Before I Die

Hello.

Just to let you all know that I'll be performing at a new poetry night "Before I Die" on the 6th November - details on the left.  "Before I Die" is the name of the poetry night, incidentally, hence the quotes. I'm not actually planning to kill myself afterwards, though I'm trying to decide what to include in the set as we speak, and I've found some ancient old howlers on my hard drive which might make someone else want to kill me if I read them.  But I won't.

So expect good material, some new material, a whole lot of open mic opportunities, some killer poems from Tom Bland and Sunshine Faggio, and the start of what will hopefully be a regular night on London's poetry circuit.

The Facebook event page, for those of you who do Facebook, is here.

The "I'm sick of poets plugging their work online, who do they think they are?" whiners group, on the other hand, can be found somewhere off the edge of Beachy Head.  

London

(Sorry for the long break between blog entries - I moved house at the beginning of September and BT were supposed to connect me back to the internet within a couple of weeks of the move date, but in reality didn't happen until a few days ago. 

Let's not go on and on about that, though, or talk about how naive I was to actually try staying with them.  Let's put a poem up, shall we?  Yes).

As the man in the Bell Pub

with grey octopus hair

tried to tell me, there is

poetry in this city –

you can find it (son)

in the warm vanilla ice

cream light of night

time terraced houses, the

hilltop display of Christmas

lights strung out

across midnight wires of

roads, the sight of

Canary Wharf, viewed

like a quiet, gently

humming generator from afar.

Try to see it (he said)

in the Heathrow Planes

morsing signals of

life to us down below,

winking that there is

even more life and love

above, and try to

understand that

every scuff your feet

leave on the pavement is

another line on the

city’s Pollock painting.

Your problem (he sneered) is

just that it always continues,

with or without you, and

you cannot see it all at once.

It cannot be fixed, defined,

badged with single

metaphors, and soft

signs of easy requited love.

It writes itself, and will

continue to do so,

even when you’re gone.

“How do you like that?” he

asked, leaning back in

his chair, killing me off

with the point of a single

stinking, righteous finger.