The New Music

Last week, you tried to play

Beethoven’s Fifth

on your towel.

The week before, it had been

Mozart’s Concerto for Flute and Harp

using a radiator,

and some left-over floor tiles

from your recent kitchen refurbishment.

So, when you said to me

that recently you had made a breakthrough

in your Musical Odyssey

and had learnt to play the banjo

in an afternoon,

while somewhat sceptical,

well, I thought,

it’s good to see you heading

in the right direction;

at least you’ll be able to pick out

some melodies from

whatever latest over-ambitious

musical interpretation

you had decided to conquer.

What would it be?

I briefly wondered.

Certainly not some bluegrass;

that would be far too obvious

for a banjo.

Rachmaninov’s Third Piano Concerto?

The exquisite opening to Mahler’s Fifth?

‘Banjo,’ you said,

‘I have discovered,’ you continued,

‘is’ and here I started to worry,

‘the ideal medium for the poetry of rap,’

and proceeded to play the lyrics

of Public Enemy’s Fight the Power

using your banjo.

And only your banjo.

‘I’m done with musical interpretations,’

you said, after you’d ‘finished’.

‘As well as learning to use the banjo for rap,

I’ve started composing.

It’s easier than I thought,’

you continued, ominously.

‘I have managed to conceive, musically,

what Richard Strauss was unable to do,

and have accurately described

a teaspoon in music.’

I asked what instrument you had used

to achieve this astonishing feat.

‘The piano, obviously,’ you replied,

and looked at me as if I was mad.

‘It’s what all we composers use

in the first instance,’

and then proceeded to play a piece

which lasted for seven hours.

When you’d completed this musical marathon,

I suggested that perhaps seven hours

was a bit long to describe a teaspoon in music.

‘What I have discovered,’

you explained,

‘is that the smaller the object,

the longer the piece of music,

and vice-versa.

Here, look,’ you said,

‘a b-52 Bomber,’

and threw a hand-grenade at the piano.

After we’d dusted ourselves down,

you said, ‘Although I’m not sure about the coda.

What do you think?’

I expressed my uncertainty about the whole endeavour,

especially the part where you destroyed a piano

with a hand-grenade.

‘Typical,’ you replied.

‘I knew you wouldn’t understand.

The piano is bourgeois 18^th century

at its worst and must be destroyed.

Anyway, I’ve decided to turn my back on music

and pursue a career as a socialist revolutionary,’

you said, and proceeded to smash

all of your medication

with a hammer and sickle.

‘That was George Michael’s Careless Whisper,’

you explained.

‘One last hurrah before I set the workers free.’

Infinite Loop

I sometimes threaten go on strike. It’s then that my boss points out that, as I’m a poet, it basically makes no difference anyway.

‘What’s the difference between a striking worker and a poet?’ he asks me.

I jokingly reply that strikers tend to get more done than poets and, even though they’re striking, have a higher earning capacity.

‘Ha, ha, ha! LOL. Amiright?’ I add, in case he thinks I’m being serious. But, no, apparently it is actually the right answer.

‘I can see your life hasn’t been entirely wasted,’ he says. ‘At least you’ve learned one more thing than how to write iambic sodding pentameter. Fair play, I suppose.’

I can’t really complain about my working conditions as a poet. My ‘garret’ is a four-bedroom detached house on the Worcestershire-Birmingham border, I have easy access to notebooks, and more pencils than you can shake a stick at. But striking’s all about the money, really, isn’t it?

It’s reached the stage now that whenever I bring up the subject of a raise, my boss walks over to the cupboard, takes out the bicarb, and says, in that deadpan tone he’s spent the last five years trying to perfect, ‘That’s a close as you’re likely to get, Mr So-Called Poet.’

I point out that, as a so-called ‘So-Called Poet’, I’m the one who’s supposed to be handing out the metaphors.

And then I usually threaten to go on strike again and we find ourselves caught in an infinite loop from which there is no escape.

Writer's Block

Today I tried to write a poem with

a pencil made of sparrows.

Evolution

The world has gone mad.

Depth is in.

The TV channels are all filled with poetry;

so much poetry.

Not that trite, rhyming bollocks,

but the really, really heavy stuff.

Dense. Textured.

Layered.

But nobody’s watching TV. Everyone is reading the latest

puzzlingly impenetrable work of poets.

The world has gone deep.

Madness is in.

Everyone is negotiating meaning with metaphors,

too busy to commit crime, or work.

Suspicious of appearances, consumed with inward distances,

and the cosmetics manufacturers have all gone out of business.

This, then, is poetry

for the end of everything.

The detachment of language

from reality.

Deep. Mad. 

World.

Three

Death dreams of flying. He is impossibly

standing on a ridge at the top of a mountain.

