Somnambluebirds

OK, let me explain.  This is a poem that refuses to lay down and die.  It won't resolve itself - it's been in my 'to redraft' pile for about eight years now.  About four years ago I made the mistake of thinking that it was resolved and got a version of it published in "The Delinquent" magazine, but despite their seal of approval I still wasn't convinced.  So I reworked it again.  And again.  And again.


The version you can see below is the latest version, and whilst I feel that my mind is far too weary of the whole idea to really do anything better with it now, there's no guarantee that I won't come back to this again at some point in the not-too-distant future.  In the meantime, this is probably as good as it gets.

Those colourful talking birds,

they come to you in the middle of the

night, fly through the open

sash window like mis-fired

darts from the street corner pub,

scuffle and scrape beaks and

claws across skirting boards like

finger bones on wood.

They murmur their

demands in voices like a

choir of schoolgirls

humming the national anthem

slowly, out of tune

with each other, plead with

trembling beaks like

tweezers delicately gripping at

the splinter of a truth.

They bother like all beasts

bother, climb to kick at the

ghosted screenburn of

bad old ideas, tug the

sheets in the compass

direction of your last lover,

morbidly mutter the

name your parents would

have called you had you

been deemed worthy of it.

They stole your instinct

at birth, and are now

acting on it, indefinitely,

reaching for a conclusion

you have been denied.

The Love Optician

(There are a few poems I've written and performed live, initially to an extremely positive response, only for the positive feedback - and the applause and sometimes laughter - to wither and die on subsequent airings elsewhere. It's almost as if something in the first shot could never be replicated, either through some fault in my own delivery, flaws with the poem itself, or me just striking it really lucky with an overly supportive audience at first.

This is one such. Scrapped in 2009 because it was creating way too much of a sag in live sets, it will probably never see the light of day again unless a few people drop me some comments begging for its return. Yes, I realise I'm not doing a very good job of selling it, but with old, long-dormant poems my attitude becomes more laissez-faire. You either like it or you don't, and it's no skin off my nose, frankly. Yeah, how do you like THAT? Remember, this is all free online content, if you want the freshest and the best, give me some money. Turn up to my bloody gigs, buy the latest magazines that have my current material in.

On the subject of opticians in general - I used to have a terrifying optician for many years who was deeply snappy, impatient, wore grey faded cardigans and smelt faintly (or occasionally strongly) of sweat. She was the inspiration for this poem, it's very much her stern voice and tone. Once during a live intro I joked that having a really glamorous, charming, highly likeable optician would perhaps be welcome for a change. Not long after I made that announcement, it happened - I turned up to the opticians and was confronted by an astounding beauty who was reassuring and extraordinarily friendly. I then had to try and deal with spending time with her speaking softly into my face, breathing down my ear and looking me in the eyes while the lights were all down. I was in a relationship at the time. I still am in that same relationship now. I couldn't get my contact lenses back in afterwards I was so flustered and flushed. It felt worse than the usual arrangement, guilt-inducing somehow, even though I'd done nothing wrong. So be careful what you wish for - in practical situations, mundanity is usually the more favourable option). 

I’m going to make everything

all blurry now.

Don’t worry.

That’s quite usual.

Now come with me.

Follow me

on to the street outside, and

walk amongst the traffic.

It’s OK.

I’ll guide you, and

sometimes I’ll lie, but

what kind of man doesn’t

suffer the odd knock 
or scratch?

Now we’ve got to know each other,

so let’s hold hands.

That’s it.

And we can go back to yours, and

I can look into your eyes and

tell you what it is you can’t see.

While you’re blind, I’ll

jemmy the skirting boards

from the walls, reveal the

plaster that is pale,

untanned by the warmth of

your breath beneath, and

etch obscenities in

forgotten languages by

compass point, before

replacing everything again.

No, it’s not a curse.

I don’t do hexes, dear.

I just like leaving my mark.

Do you see?

Do you feel better for your new prescription?

Good.

Can you see what you couldn’t before?

Equally good!

I have to go now, but

I’m sure, if you’re sensible,

you’ll see my assistant in

six months time
for another check-up.

