You’re basic,
a lengthy silhouette
miming the human experience.

Staying up late
to blind yourself,
blinking to the sounds of sleepiness
heart beating to Skinny Love.
What ifs,
pre-recorded scenarios
imagining that first hug.
Contemplate that bottle of pills by the sink
that new film that you want to see,
condensation in the lid of the teapot.
You’re candid,
unsure if all scabs heal
trying to remember when you didn't have a writing callus,
when you slept through the night,
when purple was the only colour you didn't use.

Purify infectious matter,
***** green-blue wine glasses overflowing.
Tinfoil vases and orchid flowers,
melting boxes of 64 assorted crayons.
You’re laconic,
often dying to create,
like the verbose and the wordy
sighing simply to translate.

Missouri gift exchanges,
loose blue jeans ******
stacks of classics.
Tales of the Jazz Age wrinkling
to a slow 50s song.
You’re a try hard
dying to knit,
only true fear is disappointment
burning in the lime light.
6000 voluntary hours
linking syllables to daisy chains,
dropping pesos to foreigners,
hands sandwiched inside
the front cover and the first page
of The Count of Monte Cristo.

You’re basic,
down for maintenance,
compressing the weight of the atmosphere.

.
     Seems much smaller than I had imagined.
     It only stretches as far as my eyes could
     see.
     It reeks of the past, with no hints of the
     future.
     The present is here, the present is me.

My world tonight...
     Sees me nestled,
     watching silent but with mind
     dishevelled...
     Unnoticed on this kerb...
     Unnamed and unlabelled.

My world tonight...
     Is filled with familiar strangers,
     ushering their lives along.
     I know their faces but not their names.
     I'd call this home but I don't belong.

My world tonight...
     Is spinning regardless...
     It stays on track.
     Never waits for me.
     Never looks back.

My world tonight...
     Has no intention to soothe my thoughts.
     It is baring its bite...
     It's leaving me far behind...
     But I'll catch up at the break of light.



                                        *As I always do...

Good on You (a love poem),
this one, is, good, on you.  

phrase uttered, measured, apace,
each comma,
a paused breath of:

admiration, enveloped by
a secret pleasure coating,
saucier prepared,
the base, the pleasured secret in this
mans minds eye unseen.

each comma,
precisely the carbon copy of the
comma curve of dark hair that
falls from a forehead down to the chin,
in a museum quality photograph,
as if it was intended to hold, contain,
your sly blunt moody,
and full plated whimsy,
when that half-smile poesy is in place.

good on you,
slow please,
not
goodonyou.

did you think, I did not have, a special bottle,
a Grand Cru,
a pinot noir, in the reserve,
inside the locked cellar of me,
to be used to anoint mine own
English Duchess of Burgundy?

well and proper aged,
but unlabelled,
till you provided
the appelation, the domaine,
good, on, you.  

the bottle dusty, the feelings, not.
if we never meet, matters not,
the gentility, tous les bons mots,
good in you,
hid in in all of the
astounding incredible poems
I well-addicted need,
those archeological mounds of a life,
I excavate and well heed,
going from one to the next,
me, the bumbling bee,
pollenating, following the path of the
watermarked tracks of
the King's Cross,
alas, they do not offer a couchette,
from Terminal 4 to London Bridge

unlike a teenager
happy to confess,
I am even younger,
an old fool, a geezer,
in love with a museum quality smile,
as he totters down to the Tottenham Hale station,
to catch the blue colored line, to the station after Vauxhall)
(oh dear, what's it called again?)
walking 10 to 2, saying ta to all
who assist his
two hands on an old man's bent feet,
steering the wheelhouse heart through its tubes

this is an undedicated poem,
retuned and returned,
addressee unknown, yet I know
by the greening dew droplets decorating faces,
that come so easy,
not a one wrung out,
you know
the who's of the true ownership,
the clarification,
in the bread crumbs,
fully disclosed,
left by me,
but for me,
in order to retrace my steps,
to find the railing,
when the steady on need arises

some Tuesday next,
will disembark from a riverboat,
at the old Tate,
spending my afternoon,
staring at an imaginary museum quality photograph,
till the guard surly reminds the pesky Yank,
its past closing time,
the man who will not be moved,
for already he, past overcome,
so why be thinking on why leaving,
for he will only be back again tomorrow.