He looks below and sees a sheer drop. The

surface of the rock is flat, impossibly

flat, and the scale is somehow wrong. But this

is a dream, and dreams are the only things

Death has. There is an end to this sheer drop

but Death cannot see it for a layer

of mist; it does not have substance enough

to be a cloud. In his dream, Death thinks that

jumping off his mountain ridge – where the scale

is wrong, and the mountain face too flat, and

the cloud is not yet a cloud – jumping,

he feels, would be a solution. But

he dismisses this idea. There

is no way down from this mountain ridge.

Death sees that there is no way up.

    Death’s dream takes him elsewhere. He is in a

forest now and is too cold. Death walks

and the leaves change colour. Death likes the

changing of the colours but he does not

appreciate their beauty, he simply

knows that whenever he arrives in a

forest, the trees greet him with a change of

colour. Death does only three things: waiting

to arrive and arriving and dreaming.

Death has dreams and dreams and dreams. Death is

always dreaming. Death and his endless dreams.

    Death is about to dream of flying again.

He is not on the impossible mountain

ridge any longer; he is in a

back garden, standing in a child’s plastic

aeroplane. He flaps his arms and this time

he actually flies. He has no need of

the child’s plastic plane, and as he ascends,

he waves goodbye to his wife and his child,

for Death dreams of many things which he cannot

have. He flies above clouds, well-formed cloud-shaped

clouds, not ethereal, amorphous mist.

Amorphous, ethereal mist is one

thing, but these clouds are satisfying clouds;

proper clouds; white fluffy clouds. The white

fluffy clouds change colour as Death flies past

them, like leaves changing colours, but these

are different colours; vast swirls of metallic

pink and indigo and the colours in between.

Animals recline on some of the clouds.

Death comes within striking distance of a

leopard with impossibly sharp, menacing

teeth, but Death does not fear the impossible

leopard. In Death’s dream, a red biplane

manoeuvres a loop, and Death starts to soar,

and completes his own impossible

manoeuvres. He would feel freedom, but Death

is already free. Forever released;

forever on the way to arriving;

forever arriving; and always in a dream.

   Death admires the beauty in the ugliness

of the motorway which cuts across the

countryside, although he does not feel this.

The trees change colour, the clouds change colour,

and the landscape changes from green to grey.

    Death dreams of a yellow room. Outside there

is sunshine and the sound of summer and

the sound of traffic and the illusion of

life. But Death retreats from the yellow room

and the sunshine and the sounds of summer

and traffic. He chooses to be elsewhere;

to be in a place of isolation

and darkness and the possibility

of menace. Death is comfortable in this

place, this place of absence. Death questions his

choice to be here. He starts to run through

the darkness, a light in his hand. The light

does not illuminate for there is nothing

for it to reflect off, except the ghosts

which Death does not fear; the ghosts which scare others.

    Death dreams of being younger. He is surprised

at how different he looks, how much bigger

he has become in the intervening

aeons. It must be the burden of all

the souls of all the things from all places

and from all times: the stars, the planets, the

gas clouds, the comets, the meteors, the dreams.

    Death dreams of the impossible wave which

is impossibly large; its surface

irregularly tessellated

metallic-looking hexagons, the light

refracting off them in the many colours

invisible to the eye, like the colours

of the clouds he once flew above. The wave

recedes and as it does it evaporates

to reveal a vast canyon. He looks down

into its impossible depths, as

impossible as the mountain or

the leopard’s sharp teeth. He finds himself in

the ancient underground place with its

impossibly high sides. He looks up these sides,

these walls, and reads the story of their

geological timescale. He pulls the

string on the wall and everything collapses.

    The dream is the birthplace of all of Death’s thoughts.

He thinks of how strange it is, and yet how

simple, that people inherit their parents’

shadows, stretching back and back and further back.

Five

Death travels back in time to write

a postcard, buy a tie, to order

a take-away, to have a signet

ring engraved with his family crest.

He buys a pint, writes in a notebook,

then takes a train to London King’s Cross

to snap a selfie on a platform,

Harry Potter fan that he is.

Death breaks into a car and joy rides

along the M1 motorway; he

picks up a speeding ticket and

a criminal record on the way.

His fake ID scam ensures that when

he stages a jail-break, an unsuspecting

accountant will end up serving

the rest of Death’s eighteen-month sentence.

Death finds himself proposing to

a starry-eyed, naïve young Goth.

He jilts her at the altar, having

discovered his pansexual nature.

Death decides to adopt a puppy.

He ties a piece of string around

its neck, then ties the other end

to the gates at Buckingham Palace.

Death takes a holiday in Crete.

He fights a minotaur, drinks too

much ouzo, sleeps for a whole week

and wakes up on a flight back home.

