No title

Mick knows where the dead go.
He followed them abruptly,
From that hawthorn field corner
Hot and quiet and smelling of pain.

Looking now you see the Somme or Ypres.
Fertile ground with death overgrown
And moments of violence blurred away
With grass and hedge and hoe.

They speak of place memory;
Of an imprint in nature of some violent act
But in the corner of that forever field
Lark calls, and the sway wind takes on.

Cove at Borth y Gest

Quick bit of poetry from the summer that wasn't right and wasn't right, and then improved when I let go of it a bit. Sitting in this lovely, tiny cove in Wales in August when it should have been sweltering, but was actually simultaneously hot, cold and windy.


Hot winds jut against slant slate crops,
Against the sea's surge inward, into the cove,
A swarm of sand scours people from the beach,
And sun umbrellas tumble cowering to hide.

Kites shred into the sky against ragged clouds,
As the sun beats an early rhythm out against sea and slate.

Underground nonsense

Summer underground
And the tube is vacuum packed,
But the ipod opens spaces
When my eyes close like clams.
When I think about elections
I stop getting erections
But Tories do that to you, sometimes.

Summer underground
And such beauty reading novels,
But the skin opens spaces
As a breeze devours the train.
We all try not to make contact
When all we really want is contracts
The city makes us lonely, sometimes.

Tilly is five tomorrow

The little radiator hits the garden
Flapping in her cape as Supergirl,
Or booting the ball high and true
In the summer and laughing loud.

On this earth now five short years,
Roots so deep entwined inside us
That life before her crying coming
Sits in memory - a blank waiting room.

Now this quark, this zap-charged electron
Orbits us super fast, glue-ing and sticking,
Painting us and colouring this world;
This girl who is five and who is mighty.

What is it about rhyme...

I love it. Rhyme and all the little semi rhymes and half rhymes in between. Getting it right is really hard work. But when you look at a real expert like John Hegley and great stuff like

I remember Luton
As I'm swallowing my crouton

you realise you are in the presence of a master. Yes yes, I am sure there are many better examples, but I like what works for me. It's that ability to connect words and then twist them, add to them which is marvellous and often beautiful.

My other rhyme hero is Martyn Jacques - lead singer of the Tiger Lillies - who, on my ipod on the way in to work this morning, rhymed "toys" with "equipoise" and made me burst out laughing on the Victoria Line.

Snapshot

He's in love with her, so much, so very
And between Euston and the stop at Highbury
As his hand encompasses her knee and
Snakes on down to tweak her boot zip, she
Smiling snapshot bright light love
Decks him with a hearty shove

The French Lieutenant's Four Year Old

I am quite proud of this picture of a very cold looking Tilly, looking a lot older than 4. Hengistbury Head is a beautiful, rugged, windswept place near Bournemouth, with some of the most expensive beach huts in the world don't you know....

That beach knows me quite well. I've sat on rocks here as a teenager at night. Chucked flints at the ground and watched the sparks fly up. Brought girlfriends here. And now my children get to play with it too.

Sparking in the night
Chucking stones off rocks,
Flints on flints send shoals of sparks
Right into the sea

And in the darkness the warm wash
Of the weighty waves,
The vast sheer of the night sky
Buoy lights in the harbour.

Absolutely

So that's a great call out,
And I absolutely recognise your approach.

Speaking to your point

I just wanted to reach out,
To really share my experience with you
And tell you why you are completely
And unutterably
Wrong