so different.

mine, simple declarative sentences,
typically matter of fact,
so **** presumptuous,
those ill mannered,
know it all Ameddicans.

yours, lace doilles,
in a pub, with Hilda and Bill,
drinking pale ale,
from a porcelain cup,
and I am laughing,
Why?

It is all,
Good on Us,
a, love, poem,
indeed,
no kidding kid.

******* silly
To think of you at all
To still feel a little sick
That's the problem with moving, you find all those things you hid from yourself
Pictures and love letters
The hate letters that followed
Over the years my memories of you have condensed into a tangle of feelings
Small, but heavy
Love and love and love
Summertime mornings white house blue trim rooftop wildflower bouquets
Atmosphere backyards sunshine is fine for making up
Naked in the lake, maps and
Sheets with ducks
Heartbreak and rage
So lonely
Never enough in the winter, cell phone turned off
Shame and humiliation, regret and guilt
Sick to my stomach
*****
All the things you've called me because of things I'd done before
And now after
You
Had no right
You wouldn't believe how long I've spent trying to cut your words out of my spine
The half-life of all that hurt and
The minefield of defenses you left littered around my heart
It's been three years since the three years that we spent together came to an end
One year since I got your final letter
It was the last goodbye between you and I
And for the most part I don't think of you anymore
I've forgotten far more than I remember about the feel of you
But every January 21st I still look up at the night sky and hear your voice
Telling me that winter stars are the brightest
I wonder if you think of me too
I hope you don't a little more than I hope you do
All the ways I felt about you, each truth making the last untrue
Are tangled in a tight little knot in the back of my mind
Shadows of words that hide in my spine
An unlabelled box in the garage
I couldn't bring myself to throw you away all the way
I hope I never see you again

The Open Studio

Usually the journey by car flattens expectation, and there’s that all-preoccupying conversation, so one only takes in the view where there’s a halt at a traffic light or at the occasional junction. A pattern on a wall, a damaged sign, a curtained window. Waiting, one looks and sometimes remembers, and what one sees later reappears in dreams or moments of disordered contemplation. A train journey is another matter: you sit and look, and when it is a trip rarely made, you put the book away and gaze beyond the ***** windows to a living landscape that scrolls past the frame of view. When you arrive there’s inevitably a walk: today through a town’s industrial hinterland, its pastness where former mill buildings have tactfully changed their use to become creative places, peopled with aspiration and strange activity. Walking reveals the despair of forlorn roadside business falling back into alleys ending in neglected and empty buildings, so much *******, silences of waste and decay.

But here’s the space, there’s a sign on a board outside, OPEN STUDIO TODAY. Entering inside it is quiet and cold, the door remaining open to let in the December air and the hoped-for visitors. But it’s bright and light: a welcoming presence of work and people and coffee and cake. And here’s the studio, a narrow space between make-shift walls where the artist works, where the work awaits, laid out on the surfaces of desks and tables, on shelves and walls, specimens of making; ‘stuff’, the soon-to-be, the collected, the in-progress-perhaps, the experimental.

Good, a heater blows noisily onto cold fingers. In the turbulent air pieces tremble slightly from their hangings on the walls. They are placed at a good height, a ‘good to be close to examine the detail’ height, the constructed, the made, the woven, the stitched, the printed, all assembled by the actions of those quiet, intent, those steady hands. There, a poem on a wall next to the window. Here, photographs of places unlabelled, unrecognised, but undoubtedly significant as a guide to the memory. Look, a dead badger lying in a road.