A drunken and disorderly

Death causes panic on the flight,

which has to be diverted to

Cairo, both pilots being drunk as well.

Death briefly works in medicine,

but is struck off due to his patients’

one-hundred percent death rate and

his unconventional appearance.

Death signs up for a library card

and spends a month enlightening

himself about death camps, death masks,

death metal and Death on the Nile,

which soon becomes his favourite novel.

He listens to Death at One’s Elbow,

but fails to appreciate it.

He prefers Girlfriend in a Coma.

Death embraces surrealism.

He gets a tattoo of Lobster

across what would have been his forehead,

and a pink T-shirt with Grave Concerns on it

in lime green comic sans. The back

reads: I am going to wait till Death arrives

before answering that vexatious

question about the existence of God.

Death keeps mementos; artefacts

preserved; existences remembered;

reminders of what life can be; to keep

in mind the thing that he is ending.

The Elephant in the Room

The elephant is the only animal

which ever gets mentioned

in the context of rooms.

‘We need to address the elephant in the room.’

say the couple whose marriage is on the rocks,

as if they are thinking of sending it a post-card.

Mr Elephant, The Room, Our House, England.

But other animals might also be present

in the metaphorical rooms

of our troubled existence.

‘We need to address the crocodile in the room,’

say the couple

who have seen beyond the elephant.

Rather than addressing the crocodile in the room, though,

surely they’d be better off

running away from it?

‘We need to address the cat in the room,’

say the couple whose furniture has all but been destroyed.

Although, in this case, they might be talking about addressing

an actual cat.

Sting Trilogy, Three: Hornets

Don’t get me started on hornets.

Hornets are the reason why

we should all live in cities.

You can’t pollinate concrete.

Sting Trilogy, Two: Wasps

At least wasps are honest

and look like the scary bastards that they actually are.

Ghastly, insecty, aerodynamic bodies ready to

attack! attack! attack!

If they could dance,

they would dance like Stalin or Mao,

which is to say:

on the graves of their many victims.

‘Look out for wasps,’

says your dad.

‘They have a limitless supply of stings,

but at least they aren’t as vicious as bee-stings,’

this last point being conjecture

on the part of your dad,

because he’s almost certainly never been stung by a bee,

so how would he know?

Is the wasp,

with its never-ending supply of watered-down stings,

overcome with the need to unburden itself of its stings,

like the sexual urge?

‘I must sting! I must sting!’ thinks the wasp.

‘Look! There’s an eight-year-old boy

having a picnic with his dad;

he’s definitely too stupid to notice me!’

Buzz, zoom, sting, retreat.

Repeat! Repeat! Repeat!

Lands on eight-year-old boy’s hand.

Stings.

All wasps are basically paedophiles,

and, unlike bees, they live forever,

which explains why there are always so many of them.

Sting Trilogy, One: Bees

Bees are basically bastards,

deceiving us all with their

comically unaerodynamic physiques

and their almost fluffy,

teddy bear-like coats.

‘Don’t worry about bees,’

says your dad.

‘They only get one sting,

and if they use it – they die!’

Which is a bit like saying to a desperate man,

who’s playing a game of Russian roulette,

‘Don’t worry about the gun;

it can only kill you once.’

But these Russian roulette bees

do sometimes go off,

proving them to be absolutely

the most bloody-minded of all of God’s creations.

Do you think that if a lion

lost its jaws, which were attached to its intestines,

and resulted in instant death

whenever it attacked a gazelle…?

You see where I’m coming from.

Dancey-dancey-dance

go the psychopath bees

with their hilariously fat thoraxes

and dad dance routines.

When I was eight-years old,

I saw my sister’s friend

do a little bee dance of her own,

attacking her long, girly hair with her own hands,

and cavorting around the garden

in a seemingly random pattern

and screaming like a girl

who had a bee entangled in her hair.

It was the funniest thing I had ever seen,

eight-year old boys, like bees,

being one of nature’s psychopaths.

If a bee should sting you,

it will die and go to bee heaven,

where it will be met by God.

‘Welcome to bee heaven,’ he will say.

‘You’ve led a largely virtuous existence,

with only one lapse into ill-humour –

which is a shame –

but we shall let you off,

seeing as it was only the once

and because I’m all about the forgiveness.’

‘But congratulations! You’ve made it to bee heaven!

An eternity of milk and honey!’

‘Hang on,’ says the bee,

because bees acquire the power of speech in the afterlife.

‘Honey? Who’s making all the honey?’

‘Ha! So, er, yes…’ says God.

‘Well, this is B-heaven,

as in B-movie, B-list celebrity,

and B-grade at GCSE.

In other words: not very good.’

