I once saw, scrawled
in marker pen;

The apocalypse
is now.
Its name is
Hoxton Bar.

(They forgot the And Kitchen, but not the Hellfire)

It’s only plaid,
Wire rims and knit.

Drink your day’s pay.

The apocalypse
Will come for us.
But not tonight.

He meant the giant in the beanie
so I know he didn't mean me,
an easy mistake to make

and the giant in the beanie
who knew he didn't mean me
took me for a Chinese
take away.

and today I said goodbye to him.

If only I could slow time down
go back once more for one more
night in London Town,
see Hoxton Square
where witches flew with angels
watch the angle of the sun
become acute
shoot the breeze again
drink one more glass of beer
with him again,
but
that is not to be
and the giant in the beanie hat
becomes a treasured memory.

Café for Cats

Take your shoes off
and close the child-gate
we don’t want the cats
out in the street please
thank you : our cats
your pleasure their purrs
together
make for a blissful moment
in a hectic world
on this busy street
don’t leave without
taking a cat on your lap
stroking their pedigree fur
all for you and coffee too


Street Art

Prevalent in these parts
the impromptu sketch
the wildly alternative mark
on arches grand designs on
construction-site hoardings
and take this side of a building
here untouched by windows
a canvas blank of brick where
Gulliver’s sister lies gagged
and bound in a Lilliput house
her knees poking through
the upstairs floor


tokyobike

in pastel-green apricot-pink
a lithe machine of delicate frame
and slim-line wheels
would look well in the hall
and out on the street
if properly socked with
your oh so short skirt
the gym-honed thighs
the custom rucksack
tight on your back


Whirl of Leaves

The breath that blows
these notes across the page
the murmuration of fingers
against those resonant strings
up and down to and fro
on music’s path go
the flute and the harp
pursuing the ground
into the autumn air
chasing the wind
until . . .
at a passing wall
they are stilled
into motionless
their rise and swirl
emptied of breath
no more to blow
or pluck these dancing
murmuring
wind-driven notes
but into fermata’s
grasp    

(where despite
a futile final flurry
a long bar’s rest
takes hold
till Spring)


St Paul’s by Night

From across the river
an unexpected view
not just that gracious dome
but the building below
substantially whole complete
for once not hidden by proximity
or an errant developer’s whim
the progress to the great south door
unimpeded when we walked
the well-tempered bridge
as high on the lofty cranes
bright red stars guided
our journey home


Askam Square

In this London square
the trees hold still
as sculptures in
the nothing air
no breeze to animate
their leaves except
a steady gaze might catch
a gentle oscillation
here and there

La Maison vert foncé

So very green this perfect Hoxton house
it could be in a petite ville Française
incongruous here – but such a treasure
geranium-filled window boxes
lace curtained attic rooms
just-have-to-have-a-look inside and see
the dress-maker’s table the library of books
the posters artists’ prints and all
a purposeful lady sits typing at her desk
costume directions for a Pirandello play


Daughter

Last year she’d bought a boat on the river
this year she’s in New York for the week
Keeping tabs on daughters can be wearisome
you hope for hug and to hear that certain voice
see eyes that haven’t changed their depth
since a child when you marvelled at their colour
so - it seems you won’t be seeing her this time around
but she’ll be in touch when she gets back she says
and ‘we’ll talk’ . . . she says.

Urban Fox**

dogs don’t have such a brush of a tail
a flattened skull or triangle-like ears
one was about to cross our path
thought better of it and retreated
behind a bush content to wait
till we’d passed on by
I
writing just the other day
about the fox of Chinese lore
remembered this celestial dog
had nine tails, four legs and a golden coat
served the Palace of Sun and Moon
transcended both the yin and yang

******* a Boat

Not everyone’s idea of bliss
Emptying the toilet every week.
If you are the kind of person
Who likes creature comforts
It is definitely not for you . .

They say it’s where you go
When things go wrong,
The close friend dies,
The relationship comes apart
And living alone in a shoebox
in Hoxton at £800 a week
Just can’t be faced.

On your daily run beside the canal
You suddenly thought:
Why not? It’s peaceful here
By the water, away from the streets,
Cold in winter, damp in spring,
But summer and autumn will be a joy!

You have to downsize of course:
Most of those books will have to go,
Just one guitar and be sensible
About those shoes and clothes,
A good pair of boots and Rohan frock,
Lots of warm tights, a wok,
And you can leave the Internet at work,
Come home on your bicycle to a novel
and your cat, put the wok on the stove,
and hear the sound of your breath,
as the boat trembles under your feet.