Next to the studio, a gallery space. Two walls covered with framed prints, well lit, a body of work captured behind glass, in limbo, waiting patiently for the attentive eye to sort the detail, that touch of the object on paper, that mark found and brought out of time and place. Perhaps these ‘things’, some known, some mysteriously foreign adrift from their natural context, have been collected by that bent form on a windswept beach, by the hand reaching out for the  gift in the gutter, struck by the foot on the track, unhidden in the grass by the riverside, what we might pass as without significance and beyond attention. This artist gives even the un-namable a new life, a collected-together form.

Moving closer let the eye enter the artist’s world of form and texture - and colour? There is a patina certainly, colour’s distant echo, what is seen on the edges, a left-behindness, more than any subtlety of language knows how to express, beyond comfortable descriptions, not excitable, where the spirit is damped down and is restful to the mind, a constancy of background, like a capturing of a cloud but bulging full of hints and suggestions, where texture is everywhere, nature’s rich patterns colliding with things once invented and made, used once, once used left and changed, thrown away, to be brought before the selecting eye and the possibility of form with meaning its patient partner.



J.M.W.Turner writes  on poetry and painting

Poetry having a more extensive power
Than our poor art, exerts its influence
Over all our passions; anxiety for our future
Reckoned the most persistent disposition.

Poetry raises our curiosity,
Engages the mind by degrees
To take an interest in the event,
And keeping that event suspended,
Overturns all we might expect.

The painter’s art is more confined,
Has nothing to equate with the poet’s power.
What is done by painting must be done at once,
And at one blow our curiosity receives
All the satisfaction it can know.

The painter can be novel, various and contrast,
Such is our pleasure and delight when put in motion.
Art, therefore, administers only to those wants,
And only to desires that exercise the mind.



Twilight

A day aside and diaried into busy lives
So to a morning walk to Turner’s View
Above the River Wharfe and Farnley Hall
Where it is said the inspiration came
For his famous oil of Hannibal,
with elephants and storm-glad Alps.

On to lunch where six around a table
Souped with salad before we homed
Mid afternoon the day in decline
We were done with words so watched
The edge-timed light flow between our hands.

Inevitably we climbed the stairs to lie
In twilight’s path beneath the skylight’s
Square a sliver-moon we couldn’t see
Gracing the remaining daylight hour
Marbled with shadows our collected
Curves and planes lay as sculptures
In the approaching dimity and dark
Each experimental stroke of touch
Holding us dumb to speech and thought
As night’s soft blanket covered us entire


Northcliffe Woods

Oh nest in the sky, empty of leaves,
Those tangled branches
Reaching out from twisted trunks
Into the sullen clouds above, when

Suddenly a crow -
‘Corvidae’, she said -
And simultaneously pulled
a hank of ivy from a nearby tree.

Hedera Helix I thought
But did not say, instead
I whispered to myself
Those ancient names I knew.

Bindwood, Lovestone
(For the way it clings
To bricks but ravages walls),
A vine with a mind of its own. But

She, in a different frame that day,
Apart, adrift and far away
From our usual walk and talk,
Fixed her gaze on the woodland floor,

Whilst skyward I sought again that
Corvid high in the branches web
Black beyond black beyond black
Against the pale white canopy above.


Franco*

Blow She Still
Ed insieme bussarono
Sweet Soft Frain
Cloche Lem Small
Spiri About Sezioni
Portrait Eco Agar
Le ruisseau sur l’escalier
Etwas ruhiger im Ausdruck
Jeux pour deux
For Grilly Fili Argor
Atem L’ultima sera
Omar Flag Ave
The Heart’s Eye*

play joy touch
code panel macro
refraction process solo
quick-change constrained
hiatus sonority colour
energy post-serial scintillating
aleatoric reuse transformation

A lonely child who imagined music
on sunday walks, he would talk about
how one lives with music as someone
would talk about how one might live
with illness or a handicap. He said,
‘You cannot write your life story in
music because words express the self
best whereas music expresses something
quite beyond words’.