‘Still,' says, God.’ After all, I am God,

and the father of all my creations.’

Four

A few years ago, during an earnest conversation

with a poet friend, I was told that,

according to some poet or other,

‘all poems are either about sex or death’,

which, by process of elimination,

means that all of my poems are about death.

This seems a bit unlikely, given the number of my poems

which are comic observations.

Perhaps poetry audiences

are ahead of me in understanding

what my poems are actually about,

and are more morbid than I realised.

I introduce ‘The Greatest Pleasure of Being a Parent Is to

See Other People’s Children Behave Atrociously in Public’

for about the four millionth time.

Quite funny, the audience think,

as they laugh.

We love a good poem about death. Bring it on.

‘Here’s a poem called Shoes,’ I tell my audience.

‘It’s about shoes,’ which is all the explanation they’re getting.

Shoes, they all think;

clearly a metaphor for death.

‘This poem is about cats and dogs,’

and death, adds their collective interior voice.

I will admit that my sequence

‘Ten Poems about Death’

                                                                                     

does seems to be about death,

but what do I know?

‘Here is the fourth poem in my sequence,

Ten Poems about Death,’ I say,

to the handful of people who have turned up

to hear me recite poems about death.

But they know better.

A poem explicitly about death?

they all think.

It must be a poem about sex.

But in this, they would be wrong.

Because it’s actually a poem about sex and death,

deliberately constructed to undermine

that fatuous idea, put forward by some poet or other,

that ‘all poems are either about sex or death’.

Ha! How wrong can you be?

Sex or death? What a limited poetic vision!

Why have one or the other when you can have both?

Which, okay, I realise,
sounds like a call to necrophilia.

But all poems being about sex or death

is a limited poetic vision.

Some poems are clearly about the trials of parenthood,

or shoes, or cats and dogs.

Of course, the irony here, despite what I’ve just written,

is that this isn’t a poem about sex or death,

or even sex and death;

no, it’s a poem about how not all poems are about sex or death,

which is part of a sequence of poems

about death.

A better explanation for the

‘all poems are either about sex or death’ idea

is that its originator was severely short-sighted

(which may be sex-related), and viewed the world of poetry

through some sort of weird and obsessive

sex and death confirmation bias glasses.

I shall continue writing

my sequence of poems about death,

and finish this one by stating, for the record,

that all of these poems about death

are about death.

Mainly.

Moronic

It’s all iconic this and iconic that,

And how completely ironic

That people now call songs iconic.

Personally, I think it would be rather fantastic

If people became more iconoclastic.

Perhaps Ten Minutes

I wonder how we would spend the time,

my father and I, if we were able, somehow,

to share a few minutes together.

Perhaps ten minutes would not be too much to ask for,

to initiate, develop, and then conclude

our father-son relationship.

‘Hello,’ I would start. ‘I’m your son.’

I know, he would reply. You have my eyes and beard.

‘How about a quick sketch?’ I would ask,

and he would scribble one in my notebook.

How about a poem? he would ask,

and I would hand him ‘Song to My Father’,

a copy of which I’d brought along.

We’d strum a couple of guitars and sing a song.

Perhaps ‘Imagine’, which I’d come across

in his record collection; in keeping with the original

to start with, but finishing in daft, mock-operatic voices.

I’d ask him for one piece of advice

and he’d say, You’ve got to be joking

and I’d say, ‘Of course I was joking.’

Then we’d pour a couple of too-generous measures of Bushmills

and drink a toast. ‘Here’s to us!’ we’d bellow,

clink our tumblers, and glug.

He’d give me a look. My look.

I’d raise an eyebrow,

and we’d both look at the bottle. And laugh.

A silence would follow.

I’m sorry this never happened, he’d not say,

and I wouldn’t reply, ‘It is what it isn’t.’

A farewell and we’d be back

to our respective planes of existence,

slightly less sober; both of us reflecting on how

two people not meeting each other can happen to anybody.

Advice/News for Poets

Read lots and lots and lots of other people’s books. Novels and history books make for good sources of inspiration. A really good poetry book, and there are some about if you look hard enough, will have you leaping for your notebook within a few lines. Believe in your creative genius! Understand that you are the greatest poet currently writing in whatever language you are writing in. Unless it’s English, in which case the position has already been filled. You might still be a genius, though. However, this is unlikely.

Monday Morning

Do not write on Monday morning; this is not Bohemian enough. You should be experiencing significant existential despair first thing every week; it sets you up nicely. The melancholy of knowing that most of your time on this Earth will be wasted even if you put it to good use, erm... I don’t know. Something about cages or freedom.

