Uninspired

Today, I woke up in the south of France,

and struggled with the writing of at least

five poems, each new effort meeting failure

just like the previous one. None of it clicked.

Idea. Lines. Abandonment. Repeat.

 

It’s better to have tried and failed, I think,

than never to have tried at all. There is

a saying – Inspiration has to find

you working. What it doesn’t add is that

it sometimes doesn’t find you, even if

 

you get the bunting out, illuminate

your working space with neon tubes which read,

‘I am now working, working, working… find me!’

while saying, ‘Wow! I’m working really hard.

Hooray for work and inspiration. Hint, hint.’

 

Today scored low on the achievement scale.

decided that frustration was his new

best mate, and made too many cups of tea.

He read a lot of other people’s poems

and contemplated nothing worth the writing.

 

And on that line, this poem should have ended:

a bleak, depressing, nihilistic thought;

but inspiration came. It wasn’t much

(to wit – this poem), but it did arrive,

all bleary-eyed and sleepy though it was.

 

 

 

Timeless

   For James Green

There’s no such thing as time, if we believe

the mystics, for time is just

the measurement of objects relative

to space. A day is only such from our

perspective, here on little planet Earth.

There is no time, they say, there’s only now

and only ever has been now.

 

And that was what was on my mind before

I fell asleep last night, a night which may

be seen as little more than an illusion,

depending on your mystical perspective.

 

Mystics be damned! I like the measurement

of time. It’s useful if you have a train

to catch, or a wife whose birthday needs

remembering. I wonder how I would

arrange to meet my old friend Jon if time

could not be measured. Here I am in France,

not far from where he lives. ‘When shall we visit?’

he’d asked. A simple ‘Be here now’ would not have worked.

 

Thinking of time, I calculated that,

in just two years, we will have known each other

for forty years, which isn’t bad as friendships go.

Next month, I meet with Pasc, another old friend.

Continuing my time-related thoughts,

I realised our friendship was now forty-one.

And then, a glorious epiphany –

this month I’ve known James Green for fifty years!

I wondered what it was that he was doing with

his non-existent time while I was starting

to feel a bit old. Maybe he’s unconsciously

tapping a rhythm on the nearest surface,

a habit every drummer seems to have.

Perhaps he’s tutoring some reluctant child,

I thought, or getting ready for a walk

with Bex, or talking to his cat, or writing

a song… which brought me back to Pasc and Jon.

 

Pascal, as he then was, had been recruited

to play the bass in my first band.

At our first gig, he’d had to play unplugged

because we’d left his lead behind and didn’t have

the time to get back to the house and pick it up;

a better way of making friends I do not know.

And Jon and I had spent our sixth-form years

strumming guitars and talking music

and searching, always searching, for a bloody plectrum.

 

We could have been a four-piece band, I think,

and picture us rehearsing never-written songs:

Pasc with his unplugged bass, Jon looking in van

for that elusive pick, me singing

my dreadful adolescent lyrics,

and, always in the background somewhere, James

keeping the non-existent time on his drums.

Tomatopear

The tomato who wanted to grow up a pear,

   Said, ‘I’ve got the right shape but my colour is red.

Oh, daddy, why can’t I be green? It’s not fair!

   And with that he stormed off with his red face to bed,

   Where he dreamt what it would be to be green instead.

But it didn’t much matter at all, for you see…

…We ate that poor pear-shaped tomato for tea.

Among the Trees

   for Jon Bowen

 

We’ve just sat down to eat a salad/French bread

with bits and pieces, vaguely rustic lunch when

I make some bland remark about how lovely

it is to be surrounded by so many trees.

 

‘Trees are the answer,’ Jon remarks, and I

agree, but have no time to register my

agreement as he comes out with a measured,

‘it doesn’t matter what the question is,’

before I have a chance to counter with

another bland and uninsightful statement,

like, ‘Absolutely,’ or, ‘Quite so,’ or even, ‘Yes.’

 

Instead of making my unnecessary verbal noises,

I get out of my chair and head towards

the bedroom, where I write his gem of wisdom

inside my notebook, knowing first-

class inspiration for a poem when I see it.

 

And in the middle of the writing of the poem,

a tiny grasshopper lands on the table,

next to my hand. I notice that a leg

of his his caught up in a fragment of

a spider’s web. I let him grasp my pencil.

I place him on a piece of wood, remove

the little filament of sticky thread,

and write. And when I look again, he’s gone.

 

Like Jon, who’d gone back to his vineyards after

our post-lunch conversation, which, as always,

revolved around guitars and music; laughter,

as always, punctuating all we’d said.

The best advice I could have given to my younger self

would have been a simple, Choose your friends wisely,

Fergus.’ At nearly forty years of distance,

I almost hear him say, ‘I did.’

