spittled

spittled

they do not see 

  out the back door 

in the back yard

the stone sheep 

or is it a flock of stones
that bleat the poem’s words

hoofing and sliding in the chicken shit

crowing on the fence

the spittled words hawked up

spat upon the palette 

trowelled as they dry

upon a line of thought

white sheets blowing on an island 

away in the outer somewhere

  windy       fresh

my sun-stroked mind swirls

as the page rears up like a banshee 

to drag the unready words

  not ready   not ready 

catatonic is my oeuvre

      set in lichen
upon the tombstone

who will gibber in the corner

clack-tongued in the dust

and call my words poetry

who will beat the railings 

  with stick words

all the way back 

to my childhood

The god of Kilvey Hill

The god of Kilvey Hill

School boys did, as school boys did then,

away hell leather to the heather hill

of a Kilvey hare raised and running 

from their lay in the grass where still be still.

And the boy leaps over scrubbed doorsteps,

reflecting Brasso brasses and more besides,

runs from the stone home, the coal smoke hanging,

past the slag tips shining black, and bloody more insides.

Going up the hill ‘like’, fast as Luther,

to pin his ways upon the sky.

To reach the engine shed, blue in briquettes, 

from what the buckets carried, and why,

his father had pencil drawn the old wires,

strung over their pulleys mighty high

upon the engine shed, and culvert tipping

all the slag of that’s why, that’s why

the tips have grown, but fail to conquer,

the pollen around his heather shoes,

deep and dusty fast as hares,

upward, upward, up he goes.

Past the football field, marsh as offside,

past the east fields barbed wire cows.

Past the two marshes cotton white in grasses,

with their bomb craters filled with water now.

Sedge edged and floating footsteps dare

peer pondweed downward at monster larvae,

eating our eyes out in its wondrous depths;

that German bombers kindly dropped awry.

Soaking in wet socks and hasty steps,

to walk the ‘Roman’ wall, from the half way,

to the windmill, wretched atop of Kilvey hill;

to drink the brouhaha across the bay.

There, see, Swansea docks, under Swansea bay,

Danygraig cemetery looking beyond eternity

at ships, and cranes, and docked trucks of coal;

he saw them all, laid out in time’s indemnity

at the edge of his schoolboy escapades;

skulduggery, above the drudgery, of the village

still in the valley beneath his feet, just there.

But his is not a pilgrimage,

but a biting off of the Atlantic air,

that burnishes wild in his curly hair.

If I could have escaped the valley

    just like him

then I would have probably died just there, 

but Kilvey led my errant footsteps

to the warm rocks sitting where

the toiling river carried trees out to sea,

and showed me the way right out of there.

Go on son, you can be a liver

of a life away from the furnaces,

from the railway coke’s grey despair.

See the freedom this view burnishes;

go there now upon this very air.

Just look to the lark sky, to the summit;

dare to dream to be just there;

and never look back to the pulpit

of the god of Kilvey pointing where,

your future stalwart rises in the east,

lays down calmly in the west, 

golden upon eternity 

upon your very own

la vie, 

         la mort,

                       la mer.

the class radio in ‘59

the class radio in ‘59

"Bobby Shaftoe’s gone to sea,

silver buckles on his knee,

he’ll come home and marry me,

bonny Bobby Shaftoe"

Sang the school radio back in ‘59;

what did it all mean? Surely

the teacher played it for a reason?

It never occurred to me 

that he was having tea.

Now doesn’t that take the biscuit?

For I thought there was a corpus of thought 

(although the word corpus was unknown to me)

that we, in our poor school were not privy to,

this world across the buckled sea,

and we were afforded this peep, once a week,

of all the worlds across the sea,

that were far from me, 

and Bobby Shaftoe would never marry 

any of the girls in my class warfare.

I knew there was the sea of course,

we heard the ships hooters come over the hill

at New Year to drown out the factory hooters.

And we knew that the river, down there, 

ran into the sea. 

(Why didn’t it walk? - but I digress - again).

My uncles went to sea and brought back

exotic gifts for me, and so, I thought

I could be Bobby Shaftoe see, I could!

I could be Bobby Shaftoe see!

And maybe, we could sing like that singer

on the radio, in the corner of the classroom,

glowing as we giggled and wriggled 

in our rows of ability. But we giggled see

because everyone wanted to be

Bobby Shaftoe see; 

and the girls all wanted to be buckled 

to his silver buckles see? 

And the braking waters of the sea

did stir something deep

that was too deep for them

this side of puberty.

(But I digress - retune the radio)

Anyway, that’s what Bobby Shaftoe

meant to me,

when the teacher had his tea,

and the singer on the radio spoke to me.

       Now they use Ritalin you see,

              to stop them fidgeting.

   And Ritalin marries Ritalin;

                      and no one ever gets 

to see the rough sea;

where Bobby Shaftoe has finally buckled

under the weight of modernity.

The schools run from the rising tides.

The tsunami ships are dropped inshore, 

and ships are high and dry on the Arral sea.

Alas, no one will come home to marry me to

the tides of history. 

For no smartphone says

the truth these days. We are racing forward

on the bow wave of breaking history;

and cold, old Bobby Shaftoe blue,

lies deep beneath the iceberg you 

know is tarrying there ahead,

to marry the end

to the beginning 

of the this sad saga sea.

And ...