I have over analysed
every conversation we ever had,
Dwelled on every gesture you made,
Every minute expression in your eyes,
Even the slightest smirk on you lips,
I have replayed them in my mind a million times,
And I still can't conclude.
What do you mean to me ?
Who am I to you ?
All I know is that I love every bit of you
And you, me
And I can live with this even if this is all we are ever going to have

Bathe me as you did
in your forgiveness
but do not
for it is not what I need.

I cannot say
Hold me like before,
before was never.

I cannot crave the past
because it was never the present -
it was, but not with you.

Digging up the doubts I buried,
always there and waiting
for open air to uncover dishonesties.

Turning my head the other way
- out the window -
locked in by ignorance.

Pretty skies and sparkling waters,
goosebumps on my arms,
pretending your reflection was pure.

Back turned on reality,
choosing to see graceful things,
picking false ideals.

You.
My ideal.
My imperfection.
Fatal flaw, Achilles heel.

They say ignorance is bliss and
I understand,
for bliss it was with you in your
unlabelled silence.
But who knew silence could make
such noise in my head?

Maybe the echo of some
humble truth.

only ever caught a glimpse of love off of your windshield
nothing more than a reflection

closest encounter of such was when the windscreen shattered upon intimacy,
leaving these….. bruises i can’t get over

a colour somewhere in between azure and lavender that remains unclassified and unlabelled as of now
things without a name, like majority of the past and various faces.
i’ll admit i’ve lost sight of some.

some i’ve spent trying to recollect in contrast of being haunted by various locations i’ve yet to gather the courage to re-encounter
unavoidable, i’ve learnt.
too many to count using just two hands.


you’ve sewn the teensy bits of sadness in between your fingers
if anything they’re filling the gap that managed to find its way to you
scarred and bruises but darling you look fine, if not better off.

when it’s your time to go, wouldn’t you want the cuts to show?

i pressed my hand against the cool glass of the bus window, the print of my palm wiping away the dewy moisture from the freezing winter morning. outside it was fog and frost and cars and traffic blurring their way through the city. inside it was quiet and stranger’s silence and like another dimension; the faint yellow lights down the aisle illuminating the passengers’ tired faces.
outside, the enormous buildings revealing the dark and tantalising history of the city, the gothic structures contrasting with the business men and women with their cardboard coffee cups and briefcases in hand.
inside, itchy navy blue tights and an unlabelled plastic water bottle to sustain me for the rest of the day.
the morning was wonderful in its twisted simplicity, a million people doing a million things, and me on the bus, watching it all.

Like a pregnant woman,
I am expectant,
I am an unlabelled can,
Holding some magic instant.

A lone slipper
Diary I wrote aged 18 (Unread, too piercing)
Battered biscuit tin I’d kept for years (in the hope it would prove useful (it didn’t))
Takeaway plastics (covered in grease and crusted rice)
Receipts (seconds after I am given them)
Poo explosion stained leggings aged 6-9 months at the Horniman Museum on 1st August 2020 (Jack’s 31st birthday)
My phone (an accident, obviously) into the bin at the hospital while I was in labour (retrieved soon after by a kindly HCA)
Green peppers from every meal in which they’ve been served to me (red and yellow are fine)
Opportunities (various, for various reasons)
A half used tube of e45 at least 5 years old (not mine, left by an ex boyfriend)
Eggshells, broken so a witch can’t use them for a sailboat (now I take care to leave them seaworthy)
Probably 20 pairs of cheap headphones (pocket knotted and wires exposed)
My potential (sorry Nan)
A makeup brush my toddler put in the (unflushed) toilet
Unopened bank statements (not even shredded)
Mystery unlabelled freezer meal (too scared to defrost, could be literally anything from anytime )
Tote bag stained with damson juice (used as emergency foraging bag one autumn, furtively collected from a stranger's driveway)
Old, bobbly tights (constricting yet baggy in all the wrong places)
Uni Laptop from 2012 (riddled with viruses from streaming tv shows by the hundred, and thousands of limewire songs)
My childhood dream to become a stain glass windows maker (not so much thrown away as abandoned due to not being a real career)
And the second slipper, found a week later

