Sunday 27 October 2013

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.  

Saturday 5 October 2013

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.