Night Thoughts by Li Bo (16C)


So bright on our bed this moon,
just like frost its light is spread.
If I raise my head to see it shine,
when I turn away I'll think of home.


Reading Variously

How patterns and connections emerged during the progress a letter, a letter in this case begun with only the slightest plan, whose intention was partly to hold his daughter in his thoughts for an hour. It was a one-way conversation, and he would imagine her patiently listening to him. She was an attentive listener with a ferocious memory.

The book on his lap halted this reverie. It was a collection of essays by a woman writer known for a severe collection of novels, creative writing in which one realised how essential and rich the imagination can be in this form. In one essay she had been forthright in defence of the novel, that form that has to accept the ‘nuts and bolts of temporal reality’, that ‘from time to time a character has to walk through a door and close it behind him, the creatures of imagination have to eat and sleep, as all other creatures do.’  He had been whelmed over with such writing, and this book had travelled with him during the week so he could read and reread, opening on train journeys, in the minutes before a meal. It had been a gift he had so nearly lost. He remembered first opening the book and thinking this is all too difficult and intense just now, and then realising it was, in fact, just what was required by the ebb and flow of circumstance. He was troubled in so many things, but he knew he needed to remain hopeful. He had completed a composition during the week, the result of a fortnight’s intense thought, preparation and the teasing out of note to note, which is the stuff of writing for voices. He had been stretched by his own creativity, and now was being stretched by someone else’s, a woman of deep faith (in hope) and understanding of that small world so many of us live in, but perhaps so seldom are able to acknowledge its various riches.

This writer had also charmed him with words about music. ‘I tell my students,’ she had written, ‘language is music. Written words are musical notation. The music of a piece of fiction establishes the way in which it is to be read, and in the largest sense, what it means. It is essential to remember that characters have a music as well, a pitch and tempo, just as real people do. To make them believable, you must always be aware of what they would or would not say, where stresses would or would not fall.’ And he thought about his summer school students to whom he had said ‘music is language, the saying and meaning of words, the lift and fall of their inflection, the flow and rhythm of phrase and sentence. You have to read books and to listen to books being read, and poetry of course, the dear sister of music’.

There was more of course. Much history and philosophy sitting alongside spiritual meditation and the homespun observation of an academic, who wrote novels and taught ‘writing novels’, of a mother of four sons, of someone in love with small town life in Iowa and the possibilities of living a good and true life.

And so, the sun rose and lit up the barks of the chestnut trees across the road, in the park beyond. And as the camellia in the garden continued to explode with pink flowers, and the daffodils swayed and nodded, he picked up this vital book and opened its pages to the chapter titled Wondrous Love. Here the author writes about the importance of ‘elderly and old American hymns’. ‘They can move me so deeply’, she writes, ‘that I have difficulty even speaking about them.’ Yes, he knew the way such things moved him. Just the night previously he’d listened to a piano piece by Charles Ives, The Alcotts, with its haunting hymn-like melody and distant echoes of Beethoven’s Fifth, and thought of holding her hand in that university concert hall where he had shared with her this extraordinary work, music that had taken him him to America as a teenager, even to Concord Massachusetts where it had been composed, that he would listen to over and over and wonder at, a music so distant from his roots in the English Choral tradition, but so close to the heart, a music bound to a simplicity of culture that existed once on a different shore, and to which he continued to feel a deep association and love.


Lochan

a poem after  Bai Juyi  (772 -846)



There should be a temple here,

a pavilion on the eastern shore.

Easy to imagine oneself in Jiating, 

but this is Wester Ross.

Instead of orioles fighting in the warm trees, 

crows pick over the summer mud.

Disordered flowers confuse the eye,

bright grass hides the fisherman’s footprints.

I love this lochan,

but cannot stay for long by its bank.

One tree grows out of a reflection, 

on its island home.


Portrait**

You sat for my camera
just the once
in a Mediterranean garden.
It was a haven of green
above a sunned-blue bay.

Unplanned it was.
We’d eaten lunch
watching butterflies
flicker-perch and hover.

You’d tied your hair with a scarf
to keep the midday heat from your head,
a sun that brought your freckles to the fore
on bare arms, on your golden cheek.

Then, for a little while
you left your public self elsewhere,
and my zoomed lens travelled close
as a lover’s kiss when waking.

