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.