 

Amphibrachic Ode to an Agave Plant

   for Paul

 

I ate my pyjamas in springtime,

   Last week, I drank ink from a printer,

But pity the man who confesses,

   ‘I lost my agave last winter!’

 

I chopped all my wood with a teaspoon,

   And now I have many a splinter,

But sorrow’s for he who’s caught saying,

   ‘I lost my agave last winter!’

 

This life is bizarre and absurd, like

   A play by that fraud Alan Pinter,

His best lines make mush, much less sense than,

   ‘I lost my agave last winter.’

 

This poem is hardly long-distance,

   Composed by a poemy sprinter,

   But what is its last line? You guessed!

   ‘I lost my agave last winter!’

 

Cocaine Bear, the Poem

‘I fancied something highbrow,’ read the message,

underneath the screenshot of a title –

‘Cocaine Bear’ – and

 

‘God, it’s shite. Was it ever going to be

anything but?’

 

I replied asking if the film remained

true to the original Shakespeare, wag

that I am.

 

What next, though, for the makers of ‘Cocaine Bear’?

‘Heroin Bull’ or ‘Marijuana Tiger’?

‘Amphetamine Hippopotamus’

or ‘Magic Mushroom Wolf (Live Action Version)’?

Or maybe ‘Anabolic Steroid Shark’?

 

So many questions! Anyway, I hear

the sequel, ‘Cocaine Bear Does Rehab’,

is right up there with ‘Hamlet’ in its violent drama.

 

Why aren’t the recovering cocaine-addict community,

outraged at the insensitivity

at being taunted by the word Cocaine

on buses, billboards and the like?

Their woe-is-me complaints would fit the zeitgeist nicely.

 

I suppose when you’ve snorted your septum

into oblivion and fucked up your life,

you probably don’t worry about shit like that.

Advice to This Poem

Avoid unnecessary repetition.

Stick to the metre. Be consistent with

the line length.

Make sure that the mere is kept at all times.

Avoid unnecessary repetition. If rhyming, keep it simple (no one likes

to struggle with a Hudibrastic mouthful)

and be effective. Steer clear of invective

(you ma be angry, people like to laugh, though).

Avoid Unnecessary repetition,

if that’s a thing. It is? Oh, right. In which case,

avoid unnecessary repetition

(some people think you can’t say that enough,

the fools). Please bear in mind the audience.

Be kind to them, as some may well be poets,

and may live lonely, loveless, lachrymose lives.

Avoid all attempts at alliteration.

The most important thing you should remember

is never end this poem with

‘avoid unnecessary repetition.’

 

Julian

I sit in this once empty chair and turn

my thoughts to how you’ve been since last we spoke.

You had the 'flu and thus postponed my visit.

So sad it turned into a cancellation;

it would have been a blast to say farewell.

 

But such is life. You get on with the task

of living: work or play; awake or dreaming;

earning or spending; running, walking… stopping.

It all just stops. When we were boys, we never knew

a clock could run so fast. But such is life.

 

It’s always later than we think, the stoic

would say, and he’d be right. How late it was

although we did not know, and so our friendship

had no farewell blast. There was no talk

of all our misdemeanours past. No joking

 

about the time we started Matron’s car.

No reminiscences about the time

I stayed at your house and you pestered your dad

to let me try some aqua grappa (which he did).

Now laughing now, but only endless silence.

 

And yet I see you clearly in my mind.

That face from boyhood’s many years ago.

That rascal’s grin. That loaded laugh.

That attitude which broke so many rules.

So vivid in my mind. So bright. So… Julian.

 

It’s such a cliché, ‘Gone, but not forgotten.’

It holds some truth, though, for today you are remembered,

with fondness, sadness, joy and love.

Returning to the silent here and now,

I wonder at the turning of the clock.

Movement

The mystery will dance with words,

but cannot be defined by them.

It is their rhythm and their meaning.

It is their sound and their appearance.

It is their shape and their construction.

It is their presence and their absence.

Enjoy the dance of mystery,

for words are part of its expression.

An Early Morning Calm

My life is one of quiet contemplation.

Resisting the magnetic pull of noise,

I sit. No radio. No internet.

No papers or TV. No suit or tie.

No world of work. I look out of the window.

 

The sky today is uniformly white

and light, relentless rain is falling earthwards.

The play of silence in my mind gives way

to simple thought: an early morning calm.

The world of words has woken, and I listen.

The Futile Grab

No meaning here, no meaning here at all.

Observing life in real time: illusion.

Take Flight

Most days I stumble, stumble, stumble, crashing

into these… unthought thoughts. They manifest

themselves like heartbeats, breaths, or baffling dreams,

and like those things, they simply are.

