Ninety-Degree Shift

These are warm-up exercises

In preparation for

Or as a means of delay

For the forthcoming grand entrance

When I will turn the book on its side

To write in landscape form

A set of poems to be printed

In limited, limited editions

That is how I started

Back in the day before self-publishing was rife

To return is not always nostalgia

Nor is one always to write in the portrait form

Such absence of technical manipulation

As might be found in serious study rooms

You know the kind of place, criticised

For enjambment, for not knowing where lines end

To fast forward is not always science fiction

Or modernist futurism by any other name

To loop the tape loop is still to loop

Repetitive writing is similar, if not exactly the same

 

Organised Observation

I have to rearrange the Batik on the bannister

In the process, but then firmly fixed

I see a space for a row of my pictures

So self-evident in the course of natural selection

Will I get the idea past management

Who I do know rather cares

For the new desk’s location

Although it was ridiculed at first

I have kept the penny coin (mock copper)

Which sits atop the banister post

What might be its provenance I ask myself

As I take a moment to look out of the window

I bought a shade with a tea candle from Ropewalk

Which says it is not to be left unattended

It is as a counterbalance, to the natural light

Though not yet seen to, or at, its full potential

 

Observatories

From Scorpio to Aquarius

Among the planets, among the stars

Talk of the multifarious

To banish the witness, to spare the scars

The PGS physics class

Never did go to Jodrell Bank

And on that one visit to Kelly College

The giant telescope was out of bounds

This then is almost to the limit

Of my knowledge of astronomy, or astrology

Except for Bridget Riley’s poem The Planets

Which I recorded live at Emerson College

I have looked out at the moon

I even sang along with The Waterboys song

I saw the crescent, you saw the whole of the moon

Long before our meeting of the signs

Did I though not begin with the zodiac

An altogether more debatable subject matter

Where you can always find the good, or bad stuff

If your thought processes are sufficiently flexible

Begin

In the first hours

Of rising

Words for no one

But myself

In those first moments of the day

With tea to drink, on my own

In the beginning of the new day

Sat solitary, in my morning meditation

After which

To prepare for the community of writers

To take tea upstairs to my lover

To bathe in a bath, prepared by one and the same

Then to hold onto the goodness

To find faith in those faithful friendships

To become that uniquely alive persona

Who is grateful for the love of love

Support

This is my prayer

A simple silent gift

Both for myself

As also to share, with those who wish to share

It is a non-religious prayer

Because, whilst I am a man of faith

I am not a man of religion

I have no touchstone to god, except my god within

The sky is of many greys

Rolled into clouds, calmly overlapping

The trees are of many, many greens

From the foreground, to the backdrop merging

I pray that these various colours can be seen

That with the differentiation

We can engage, admire, love

Love the complexity of all our visions

The complication of prayer

Comes with the easements, with the corners

Of the wooden barns, of Walt Whitman’s way

Places, where I have never felt truly able to go