Hang On, Turn Back, Opened Up

The first lines came automatically, from the deeper subconscious, almost a stream of consciousness thing; it was with me the instant of waking, yet not within the poetry notebook until a few days later. Then written as an epigraph, in two lines. Only when typed up and edited did it become the first four line stanza; something about my losing the nerve to be too pretentious.

And in becoming a stanza the vagueness of the double meaning enters the fray; am I talking to the you who is really me, or is the you a past or present lover, or is the you further away, a deity, or its non-religious equivalent. Am I truly trying to mislead, or hoodwink, or beguile; is to be ambiguous my way always; whether by design, or by default.

In the second stanza I bring into play a couple of words from Ray Bradbury’s book The Zen of Writing. He says to look for zest and gusto; these are both words which I have previously used in my own writing. That I am enthusiastic to share these words says something about how important both zest and gusto were at the time. One of my old bosses said that the thing he loved most about me was my enthusiasm, my can do attitude, my great belief that more could be achieved than we might imagine. I took that as a huge compliment; that’s me, zest and gusto.

The third stanza gives a clue as to how long sometimes the poem is in the soup steadily cooking. I talk of meditation and doubt; that is because in our previous meditation sangha I had come across doubt as I meditated. As a non-religious man I had questioned my own faith in myself, as opposed to my being in need of an external faith or force.

The fourth stanza takes me back to memory, several years worth of memory in fact, but culminating in a very recent memory. On our last vacation we stayed in a swish, contemporary, energy-saving villa, almost on the beach, at Widemouth Bay near Bude. Everyday we were able to walk on the beach, beside the wild February Atlantic surf; the hours and hours which we spent taking photographs and writing are now condensed into these four short lines, indeed only the last two lines are specific to that time.

Buy for print or kindle on Amazon

Documentaries

Down the hill
With head, and video camera
Poking out of the sunroof
Trying somehow to capture
The pastoral

Then to watch the professor
Who obviously hadn’t attended
The seminar on social skills
Whose nervousness almost stole away
His immense breadth of literary knowledge

Who else
Will walk out of a summer’s morning
Who else, through his writing
Will capture your imaginations
Years and years after the events

Then to hear of the artist
Who gathered in, then exploded nature
Who embraced and exposed technology
Such that he gifted action, and I saw the light
Again, and again, and again, and again

Buy for print or kindle on Amazon

Denial

Nineteen, or Seventeen, what’s it matter
If the target to achieve is seven, or eight

In this way your morning awakes you
In this way reality catches your solar plexus

Amazing really, that it’s taken sixteen years
Think of all what you did in your first sixteen

Which is where your memoir faltered
Thirty years before news of this illness broke

As it did in that telephone call
To a Yorkshireman visiting Yorkshire

Of course by now you know I’m skirting
You too can feel the words meandering

That is how it must be, I have to conceal
For concealing is my learned behaviour

But, as you can see, I sort of want to reveal
I want to, but no I cannot, what is the point

What is the use of giving you news
Which actually is only of any concern to me

Buy for print or kindle on Amazon

Bays Set Out For People Watching

What to do, where to go
How to let the day develop
How to help affairs shape up

Watch the waitress take the orders
Watch the waitress pour the coffee
Watch the waiter serve the breakfast

Look at the glum-looking chap
At the next table, not a smile
So far, not one hint of happiness

Who knows what his worries are
Who knows the troubles in his life
Who knows the debts he has incurred

Maybe he looks on me in the same way
What a miserable sod he might think
He could even dismiss me, as a waster

Though I don’t feel at all uneasy
I don’t feel at all out of place here
I don’t, until I see, and hear, his laughter

Buy for print or kindle on Amazon

Olden Days Are Not Forgotten...

One day out of seven
Not a bad ratio
But of course that all depends
What you talk of
What side of the equation you are on

In this instance it was running out of words
Not knowing
The next thing to write
Not knowing
The next thing to think

And most certainly, in those moments
I did not think back
To that last one in seven chance
Such then as were my opportunities limited
Such then my escape into silence
Ever more profound, ever less pronounced

Then to read, thanks to Maria Popova
Of the damming of the word depression
An onslaught on its lack of anything useful
Better then to return to the previous term
Melancholy, and how that word now so so
Rightly masquerades, if sung in a mohair suit

Buy for print or kindle on Amazon