They turn up in my mind’s departure lounge,

hoping to catch a flight of fancy (also

known as a poem). Most of them will

journey no further, having come from only God

knows where, to nowhere else: the nowhere of

ideas; placed and then displaced.

As far as I’m aware, they vanish with

as little will as they arise. Today,

there was a nothing thought; a thought

so nondescript it barely was, and yet

it flew on one of Fancy’s happy flights

and landed safely on this poet’s page.

Farce Track

You give up making sandwiches for Lent,

and thus redeem your soul in increments.

Unrealistic

Sitting around

expecting the world

to make some sort of sense.

Cosmic Ants

Passing the baton of stupidity

down the generations

of deluded

eschatological fantasists.

And Yet

 

It’s nobody’s dream to live in

   South Ruislip.

And yet, many people do

   live there.

 

Melt

I’ve never understand ‘butter wouldn’t melt.’

Of course, if I had a piece of butter

in my mouth, I’d spit it out with a loud,

‘Fuck me, that is disgusting!’

Like a gobful of olive oil.

Now, ‘ice wouldn’t melt.’

That makes some sort of sense.

Ice-cream wouldn’t melt?

How about The North Pole.

 

   Envoi

 

Futhermore, ‘melt’ is a disgusting word.

 

The Sun Illuminates the Page

The sun illuminates the page, I write.

I’m being literal: today, the sun

has not been hidden by a bank of clouds;

instead, her rays are landing everywhere,

including, as it happens, on the empty page

of my new notebook, hence – ‘The sun

illuminates the page.’ It wants to be

a metaphor. The sun is consciousness?

it says, uncertainly. I can’t be sure,

it says. Perhaps I mean awareness? Where’s

a guru when you need one? Maybe it’s

that ‘consciousness awareness’ thing I’ve read

so much about? The line returns to silence.

It doesn’t last. The page is blank. Was blank,

it says, until you wrote me down. Before

my words were fixed upon the page, the page

was empty; now, it’s filling up with words.

The empty page is what you are because

you are a poet; had you been a painter,

you would have been the canvas; had you been

a sculptor, clay; a goldsmith, gold. You get

the gist. ‘Indeed I do,’ I say. ‘But what

are all the words?’ I ask, because the page

has now filled up with words, and I have had

to turn it over. Words are what you think you

you are, it says. ‘I am the poem when

the page is full,’ I mutter to myself.

Except you aren’t! it says. I don’t know why

an exclamation mark was needed; there

it is, though. Words are misdirection. Words

are a distraction. Words are fundamental to

that human quest which everybody leans

towards – which is to clutter up

their lives with our greatest illusion: purpose.

   ‘I wonder what it is that I’ve

      been doing all these years.’

   You thought you were the words;

      without the page, you’re nothing.

 

The sun illuminates the page, I write.

Next time, I’ll think of something less contentious.

 

 

Literal Madness

You know those literal-minded people,

those people who seemingly believe

that words should only have

one, bloody meaning,

 

and that Nuance is a place in France

(No? Well, imagine that you do

know them, okay?)

 

Well, these people who are literally-minded

should never keep a pair of boots

in the boot of their car.

 

Imagine their bewilderment

at having to answer,

when asked the whereabouts

of their boots,

 

My boots are in

my boot.

 

They would not be able to

follow the contradictory madness

inherent

in such an apparently harmless statement.

 

How can my boots

be in

one of 

my boots?

 

they would think, even if momentarily,

before they grudgingly concede/recalled,

that the word boot may –

stupidly, in their opinion –

have another meaning, to wit:

 

‘the storage compartment

in the back of a car’.

 

Your very helpful suggestion,

which is duly noted,

that they simply refer to the boot

of their car –

 

as a trunk –

 

would have worked splendidly

had our literal-minded acquaintance

but owned an elephant

 

in whose trunk he could have stored

two boots,

one up each nostril.

Silences

I wonder what the other poets think of

when they are not looking

out of their poets’ windows,

 

and contemplating the next word,

the next line,

the next stanza,

and the eternal problem

 

faced by each poet,

in each poem:

how to end the blasted thing.

 

Maybe, like me,

they are meditating on

the multiplicity of silences

which life presents to us,

 

and whether or not

they all sound the same.

 

Perhaps it’s a deep silence

which they imagine,

like the silence of the tomb;

or maybe a melancholy silence,

like the one hidden in the word goodbye.

 

It could be, given that they’re poets,

the silences of the unwritten word, the unwritten line,

the unwritten poem.

Or even the silence of those whole poems

which failed to emerge

into this unquiet place.

 

While they are thinking of their many silences,

you fix yourself upon the silence of this page,

with its borders of

wordless, blank, unwritten silence,

 

isolated from the world of noise

outside of this poet’s window.

Anything is Possible

I was trying to stop the traffic lights with my thoughts,

but it just wasn’t working.