1 2 /3 4 /5 6 /7 8/ 9 10
I count my steps as soon as my feet leave the bus and carry me home, not thinking of my path, it's ingrained in my body
4 counts of ten and 3 to the traffic light
Balancing on the kerb-edge, anticipating the Green Man - the only man to keep me safe in the dark
7 steps to the other side, a small blessing of lockdown is the lack of noise and stale ***** and rowdy laughter spilling out of the four pubs I'd pass, no swerving or increasing my speed, shoulders up at earlobes and eyes trained on the concrete, whole body screaming
Please don't notice me
The streets now are eerie, the silence brings no comfort
Only heightened awareness of every rustling leaf in a city battered by easterly winds
And I can't catch my breath
6 more 10s and 8, 9
From the corner of my eye a shadowbeast grows and on instinct (self-preservation, conditioning, societal training) my hands are bitten by metal teeth in my pocket
A painful protection, the irony is not lost on me that my only protection outside my door is that which keeps others away in my absence
But the shadow is someone moving to their car so I relax infinitesimally
There are still more steps to go
Coming up for the park, what they call a hot spot but hot for what, all I feel is cold and alone
It's badly lit, filled with teenaged hoots and hollering, kids letting off steam and who can blame them couped up and schooling at home
But their shouts and laughter ricochet sinister and all I can think is What if no one hears me scream?
Finally hurrying past the playpark and the swings creak with too-big boys hanging from too-old frames
I look away and press on, my feet subconsciously pounding with the music blaring from a phone
Disembodied voices decrying the ******* and hoes to silent replies
Another 60 steps and the rats scurry in the bush, I used to shudder but now I recognise their twitchy anticipation, ready at a moment's notice to drop their morsels and run for cover because the intention of the passerby is not my perogative
And the underbrush serves rodents well for hiding in the dark
My own camouflage comes in reflective patches seen by the street lamps, a token honing beacon to oncoming pavement traffic and cars on the roads
I Am Here - See Me
But also don't, let me merge with the stone and concrete that I may pass unnoticed, unwatched, unlabelled
The earphones hang heavy, empty, a prop in the farcical show - blasé ownership of the ground I travel
This is my space and you won't take it from me
This is my body and you won't take it from me
This is my life and you won't take it from me
Not a statement but a plea silent and screamed and etched on my body and painted on my face
But you won't see it in my eyes because they are married to the cracked tarmac and tree-root rebellion pushing against obsidian skies
At night there is no connection with strangers unless their feet fall like yours
pretend power and child-in-mother's-heels certainty
These are inherited steps, a legacy of communal mourning and communiqué
The last street to cross
Cars are few, but ritual demands I take in this T-junction
Safety First
I am king of the road, watch me step
1 2 3 4 strides to the homestretch
So now I count the doors
Only 9 chances of being pulled into a close
8
7
6
5
I'm blinded by a car at full beam
The secure garage door opens and I am trapped
Rabbit-hearted and deer-spooked
Unsure who's behind the wheel, if I can pass ahead
I wait, lungs filled with lead until only brake lights are visible to me at the road end
I'm jumpy tonight, I note
4 doors
3
2
1
And I turn into the carpark
Sticking to the lit pavement
Weaving quickly between vehicles and I'm at the building door
Two flights of stairs and a landing between take 29 steps, I skip a few in anticipation
8 more strides in pitch black - none of our door lights work just now and despite the secure entry system I still speed up
Until the sweetest sound of all
That familiar metal click
786 steps to safety
And as I rest my head on the cool wood interior, I count myself lucky that in here I am promised security
Unlike the thousands of others whose homes are no safer than the streets
A sure sign of the long road yet to be travelled, whose destination may promise a world where we matter