Wednesday Evening/Thursday Morning

We could spend every Wednesday evening reinventing architecture instead of whatever it is we normally do on Wednesday evenings: feeling optimistic, or feeling a vague sense of achievement that the working week has become nearly the weekend but knowing that come first thing Thursday morning we will all be thinking ‘Still two full days of work ahead’. Did you know that a good way to avoid this is to become a poet?

Two

I walk through all the stillness which the forest

brings me. Not perfect stillness: footsteps, breezes

through branches, and the mystical vibrations

of trees themselves create a restlessness;

a restlessness which, in itself, is restful.

This restless-restful movement muffles silence.

You’re never still or silent in a forest,

not totally; there’s always something there.

   The previous day, I’d covered ten full pages

with poem notes: half lines, full lines, full stanzas,

and several phrases of iambic feet;

my unsuccessful quest to find the perfect

opening line. I walked. I sat. I wrote.

I wrote some more, then walked some more, then sat

and wrote and wrote and wrote. The first line would

not come. Eventually, I set off home,

and left the poem in the woods behind me.

   And so, today, I find myself among

some different trees and wonder if the poem

had moved there in the night; unwritten words

blown by a breeze, or moved by something else:

the restlessness of poetry unfinished?

I sit. Get my notebook out. Start to write.

But as with yesterday, the words I write

are not the right ones. Scribble, scribble, scribble,

the pencil goes. I look at what I’ve written.

It’s so much blah, blah, blah, and yet more blah.

I look up from the page and see that someone

has written something on a tree trunk,

a few feet away from my log-seat spot.

I get up to inspect the writing more

closely, the eyes of middle-age not being

as twenty-twenty as they were in youth.

A neat, italic script spells out the words

I breathe the forest out and all is still.

This surely can’t be accidental verse,

this bouncing pattern of iambic feet

skipping across the trunk. I wonder if

there’s more on other trees. And yes. There is.

Indifferent to estrangement from the world

is written in the same italic script

on the next tree, and as I look around me now,

I notice there are lines on all the trees.

I walk around the forest, read each line

out loud, transcribe the words into my book.

A forest, first of trees and then of poems;

hundreds upon hundreds of lines displayed.

Walking along the glory paths of fields.

  No flowers painted with the summer’s sunshine.

     This, then, you say, and only this; no more.

Unwatched, I stumbled through my ignorance.

  I shrugged my old self off; it fell from me.

    But can you hear it yet? And can you see it?

Once more the sun is hiding from the land.

  Kaleidoscope of grey above today.

    Did you not see when the clouds became waves?

This landscape, too, will pass into infinity.

  The noteless harmony of indecision.

    I recreate the universe inside my head.

If everything is just a state of mind.

  The cordiality of introspection.

    To write a never-ending list of unread lines.

I can’t believe that I was such a fool.

  The quiet voice which has no need for anger.

    The future is a different past, all told.

I leave the past behind; become the breeze.

  The past is written down in other people’s minds.

    Waiting for words to strike from who knows where.

The fountain of our youth dries up too fast.

  Give up! Give up! Give up! Don’t play the game!

    Why look towards the future’s downhill slopes?

Where are the saviours? Nowhere, that is where.

  Nowhere is where we all will end our days.

    The rhythm of the line is laid out bare.

We paved the way for saints and sinners all.

  Standing or falling: which one is the worst?

    Who is aloof? A man who hides himself.

Where can I find the things I need to find?

  Be more than what you are, just for a moment.

    Admire the nothingness of life and all its woes.

Where are the colours now? Where do they bleed?

  Wasting the day by writing unread words.

    Flowers are words, each one a poem's end.

Escape from this half-spun reality.

  Smouldering wood – the flames will soon be here.

    We did not know ourselves. We did not know

ourselves. We did not know ourselves. We did

  not know ourselves. We did not know ourselves.

    And all of us will one day be as leaves

I finish writing down the final line.

I look at the leaves on the ground. I stare

as they are displaced by a gust of wind,

and, for a second, more words appear.

   We walked between the forest trees

   and as they spoke their autumn verse,

   we heard their words and wrote them down.

   Moments are brief, like life, or what we think

   is life – it passes in a dream of what

   is not, and never was, but might have been.

Another gust whooshes them heavenwards.

They mesmerise me as they dance back down,

then settle on the forest floor, all meaning gone.

I turn to leave this mystic arboretum,

and as I walk, I think of trees. I think of words.

I think of leaves on forest floors. I think

of seasons too. Of spring’s sprung rhythms.

Of summer’s perfect days. Of autumn’s unmatched

beauty. And winter: lifeless, cold, grey, vast;

which brings the end to all which come before.

   Outside the forest now, I feel the silence.

The clouds pale grey. The air blue-cold. The bare

trees silhouetted. Stillness on its way.