Two forthcoming gigs

Hello there. I just thought you might like to know about two gigs I've got coming up next weekend.

The first is a DJ set I'll be doing with the Dirty Water Club's Arthur Scott at the "Well Versed" event as part of the Stoke Newington Literary Festival on Saturday 7th June. You can expect the usual mix of sixties garage pop, soul, funk and other oddments besides, but perhaps more importantly the featured poetry acts will be:

Phill Jupitus + Tim Wells + Niall O’Sullivan + Chimene Sulyeman + Bob Constant + Lucy Ayrton + Sam Berkson + Chris Coltrane + Captain of the Rant + Paul McGrane + Lisa Kelly + Emma Jones

We'll be at Mascara Bar, kicking off at 8pm and with DJs until 3am. There's also another full day's Well Versifying ahead of the Saturday gig, with full details available on their Facebook event page if you're interested.

But then I'll also be putting in an appearance at the Garden of Abandon on Sunday afternoon (8th June, Olden Garden, Whistler Street in association with the Chelsea Fringe) from 2pm. Also there will be:

SALENA GODDEN
NIALL MACDEVITT
FRAN LOCK
PAUL VAN GELDER
CAT CATALYST
THE BUNDY BOYS
JAZZMAN JOHN CLARKE
ERNESTO SERAZALE
DAVE BRYANT
CATHY FLOWER
FRAN ISHERWOOD
CHERYL MACLENNAN

Again, the relevant Facebook invite is here. I look forward to seeing some of you at both events.

What's The Point?

(If you're a poet and you claim you don't get these feelings, I'd suggest you've either only recently started writing poetry, or you're a liar. It's as simple as that. I think even Andrew Motion and Carol Ann Duffy look into the mirror on occasion and ask themselves "Why? Why do I plough on regardless?"

I could have made the ending more optimistic and upbeat, including something about being born to write poetry against the odds, but everyone does that. It's funnier to me to regard it as an affliction). 

What’s the point of

this artform nobody notices,

this expensive, time-consuming,

delicate haircut of a form

that fails to impress even

plump middle-aged ladies

on the bus, their fat

wobbling under their

skin like cheese in cloth,

as they scoff in disapproval?

What’s the point of

these words with no

accompaniment, with this

fragile, brittle aural

sculpture whose

sharp jags are

caused only by SHOUTING,

with each soft word

forming a wave pattern

in the shape of a

check on a tweed jacket?

What’s the point when I

don’t have the credibility, the

soft mother’s hum of melody, the

pounding rhythm of any

sort of party, when my

fingers no longer smell of

metal fretwork and

varnished wood, and I

stink only of yesterday’s clothes?

And at what point do

I walk away?

And should it be now,

when nobody is left listening,

just waiting their turn?

Nobody's Diary

Following on from the "Reminisce" entry I did recently, I realised that I actually started keeping a diary exactly ten years ago. This has been a brilliant thing to crack open again - revealing a lot of embarrassing truths about myself I probably wouldn't have been comfortable being made aware of at the time, such as that I was an ungrateful sod who was actually having an astonishingly platinum streak in my life without being aware of it. True, I didn't have much money, but I was at the start of a great relationship, was socially very active with a lot of friends, and I had freedom to consider all kinds of options which would be riskier now. Youth is wasted on the young.

This extract from almost exactly ten years ago today highlights an unreal little moment for me, on the way home from a book launch in Central London:

"On the Number 73 bus home, we are treated to Duke Baysie working as the bus conductor, checking our tickets and honking and wheezing with style and aplomb on his mouth organ. I assure you this actually happened, and that he has to pay his rent just like the rest of us in London. Or maybe I dreamt it, or it was a figment of my tired imagination. We get off the bus to the sound of “Killing Me Softly” wailing bluesily in the background." 

For a long while now I assumed that this memory - which has stayed with me - must have been exaggerated over the years, but it's there in black and white much as I remember it. I know Duke Baysee regularly worked as a bus conductor to fund his records, but just having him on the bus rasping his harmonica into the dark of the East London night always felt great.

