THE DEAFENING SILENCE
The silence is deafening
But then it always has been;
Deafening all my life, I mean.
It’s as if I’m not really there,
Although I am sure that’s not true.
Perhaps I am invisible to all
But a few true believers.
Are they possibly seeing what isn’t there,
And also hearing the deafening silence?
read more of my poems in my new collection ’67’ – http://www.tinhuttalespublishers.co.uk/67/
FAMILY PLANNING
You English have it:
A plan for life I mean
Sex, marriage even,
A mortgage at nineteen.
Holidays in Benidorm
Or that Costa by-the sea.
And two point five children
That grandma minds
Most weekends for free.
MARCHING
Hey, conveyor stop your motion
You tread on ice and leave an ocean
Once you lay in slumber deep
What was it that broke your sleep?
Standing on this moving shoal
I still can’t see my aging soul
Where you come from none can tell
Where you’re bound for must be hell
Did you, were you, will you, can you?
We in darkness bleed upon you
Babylon has come and gone
And still your engine thunders on
THE NIGHT THE MUSIC DIED
He lay in the box quite comfortably
His waxen face staring into infinity
Looking much better in death
Than he ever had in life.
It was all that I could do to peer
At him through slatted fingers
From the back of the room;
The ever-present smell of tanning
And leather aprons absent now;
More than forty seeping years of it
Scrubbed away one last time
His moped – a natural progression from pedal power
When his legs gave out –
Lay discarded in the coal shed
At the back of the house.
(No driver you see, and mother still had the shopping to do)
He dug turf, cut down young Sally trees,
And turned over his bit of stony ground endlessly.
In summer he clipped sheep slowly
With a machine bought by post from Clerys,
Carefully stowing it away in its box
When the shearing was done.
The clay pipes he sucked on – their broken stems
Held together with blood pricked from his thumb –
Were redundant now
And his three bottles of Sunday-night Guinness
Would stand corked under the counter evermore.
Who would dance half-sets with her now?
My mother enquired of no one in particular,
The smoky saloon bar stunned that the music had felled him
Knocked him to the floor in the middle of the tune.
He lay there with a smile on his face
Knowing it was over
And I never got to know what was on his mind.
We put him in the ground
And sadness trickled through me
Like a handful of sand through my fingers.
Later, everyone stood around
Eating sparse ham sandwiches
While I stood there, dry-eyed;
He was a great man they all said
Slapping the back of my overcoat;
Sure he gave forty years to that tannery
And what did it give him?
I wanted to shout to the throng;
A gold watch and a tin tray
And both had his name spelled wrong
BOY
You won’t remember this
But I will
You changed again, got bigger
Both in body and in mind
One foot is the man you want to be;
The other is the boy
You so carelessly leave behind
from my latest collection of poems, ’67’. http://www.tinhuttalespublishers.co.uk/67/
PARTING
The sun also rises over concrete
Over this puff-adder sky
And the pricked-up chimneys
Looking like piss-horns in the stark morning
There are no shadows yet
On this marbled plain
So tender in years
But so sparing with love
I shiver at the bus stop
Admiring this proliferation of granite;
So cold, so hard,
So like you….
ENTRANCE B
Why are they so nice to us
Those denizens of the DHSS?
Oops! – wrong image,
It’s now the Employment Service…more or less
Raymond sported a badge which identified him
As ‘a member of the clerical support team’
I wanted to ask him what position,
But he was already away
With his ‘back-to-work’ scheme
I had to have a plan you see
That got me ‘gainful’ again;
What occupations could I list?
How much, where, when?
Well, let me see now;
I was a brain surgeon till times got tough
Then I tried circus strongman
Till my back cried enough;
Later, it was alligator-taming
Till I lost my bottle
Now I fancy Formula One driving
At full throttle
Raymond scribbled; the audience had ended
‘No inclination – benefit suspended’
What has happened to the barricades;
The litter-strewn floors,
The ‘them-and-us’ confrontations,
The glass partitions, the bolted-down chairs?
Open-plan dole-queues and carpeted floors?
I think I will get myself a job
There’s no soul in this place anymore.
HISTORY LESSONS
See the walking dead
And the carcasses piled high
Like wood on bonfire night;
Clothes, shoes, hair and jewellery
Neatly stacked in separate heaps
Gaunt history staring us in the face
Confetti droning overhead
Gently napalming young bodies
Flesh peeling
Delta-Mekong dots on the map
Where’s Daddy?
Gone to fight the yellow man
Burning deserts erupting
Below technology-laden skies
Push-button warfare
Timed for peak viewing.
Blind killing-fields
Scorched earth, scorched body;
What’s the difference?
taken from my new collection of poetry ’67’ http://www.tinhuttalespublishers.co.uk/67/
It is very difficult to motivate yourself to write something clever and witty when you look at your dashboard and see that you have had one visitor all day. ONE VISITOR! My grandfather has had more than that today – and he has been dead for 60 years!
Do we writers ever ask ourselves who or what are we writing for? I think I can safely say there are more writers around today than at any time in history. Recently somebody came up with a figure of 150 million blogs alone on the internet. I think I will do a Hemingway – get out my shotgun and blow my brains out!
Seriously, why do we do it? It’s not as if most of us are making any money out of it.
George Orwell says one motivation to write is sheer egoism, that we write out of the “desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death, to get your own back on the grown-ups who snubbed you in childhood, etc., etc.”
It could be a reason I suppose, but it could just as easily be more Orwellian clap-trap.
Maybe we write to change the world? People consume now more than ever in the history of the world. We eat more, we listen to more music, and we consume more information. However, most people have the attention span of a gnat these days, so I don’t think that will wash.
To discover the meaning of life? Victor Frankl, the psychiatrist said “Life is never made unbearable by circumstances, but only by lack of meaning and purpose. Writers are uniquely gifted to find meaning for themselves and to help others find meaning. In fact, this has always been the main task of storytellers. Every story matters to the person living it, and our job is to tell the universal stories, the stories that reveal the story of every person on the earth”. Sound like a right load of psychiatric bollix to me!
I like Dylan Thomas’ words on the subject;
In my craft or sullen art
Exercised in the still night
When only the moon rages
And the lovers lie abed
With all their griefs in their arms,
I labour by singing light
Not for ambition or bread
Or the strut and trade of charms
On the ivory stages
But for the common wages
Of their most secret heart.
Not for the proud man apart
From the raging moon I write
On these spindrift pages
Nor for the towering dead
With their nightingales and psalms
But for the lovers, their arms
Round the griefs of the ages,
Who pay no praise or wages
Nor heed my craft or art.
NO THANKS
If I left you now, what would you miss?
Grumpy mornings, silent evenings
And taken-for-granted pause between the emptiness;
And hidden behind the tall tales, adultery;
Mental maybe, but real nevertheless
You dazed me in the park one Sunday’s summer afternoon.
Your smile was electric.
Later, you hid your patience well
When freedom was dragged from under my feet.
You ticked of the (waiting) time
And I repaid you with monologues of deceit
There are those more deserving of your kindness;
Less selfish, less angry,
And less possessed of my bloody-mindedness.
You bore your cross to the edge and beyond.
Always hauling me back to the fold.
Snatches of love were your only compensation,
Were I a better man I would cloak you in gold
The two scenes were photographed at Rye Harbour, East Sussex
poem taken for my new book of poetry, available @ http://www.tinhuttalespublishers.co.uk/67/
My Writing Life 