Brief Silence

The silence of the classroom, when the children

have all departed, tries to fill the spaces

vacated by the absent children. You

could hear a pin drop, not to say the laughter

at Friday afternoon’s surreal red herring.

The only things now left from this week gone:

some rubbish on the floor, the odd lost ruler,

a pencil case, some chairs that weren’t pushed in,

and too much marking. Piles of books

awaiting comments, tick and marks.

The silence settles. ‘This is it,’ I think,

while contemplating eight miles on my bike.

Uphill. The calm after the storm, before

the next storm. Take it in. Breathe out. Ride home.

[Another abandoned poem, April 2016; writing about 1997-2003]

Free Will* (It Isn't in the Script)

Romeo and Juliet cannot

elope to Gretna Green when Act One ends,

and Desdemona can’t seek marriage guidance

counselling when Othello has his tantrums.

Hamlet’s depression can’t be remedied

with meds, or therapy, or meditation,

and Oberon can’t take his grievance over

the Indian Prince to the Small Claims Court.

Lady Macbeth can’t rid her hands of blood,

and laugh and sing and dance with gay abandon,

and Prospero is not allowed to turn

his old foes into frogs, or four-wheeled pumpkins.

Petruchio can’t do the washing up

then give a pair of trousers to his wife.

Beatrice and Benedick can’t take themselves

behind the bike shed to relieve their passions.

Sir Toby Belch cannot go full-on de-tox,

renounce the drink and go to AA meetings…

…And you and I, we all must live our lives

according to what’s written in our scripts.

*as in Shakespeare

[Trawling through an old notebook, and once again I came across a sizeable stack of abandoned, half-finished, unrealised, and ultimately forgotten, almost-poems. This is one of them.]

One

I decide I need to write a poem about Death.

Ten Poems About Death, I muse.

Seems like a nice round number.

‘Here Death,’ I call.

‘I’m writing a sequence of poems about you.

Any comments?’

But Death does not reply,

because Death is not real.

As in corporeal real.

Death itself exists.

Obviously.

But not the corporeal personification of Death.

Anyway.

I’m not so keen on the idea of the actual personification of Death.

Bit too spooky.

But then Death does appear.

He is not wearing a hooded black cloak.

He is not carrying a scythe.

He is not a skeleton.

He is, in fact, a T-shirt.

It is, in fact, a T-shirt.

‘Death is a T-shirt?’ I say out loud.

Yes, I am a T-shirt, says Death.

No, not really.

T-shirts don’t talk,

even ones which represent Death.

‘You’re not the personification of Death, though,’ I say,

while staring at the writing on the front –

The Second Law of Thermodynamics –

‘you’re a T-shirt,

and a T-shirt is not a person.’

The writing on the front of the T-shirt changes.

That’s where you’re wrong, it reads,

and underneath there appears a convoluted explanation

about how a T-shirt which is able to communicate

by expressing its thoughts on the front of itself

is a form of personification.

Sod personification anyway, says Death,

in his T-shirt way.

You’re so humancentric.

The T-shirt is a manifestation of Death,

or, to be more accurate,

the words on the front of it are a manifestation of Death,

or they were,

until they re-manifested themselves

as a convoluted explanation.

Then

The Second Law of Thermodynamics

appears once again

on the front of the T-shirt.

‘What about accidents?’ I say.

And accidents appears on the T-shirt,

followed by,

Nobody likes a smart-arse.

I pick up the T-shirt with

The Second Law of Thermodynamics

And accidents

Nobody likes a smart-arse

written on the front.

I realise I should have mentioned

suicide as well as accidents to Death,

but then remember

Nobody likes a smart-arse,

which pretty much covers

every other eventuality.

I put the T-shirt on.

It’s a one-size fits all.

‘Oh, very funny, Death.’ I say.

Yes, Death is hilarious

appears on the front of the T-shirt,

I decide against wearing it outside of the house

and spend the next hour and thirty-seven minutes

trying to persuade Death

that if he’s/it’s going to assume

a corporeal form which communicates

in the medium of ever-changing written words,

then a notebook would be far more convenient,

and obvious,

than a T-shirt.

In the meantime

The Second Law of Thermodynamics

And accidents

Nobody likes a smart-arse

reappears on the T-shirt

and, beneath it,

Live 2018

as if it’s the name of a band

touring an album.

‘Very funny, Death,’ I say, again.

I’m basically a comedian

appears,

but not on the T-shirt;

the words appear on the page

of the notebook in which I am writing.

‘Oh, very meta,’ I say.

Death’s words vanish

and are replaced with

I have work to do.

Why don’t you get on with writing

your second poem in this series?

Perhaps you could make that one like an actual poem,

with rhymes and metre and whatnot?

