Tangerine Feat

I walk into a bar and juggle spectacularly.

It is the most amazing display

of juggling ever witnessed.

The barman is understandably impressed.

‘That is the most amazing feat

with tangerines which I have ever witnessed,’ he says

(by now you will have guessed that I juggle with tangerines).

‘A tangerine feat, you could say,’ says a patron

just before he falls off his bar stool.

‘Practice senseless kindness,’ he sibilantly stutters,

while hanging on to his bar stool,

‘and random acts of drunkenness.’

Tangerine Feet

What do I mean when I say Tangerine Feet?

Are the feet the colour of tangerines?

Are they the shape of tangerines (surely impossible)?

Perhaps tangerine feet are tangerines

where feet would normally be,

but then they aren’t tangerine feet, are they?

but tangerine leg extensions.

What do I mean when I say tangerine leg extensions?

You see the problems poets create for themselves,

and, if they bother reading poetry (some do), other people?

Wonders

Unite behind the wonders of humanity:

kindness, generosity, despair, malice,

religion, cookery books, science degrees,

wistfulness, stupidity…

I mean, I could go on, but you probably

have a sandwich to finish or a poem to ignore.

Most of all, though:

trying to make ourselves look good in the eyes of others,

when, as Oscar Wilde said, ‘The one thing in life

we never know is how other people see us.’

Although that’s not entirely true:

they see us as they want to see us,

and that’s something a little easier to unearth, possibly.

Things

The best things in life are free. rarely things

Hatched

     eat           after
Don't count your chickens before they've hatched.

Taking Stock

     stock cubes

Too many / cooks spoil the broth.

I Try Out Different Ideologies

At breakfast, I become a communist.

It starts off well enough. The revolution

is bloodless, swift, decisive, strong. I storm

the fridge and liberate its captive contents.

I redistribute them about the house:

the orange juice and almond milk are poured

into the bath; the royal gala apples

are placed on window sills and mantelpiece;

I put the mango chutney on a stair;

and smear tahini on the bedroom ceiling.

The vegan sausages are strung up on

a coat hook pour encourager les autres.

By half-past nine, the paranoia starts.

Utopia has not arrived. I look around

the house: if anything, I must concede,

things have got worse. Someone must be to blame.

I ‘uncover’ a plot: the vegetables

have been conspiring with some foreign agents,

and, after spending time inside a meat-

grinder, confess to their nefarious deeds

during a show-trial in my living-room.

Impatience grips me as I realise that

the Workers’ Paradise is further out

of reach than ever. So, I try my hand

at fascist ideology. Step 1:

I make a bonfire of my books. Step 2:

I make my train set run on time. Step 3:

I gather all my troops (just me), invade

the spare bedroom, annex the airing cupboard,

and daub the walls with poetphobic statements

declaring my superiority

over ‘the lesser poets’ (any poet

who isn’t me). This all feels great until

the fire alarm goes off because of all

the burning books (perhaps I shouldn’t have used

the garage as my ‘place of intellectual

purification’?). Fortunate for me,

I have a fire extinguisher to hand,

and when the fire brigade arrives, I tell

them that the clouds of smoke the neighbours saw

came from a really massive piece of toast.

Left to my own devices once again,

I undergo religious revelation.

The flames were clearly Flames from Hell, a sign

from God that I must put my house in order;

recant the day’s godless ideologies;

repudiate the false hope of their claims;

and thus, embrace the one true faith of

religious ideology. But whose?

The Catholics’? Muslims’? Jews’? Sikhs’? Buddhists’? Mormons’?

I save time by believing all of them

at once (this surely can’t be any more

confusing than the contradictions found

inside their holy books) and spend the final

hours of the day in silent contemplation,

a bit of meditation, and some prayer.

When I awake, I see my prayers have not

been answered. Chaos, chaos, everywhere

I look: the house is like a vandal’s playground;

the garage needs a dose of demolition;

and all the food has vanished from the fridge.

My ideological experiments

have failed. Tomorrow, I shall try philosophy.

Second Person

I like you.

Not you personally.

Don’t take that personally.

If I know you,

I probably do like you

(keep believing that).

I like you –

the word you –

when it’s used

in the context of a poem,

especially in the context

of one of my poems.

You, I write,

when really, I mean I.

But I want to avoid me

and so I invite the reader

unconsciously to imagine

that I am you.

William Blake, It Was Really Nothing

William Blake reflected on the possibility

of seeing the universe in a grain of sand;

but did he ever cogitate, I wonder,

on the possibility of seeing the futility of existence

in a grain of rice?

Just now, having just finished a lentil Madras,

I took my plate to the sink.

Would I be bothered to clean it, there and then,

or would I channel my inner student

and leave it to form the first level

of yet another soon-to-be established

kitchen sink pile-up?

It turned out that I would be bothered,

and as I swiped in the direction of cleanliness,

I saw a single grain of rice

swept off the plate and down the plug hole.

And, despite myself, I couldn’t help

but feel sorry for this single grain

as it disappeared.

‘The finest of all rices from

the foothills of the Himalayas’

the half-kilo packet informed me.

Oh, grain of rice, I reflected/cogitated,

what a journey you have made:

cultivated; harvested; shipped thousands of miles

to the UK, where you were packaged;

transported to a shop; bought;

driven a few hundred metres;

tipped into a pan of boiling water;

and, after twelve minutes, cooked.

You made it far as my plate,

the grain-sized fraction of a whole meal;

a meal which was almost completely eaten,

except for you.

Instead, you were taken to a sink,

and swept towards a drain

in a cascade of water,

your one consolation:

to be immortalised in verse.

If you can see the futility of existence

in a grain of rice…

Yes, William, I can.

Even-Tempered

‘I’m not even joking,’ said Gemma.

Why ‘even’, though?

How about something

with a little more impact?

Fucking. That would work

for a lot of people.

I never used to swear in my poems.

I’m not fucking joking.

Or what about

putting the modifier

after the joking?

I’m not joking, probably.

The unnecessary addition of ‘even’

does rather give this phrase the ring

of the inarticulate and slightly huffy adolescent,

like the ubiquitously redundant ‘actually’.

Ackshully! The sort of word

my English teacher needed smelling salts

to recover from (along with ‘sort of’, ‘even’,

and, also, ending a sentence with a preposition.)

Maybe we should use ‘even’ more often;

actually, sort of.

Best get the smelling salts then.

I’m not even actually fucking joking, probably.

Articulation

The expression ‘bad poetry’ is meaningless:

critics still use it, forgetting that bad poetry

is not poetry at all – Keith Douglas

Everybody likes to play their favourite game:

analysing the shortcomings

of almost everybody else.

‘His poems stagger like a drunk

looking for a bus shelter,

and are as interesting as a fabric swatch.’

‘She always uses the wrong words,

and the nearest she ever got to poetry

was standing outside Waterstone’s in 2014.’

‘His experimental work

is all test-tube and no Bunsen burners,

and is that ash I can smell after reading?’

‘That high-profile clique has one voice

and sings the same three notes, over and over:

You see, I… You see, I… You see, I…’

But we all love some poets,

and can’t quite believe that anyone else

swoons over them as much as we do.

Their collections are like the albums

we played into the ground when we were young;

we’re not even put off by the bad artwork and the scratches.

And I bang my head against the kitchen table,

wondering what it is that people most dislike,

or like, about my every failed attempt at articulation.

None of this matters.

We write the poems which we want to read,

and if not that, then what, exactly, are we doing?