Will this wobbly shaft of woe,

  Will this buckled poem 

  come home from my ‘I see’

and marry my thoughts to thee?

poetry on the 3A

poetry on the 3A

poetry puts a ring around me,

reading on my smartphone,

            reading on the bus;

brought by you, dear poets, to me

on twitter see? 

     on twitter!

no fuss to read and reflect

through my reflection, dark on the wet 

window, the wine red grapes of night,

and all the chatter around me,

such languages that I don’t speak;

but the poet touches deep,

and my winsome smile over

  all their heads,

    the passengers, 

      in the seats,

draws the scarf of comfort,

even in discomfort, 

and I sigh and stare into the night,

and the bus burrs blank prose,

and the opening and closing doors

rhymes of all the timetabled times 

between me and a heaven 

full of your lonely words.

      don’t press the bell!

i’ll ride them all the way to hell

         and back again.

november

autumn’s stalking
                              just like a cat
pounces on winter


                              and that’s that

Those village evenings of youth

Those village evenings of youth 

Christmas in the stone-walled village

was yellow lamp light and empty night streets

between the valley of the chapel and the

hill of the pub, bright and murmuring.

My salve lime mouth-watering ways

alongside the slide side of the boys

who trod in unison through the night

of thin beer full of moonshine and, beyond 

finger tips, the girls who gathered gossip.

Not a door opened;

no light spilled in goodbye or welcome;

and what lingered on the quiet waiting

night, never did the village speak of it;

so we said "see you tomorrow" 

and free of sorrow of the day we

walked to our firesides and toasted

the bread and butter

of a rancid furrow.

A teeth-on-edge swallow, that

lasted for I know not how long;

and now on the other side, and

distant, I gag upon a tear,

and linger over the taste of

a youth gone waste.

Do I shiver at the scalpel that

will decapitate my youth;

or the rusty nails that bleed

in sanguinity as they exsanguinate the

feelings that should be left to 

drain into the coarse sands of youth.

However pallid the patina

on the silver days appears to be,

is it all the false heartache?

A delusion, that I cannot

return to to ask: did we?

Did I?

Really? 

beacons

beacons

we are (are we not?) living in strange times.

we know these days are strange

because the internet shows us

the old days, the future days, and

all our today’s across the world,

that differ in strange ways;

and the ways that these ways 

overlap or intrude is strange,

in a way (are they not?).

strange to be saying this on

the internet of ways, to 

readers who read in so many ways,

in so many places, where they 

are lucky / unlucky - depending 

on the way in which you, in your

way see it.

anxiety spreads so fast

along the feedback loop of 

tweets and retweets, that 

despair might drown all hope

on this Möbius curve.

except the beacons that blaze

in the annealing winds. So

let the poetry of hope burn bright,

may the ash of despair feed

the fields of Elysium,

so that the shoots of hope grow, 

and the entwined butterflies 

extricate themselves from the web,

to burn up in the sun.

tracey

tracey

paint me in words

abstract words that

run down the canvas

onto the floor

of the gallery of my life

that you have chucked (not)

there

whose tears are mixed with the paint

                yours or mine

can make sense of me 
making sense of me to you

to make sense in the sculpted words 
that will take "them" by the hand 
and demand they look

       look  look      see

see me in your frameless miles

smash the xylophone tones and

spew them across the words and paint

and sound so that the colour atones

to set my bite permanent

there

go on - down you go

go on - down you go

every envy afire in the sunset sky,

falls into the hole, the dread of night.

every promised kiss by the moonlight, 

puckered across the panting sea; is a lie. 

the blood of autumn in vixen enthral

with the tears of the north wind,

will move the poet in us all

to write in awe of that mighty mind,

that did the first light leave behind,

to guide us back to heaven help us now;

for when the celestial lights are so declined

with the light sky dying in the westward, oh

then will empty socket eyes look down and turn

away to the long stones of the cold homestead, 

for what poor wages the words did earn,

are sherbet stung; exsanguinated, bled

white and ghoul-ward down upon our knees;

to pray for sleep and to dream perchance,

of the ritual of this habitual happenstance,

for what else could spin such lies as these?

and now?

       Just followed "Unearthed" @UE

"Greenpeace‘s investigative journalism"

about the brittle world of you and me.

and now?

romantic poetics is dead for me,

and, unless we sort this, so are we.

how can I write as a candle bright,

when it is smoking, snuffed?

how can it be right

to dream of the "halcyon days",

the "golden uplands", the "salad days"?

when the end creeps nearer, and nearer,

and @UE spells it out for you and me;

and we try (yes, we do try) but to no avail,

so we vesiculate in death’s travail.

the war poets wrote of the insanity of war,

but they fought it, for

some would survive to read their words;

but who will read my liturgy of dirge?

for as far as i can see

this is going to be the end of me,

and you, and all but a few

organisms that will ride the evolutionary rollercoaster,

and then ... 

            well that does not matter 

to you and me,

for we will have ceased to be.

so how can i write like the romantic poets?

but then again,

why should i write like a prophet of doom?

when the words rattle in my mind, i owe it

to them alone, to lay them gently down upon the page,

as rigid as dried tears curling on the burning parchment 
the lemon tears of mother beast
hovering over her unmoving child, 

in a world of "woe is me".

it just does not do it! does it?

these words, they don’t, do they?

"no more glad confident mornings again".

the words decompose the orbit 
of yin and yang,
decompose into an obituary for words. 

what devil’s conundrum is this?