Instead of this stream of consciousness

which is very prosaic, really,

isn’t it?

And then the words vanish altogether,

before I have a chance to mention

that the stylistic modality of this poem

was a deliberate metaphor for

the death of poetry,

or perhaps The Death of Poetry.

The words on the T-shirt are still there,

and I go for a walk in the autumn sunshine,

notebook in hand,

sensing the imminence of winter in the air.

Plastic Concerns

I’m clearing up last night’s Scrabble

and waiting for the toast to pop up

when the title for an unwritten poem

pops up, unbidden, into my head.

I wonder what structure and tone

the poem will take.

Will it be a mirror

which reflects the meandering

narratives of Kirill Medvedev?

Or a string of opaque images

like Paul Emery?

Maybe I’ll try my hand at an original poem

in the style of me?

I think this last one impossible.

All of my poems are a concatenation

of every poem I’ve ever read,

ending up with whatever my latest poem is.

Ordinarily,

when such a word as concatenation

jumps into the forefront of my mind,

I’ll dismiss it,

unless I’m being deliberately Gilbertian

for comic effect;

but I’m not feeling that brand

of funny today.

Then I remember Sheila’s comment

about my father:

Sometimes, he would come out with a really long word,

and I would wonder if he was making it up.

Making up for a lifetime of absence,

these days he’s rarely far from

the forefront of my mind,

and so concatenation it is,

a tiny acknowledgement of my father,

in a poem which has nothing to do about my father.

Perhaps that explains its appearance,

the word having stayed hidden in my mind

after I’d encountered it

in some dense historical tome,

or a book about politics;

or possibly one about the impending

environmental devastation

which is currently doing its sprint finish,

due to overtake us any day now –

unless it already has –

although we won’t realise it has

until we see it reach the finishing line,

ahead of us,

as we come in last,

in a world-sized stadium

filled with the impotent

harrumphs of a lifetime

of social media tantrums.

I interrupt myself

in order to put on my shoes.

I’ve recently decided

that I prefer writing with my shoes on.

I don’t know if the wearing of a pair of shoes –

or, rather, the pair of shoes,

as I only have one pair –

has a beneficial effect on my writing,

but it’s an oddity

which I’ve gradually come to acquire;

one of those idiosyncrasies which evolve

over time,

like always writing in pencil,

or having to start every notebook

with yet another poem

about the starting of a new notebook.

The evolution of who I am:

the concatenation

of largely inexplicable habits

whereby I become

an ever more complicated

and ridiculous version of myself;

the unconscious becoming

of a unique, complex belief-system

according to which I live my life.

It’s fortunate that I’m not the new Messiah,

or other people might also start believing

that it is imperative

to buy every album release

which contains a contribution from Johnny Marr,

along with having to wear shoes while writing poetry,

or having to use a knife and fork

to eat sandwiches.

Plastic Concerns was the title.

It’s less a metaphor, and more a pun,

and puns have very low status in poetry,

unless you’re from Japan,

where puns are an acceptable form of expression.

Perhaps therein lies the ambiguity

which I feel towards this title:

I like it as a pun,

but as poetry,

I find it unacceptable.

There is a cacophony of despair

at the discovery of a new continent of plastic,

the latest triumph of human ingenuity;

a cacophony which seems as ubiquitous as plastic in the oceans.

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse

each now has an entire cavalry

at its disposal,

although I don’t know which regiment

this thing belongs to:

War? Pestilence? Death?

Having discovered this new continent –

the Continent of Plastica,

or perhaps Plasticopia

(no, it’s definitely Plastica) –

I react as I always do to such things:

with a not-quite-detached

Well, then.

Eventually,

after stumbling across the suitably ominous video of Plastica

online for the nth time,

I wondered,

Whence all the plastic?

and stumbled, in my subsequent search,

across a statistic which I hadn’t seen mentioned

by any of the concerned posters:

46% of Plastica is made from

discarded plastic fishing nets.

And the majority of the rest of it?
Other fishing gear:
the ropes,
the crates,
the baskets,
the spacers.

Exhortations abound:

Give up plastic bottles!

Tick.

Give up plastic bags!

Tick.

Give up straws!

Tick.

Recycle! Reuse! Sign petition!

Tick, tick, possible tick.

Give up eating fish!

FFS, you vegans are so…

…preachy.

So extreme.

Around 100 million sharks

are killed each year

as bikill,

the by-product of fishing;

fishing with plastic nets.

There’s a picture of a deformed turtle,

one of the four holes of the plastic packaging apocalypse,

from the Regiment of Beer Four-Packs,

strangling its shell.

It’s a picture we look at

while ignoring

the sky-high photograph album

of dolphins, whales, sharks,

fish, fish, and fish –

and turtles –

which have all been killed by bikill

in the pursuit of marine cuisine;

maritime mass murder;

the unintended consequence

of battered cod,

or whatever fish ends up in the kitchen.