And as you gazed at the daisied grass
a gentleness and grace descended
on your sun-shadowed face.
I took two pictures, only two.

These portraits I’ve kept
far apart  from other ‘snaps’,
as they seem close
to a painter’s art
as I will ever get.

The portrait-call goes out
and I hesitate, I’m reticent, afraid
to share them with the public gaze.
They say so much, you see,  

of what I know you now to be:
the woman I’m privileged
to touch, to hold dear and close
to this unmanageable heart.

We love urban, ice wrapper choc full, dense with matter, cream the power runs through, finding space, each cell. Unit, one by one, stacked upon deck, pile, floating concrete and multi access path. Crank each floor, glass patent steel, glint the Thames, Humber and Clyde, a boat in the reflection, slum cleared gentle penthouses on the other side. Dogged, ***** not allowed, Barking, Hackney, Toxteth, Little Ireland aka Cardiff gone. Dodo, hatchet, escalate poverty, high rise cool, the high rise flat.  Crowning glory, a sea of chiming memories, stirs the tenement cat. Swept beneath the paradigm, catapult off the parapet, somersault into a different time, moonlit skyscrapers, street sweepers become the concrete and the fifty foot glass dancers, cross between the cargo arches, gargoyles and shields bring them to the ground. The twisted metal of prams and brand new cars grind, traffic in drones, and the city drowns. Strip turn central, gorgeous girl, Hoxton lad, a touch too Dad, deposit on a Liverpool street pad, generation retro spinning fractal, money linear pavement uber yellow, scuttling insects and street martins, skylarks flying Saint Pauls cross and ball bearings, shopping centres unending. Biting into Cheapside, the hidden livers, gold delivers, pure to stay the shivers, the office block rises. Sharp bends, the bridge divides, shark rides the sky, dumps the bank and pierces its side, docks in every city worldwide, rivers pink with the ticklish blood of regicide. Pumpish, Victorian, sweet and blue, the older the City the quicker the glue. Mortar rectified a moment to ***** and overawe you. Shock, new wave architecture, backhanded awe. Brum pill wave beast eat your heart out, find another Chinese storm, currency blizzard, scales hardly balance, aha you had it, now you simply own. Own the moment, the pebbledash, corrugated roof, outside toilet and underground transit. We love urban, your moment we cherish and drain, there is nothing we can’t refuse to understand, too complex to refrain. Bounce as we ride the terrace and its suburban long train. Take your sweetheart on the nightbus, ****** him her, the hier of your plane, that’s where they will love you in the memories of the life near the top floor, and the final flight you were too drunk to gain. Seventy Two, you’re only thirty and you’re on forty one. You’ll fall back or you’ll begin ascendency. Shrink with wisdom, pick up the building, a tool, dreaming of scaling London, young a journeyman, jousters young son, learned, resisted the gun. I’ll fight with two hands, pile bricks or guide with a pen. Draw your city, write my memory, bind moment with every fragment, underpath, cycle through. Lights fading, jumping colours in the district where the girls who live the density beyond you and me, each element boiling their hearts and steaming potent New York’s paths. You had poetry in the apron of your mother’s lap, golden syrup and milky sap. You love urban, fifties bubble contrast in your seventies shunted through urban oasis and with that unknown factor, uber bijou, ‘Finding Nemo’ flat. We are urban, you are fashion, you are the generation that copied that, found the culture in the swinging city, post uni shack. Seven Eleven, Atlantic side heaven, promised more than double checking your watch before bedtime. Look at your daughter, she’s got ‘more than’ you hoped for, already in the palm of her sleeping hands, waking up to a metropolis only she will understand.

It was a night unlike the nights before and longer if that can be true of any night where Angels flew with witches.
Do you think, that night was flat?
I ironed out the early evening late day sun unaware of events to come and sallied as I usually did,with hooded eyes to see surprising things occur.
In Hoxton Square and City Road where the dying light unloads its feeble rays,where days of top hat and tails once sailed into the West.
End is always best much better than the starting out.

A shout cuffs in on the Northerly breezing sleeve of winds that never leave this soul..

Buy me gas for a lighter head..words said,spoken from those tortured lips where sadness slips upon the oily streets.
Young girl sleeping in the rain..soaking up more pain on which no passing eyes will glance.
No measure there,no chancing of a lady fate to close that wound..without a sound or with no sound to hear..her eyes quite clear in the evening air,laying there for all the world to see and yet unseen.

