY

There's poetry here on the Old Site II. There's some ad hoc work on the original site (Old Site I), but you have to hunt through the posts. Here, on A Great Bloody Wave, poems will feature in posts first - this page will hold steady the poems I'd like read (if they've not been published elsewhere - if they have, I'll link to them - they seem always to appear online, eventually). To alleviate the blankness, I'm including a few new poems on this page. They are recent, they all seem to've commenced at work, as I ate lunch at my desk or when covering the gallery's front desk. Please do comment - 


UNTITLED


It will not stop
its flicker, its shiver, its stir.
It will not cease
its scrawl, its heave, its tilt.
It will never quit
its tumble, pounce and fret.
It must always be a verb,
it will never be done doing.
Some prefer its crawl,
most accept its surf.
If it’s not alive, it is lively.
It's everything. And,
yes, that includes us.
It will be continual,
its shrug, its barge, its loll.
There is peace, but no pause.
It will never halt
its hush, its suckle, its give.

[2011]

DIRECTIONS TO THE HERDERS INN

There—scratched between those bungalows—an asphalt brook.

It runs from the village, a gully of panel fences and shoddy firs.

Further out, it’s becomes a runnel of chalk, pocked and pimpled

with the absence and knuckle-rise of embedded flint.

Soon, its verges of nettle, grasses and broom reach higher,

higher still—lifted overhead as the path sinks into a ditch,

its cloy banks feeding the binding of hedgerows.

It’ll always be dusk, and the idiocy of gnats about you.

Dusk—dung and hush—dusk—farting rot, spatting flies,

insinuating night (that insinuates death that heightens life).

Then, flood into wide openness, you’re on the Drover’s road

and distance spills out below on either side of the ridgeway.

Riding the backbone of the downs, the now turf-deadened ruts

of the Drover’s wagons widen - churned by tractor tyres.

Those parallel burns of herringbone tread, baked or plasticine

or mire, are trampled down into a farm, a pond of concrete -

a lull-rippled stillness. There’s a stile - it will tumble you

out into the lane you must follow left, and keep going,

never doubting where it leads, and you will arrive.

[2011]

ON THE SOFA

A slug yawns to its full extent and foams

in the palm of a cabbage leaf.

A caterpillar (a thing of milk, blackheads and whiskers)

corkscrews and unscrews, restless in its crib of

cabbage leaf.

Yes. The sofa is green.

Yes, it’s the green of a cabbage leaf.

I am a flea beetle, I feed on cabbage leaf.

I am always hungry, yet I am always well-fed.

We bought this cabbage leaf from DFS.

It has wilted and it pongs of rot.

We’ve repayments yet to make

before we own this rotting cabbage leaf outright.

I am a tortoise in hibernation,

I’ve one cheek on a cushion of cabbage leaf,

and I’m dribbling and the leaf is glued to me,

to my cheek, and I’m dreaming that I am

a maggot burrowed into the potato of a cloud,

a tapeworm lush in the guts of a man.

I had to be told the sofa’s green

as I’m red/green colour blind,

to me it’s a grey.

Cabbage leaves are a grey to me.

But my colour blindness is of no consequence,

I’m not painting you a cabbage leaf

(it would be a grey cabbage leaf),

I am saying ‘I am a thing stretched out

on a cabbage leaf - our sofa is green,

the green of a cabbage leaf’.

[2011]