Without our plastic bottles,

our plastic bags,

our plastic straws,

our recycling plants,

or our online petitions,

the Continent of Plastica will continue to expand.

Perhaps the campaigns –

to ban plastic bottles,

to ban plastic bags,

to ban plastic straws –

will be 100% successful,

while, amid our empty self-congratulation,

Plastica grows and grows and grows,

so that,

come 2048,

it will be left to float above the dead ocean,

and all of our plastic concerns for that ocean

will be seen,

by our grandchildren,

for what they really were:

plastic concerns.

Around 100 million sharks killed every year

Seafood may be gone by 2048

46% of the tonnage of the plastic garbage patch is fishing nets, the majority of the rest is composed of other fishing industry gear

Felled

Here, in the neighbourhood of loss,

we see the things that are not there:

a father playing with his son;

a mother singing lullabies;

the happiness of knowing what your name is

and everywhere you look, our living trees.

Song to My Father

What is the sound of yesterday? you asked.

I did not know. Perhaps it was a ballad

sung to your mother. Music, passed from her

to you, then passed, unseen, from you to me.

We were the silences between the notes;

the rests which every melody requires.

We sang in different keys and out of time,

chromatic notes which made a harmony

for songs we never shared. Our requiem

to loss. The sound of yesterday, unheard.

N

I do not say,

‘Today, I will write a poem

about a flute,

or wallpaper,

or the letter Q,’

although, I now realise,

this is exactly what I have just said.

Yesterday, as I wrote –

not about a flute,

or wallpaper,

or the letter Q –

I noticed that a clumsy capital N

of mine

looked identical

to the clumsy capital N

of my father’s;

the clumsy capital N

which started the second half

of his illegibly scrawled signature

on his marriage certificate.

The awkwardness of my handwriting

is a tedious thing.

That my e is indistinguishable from a c,

or an undotted i,

is the least of its problems.

My pencil jerks across the page

with two left feet,

failing to keep pace

with whatever thought is currently being let loose,

and often,

while this is happening:

blunders, blunders, everywhere.

There is not a single letter

which hasn’t concussed itself

as it’s fallen out of my pencil;

each minor head trauma

making the letter look

not quite itself,

as it balances ridiculously

on the line.

My disregard

for legibility

is not a constant thing:

some of my redrafts

are as legible and consistent

as any handwriting fusspot

could hope to see.

Oh, yes, I can write neatly

when the words are already there,

and I can see from my father’s notebook,

that this was the same for him,

another little clue about how we may be connected.

And so I dwell

on why the signature on his marriage certificate

was so hastily scratched, so illegible,

so like mine when I am elsewhere,

while my hand is in the room,

holding the pencil.

Never Finished (i)

The latest poetry idea:

to write some poems which are all

deliberately unfinished, ending,

perhaps, halfway through the first word,

the second line, the seventh stanza,

the final word, the

Broken Fridge Poem

The poem hurled itself at my feet,

pleading to be written.

It was a poem a about a broken fridge.

‘Broken Fridge Poem,’ I say,

‘what makes you think 

I have the time to write you?’

You have the time to stare at clouds;

to sit and read;

to do nothing.

‘Staring at clouds is a vital part of being a poet,’

I say. ‘Sitting and reading? Doing nothing?

Some things are harder than they look.’

Broken Fridge Poem looks at me.

If you don’t write me down,

it will be as if I never was.

Broken Fridge Poem tells me his life story.

‘Life stories are not poems,’ I tell him,

after he’s finished. ‘They are novels.’

But Broken Fridge Poem

is no longer at my feet,

giving me too much detail.

He sits there on the page,

a cacophony of handwriting.

Contrast

Sitting in the garden,

having just started

a poem about my father

and the clouds moved aside

to make way for the sun.

Coincidence again,

or synchronicity,

but there it was,

and with it, my shadow cast

on to the bright white pages

of a new notebook;

the contrast of dark and light.

And there you are,

in my long-troubled mind,

the light on your face,

and all of your mystery,

and all of our sadness,

dimmed.

Everything Must Go

We think that we’ve got problems now.

The stars will one day disappear,

not all together – one by one.

Their lights will be no more, their names

forgotten. Everything Must Go!

the cosmic closing down sale signs

will not proclaim. Which star will be

the last to die in this doom-fated

universe? Earth’s? No. Ours will be long

be gone before that final light

succumbs, along with all the others,

to the heat death of eternity.

An old, tired, now dead universe,

so ancient that the noughts which mark

its age will be too numerous

to count. A near infinity

of zeroes, to signify nothing.