Another queen of broken promises of beaten faces,broken heart the endings are maybe not as good as when we start.
Another night unlike and yet the same for some who sway with dreams upon the warming sun that they once knew.
Another do or die another sadness yet to lie..yet and die.
I cry myself to sleep.

Archie Monroe, the swollen bell ringer of Lavender Moor,
Is looking to sell his copper claw,
His wartime Horlick’s pedals,
And his ferocious bone lick with its wet mink sheath.
He half believes in two thirds of a God every other end of the day.
He believes in St. Clank, and the spanking of the parable,
He believes in the Holy Bee and the miracle of the monocle.
He's walking all lookable
He talks about succulent;
The warm unbuttoned government;
The other worldly succubus,
And tickled sinners such as us
Who never want to make a fuss.

The curled up nurse of Russia Road is building ghosts of crimson brick,
Hurting the sick, and Christmas pale
With the poisoned tip of her sharpened nail.
She nestles by comparison with the dullards of noon.
Who would have thought it expensively cruel
To do it in the dentist froth,
Now that she's lost in Hoxton Square?
Barely able to breath;
Hairy and ****;
Sticky to the last.


See the violent and widespread bed spasms of Arbuckle’s bottle,
And the lamp lit cancer of corrosive blue whining,
The ill mannered throat-goose
And the manicured miscarriage of Mendleson's twenty fourth mother.
Felix was peeling
We knew it to be true,
Even back then
In the pickled omentum.
The pompous rebuffs and the transparent gloves of yawning;
It seemed not she like.

See the museum’s scratched trumpet mask of medical sod,
And the soft dissection of the ink *****.
Implements of ticking and slip with the slow itch and clop.
The anatomy doll, all green and glad;
Its uncertain internal shrinking of Crippen;
The skull’s Baron of the Intact Apparent.

She cradles her parents in terrified liver
Resembling dill with an unusual, excitable finish.
Meanwhile out in Kraków:
The idiotic London guillotine shop
Shows eight obscene operation reveals trembling on a saucer.
This, I'm unafraid to never say, is not almost uncertainly bowel pay.

It was a night unlike the nights before and longer if that can be true of any night where Angels flew with witches.
Do you think, that night was flat?
I ironed out the early evening late day sun unaware of events to come and sallied as I usually did,with hooded eyes to see surprising things occur.
In Hoxton Square and City Road where the dying light unloads its feeble rays,where days of top hat and tails once sailed into the West.
End is always best much better than the starting out.

A shout cuffs in on the Northerly breezing sleeve of winds that never leave this soul..

Buy me gas for a lighter head..words said,spoken from those tortured lips where sadness slips upon the oily streets.
Young girl sleeping in the rain..soaking up more pain on which no passing eyes will glance.
No measure there,no chancing of a lady fate to close that wound..without a sound or with no sound to hear..her eyes quite clear in the evening air,laying there for all the world to see and yet unseen.

Another queen of broken promises of beaten faces,broken heart the endings are maybe not as good as when we start.
Another night unlike and yet the same for some who sway with dreams upon the warming sun that they once knew.
Another do or die another sadness yet to lie..yet and die.
I cry myself to sleep.

From November 2012..it will soon be the cold again.

dedicated to the memory of Grant Burford, the Giant in the beanie hat.

It was a night unlike the nights before and longer if that can be true of any night where Angels flew with witches.

Do you think, that night was flat?

I ironed out the early evening late day sun unaware of events to come and sallied as I usually did with hooded eyes to see surprising things occur.

In Hoxton Square and City Road where the dying light unloads its feeble rays, where days of top hat and tails once sailed into the West.
End is always best much better than the starting out.

A shout cuffs in on the Northerly breezing sleeve of winds that never leave this soul,

buy me gas for a lighter head, words said, spoken from those tortured lips where sadness slips upon the oily streets.

Young girl sleeping in the rain soaking up more pain on which no passing eyes will glance.

No measure there,
no chancing of a lady fate to close that wound,
without a sound or with no sound to hear
her eyes quite clear in the evening air,
laying there for all the world to see and yet unseen.

Another queen of broken promises of beaten faces, broken heart the endings are maybe not as good as when we start.

Another night unlike and yet the same for some who sway with dreams upon the warming sun that they once knew.

Another do or die another sadness yet to lie, yet and die.
I cry myself to sleep.


True story, the Giant in the Beanie hat knew the girl, one of so many people he helped, I didn't cope well with the situation and it was later that the irony struck me, well **** me, should I judge a ******? he never did.