A better find is an entry talking about visiting my birthplace for a last look around before I leave the country, as at that point I was unsure if I would ever return or not. I reproduce that below - it's not an amazing piece of writing, and it was produced incredibly quickly, but it's faithful. It describes a lot of things about my home town I might not think to include if I was asked to do a quick entry now. And it almost tempts me into the idea of keeping a written journal again, but I stopped because it got repetitive and I complained too much and too often. All the entires about undelivered packages and unexpected bills or replacement bus services made me realise that sometimes we only pick up the pen to write in our diaries when nobody else wants to listen. Including our future selves. Also, I fear that if I began again now I couldn't compete with my youth. Better to keep a record when ten thousand possibilities seem to be orbiting you at once.

Yesterday we both travelled back to the house I grew up in (and left at the age of 10) for “one last look”. I’ve yet to really decide in my head why I wanted to do it. What might have helped, however, was the fact that the weekend was drawing to a close, and we both had precious little money (a problem that’s been dragging on for some time as we desperately try to save funds for Australia and live in London at the same time).

Taking the Central Line outbound through East London for Hainault, the tube train dips underground and rises overground numerous times, before finally surfacing for good at Newbury Park. Pebbledashed terraced houses suddenly become part of the landscape, the dirty brown brick Victorian terraces banished to the city. The train even runs through a golf course at Fairlop –though as I pointed out to Amanda, when I was growing up it was just a plain nobody ever used for anything much apart from flying kites and walking dogs. These days you can sometimes see golfers shading their eyes from the sun and whacking golf balls into the far distance while you’re sat on the tube, a sight I’m sure has confused plenty of people who have fallen asleep and woken up at the far end of the line.

Hainault itself always seems bizarrely twee and slightly out of time, dominated as it is by World War II prefabs and houses that have been smeared in pebble dash but otherwise appear to have no common unified design. It’s made few concessions to modernisation at all. It doesn’t have a supermarket, but it does have a Spar, a Dewhurst’s butchers, and a greengrocers, as well as a nice parade of box-shaped neighbourhood shops with permanent marker graffiti all over them. The churches all appear to have been built in the sixties and are the shape of upturned skips with spires sticking out. The planners who decided upon Hainault’s surrounds also obviously liked the idea of dotting little green squares of land here and there which were too small to be used as parks, too big to be considered mere verges. Erected on them still are the familiar “No Ball Games Please” plaques, last seen on a St Etienne album sleeve near you, and last ignored by any right-thinking child with a football.

Disappointingly, however, Hainault also used to look more like Reykjavik than any suburb of London in my youth, largely because many of the buildings were constructed out of corrugated iron, much like the design of Iceland’s brilliant city. Some planner, however (who will now forever be in my bad books) has obviously decided that this just wasn’t good enough, and the corrugated steel on all the council houses has now had brick placed around it on the outside. So now the council estates look like every other in the suburbs across the land, rather than anything remotely foreign or exotic. Somebody obviously deserves to die for this decision, though to be fair it might have been undertaken for structural reasons. Most of the prefabs were only supposed to be inhabited for a few years, and few were built to last for long.

We finally reach my old house in Dryden Close. I note with disappointment the fact that, unlike my childhood memories of the place, no children are playing on the street. Little has changed around the front of the house, though. It’s (as I already knew) a very bog-standard terraced house. What’s striking, though, is just how small it really is. A slither of pebbledashed wall between two other houses, some semi-circular bay windows jutting out. The crazy paving my Dad laid down when I was a child is still present and correct in the front garden, with a small circle of earth in the centre where a miniscule bush now grows.

Amanda stares at the house with a puzzled expression. I don’t know what she was expecting, but it does admittedly seem perplexing that a family with four children could have lived here, even sharing bedrooms. We sneak around to the back alley to see if we can peek into the garden. Everything’s changed. The swing I used as a child has gone, and the new owner has a compost heap and has planted some fir trees there instead. He or she has also erected a higher fence so it’s harder to see in. Over the back of the alley where there used to be playing fields for Saturday football teams, there’s now a housing estate.

We retreat to the local pub (which I never got old enough in Hainault to ever actually use) to have a quick drink so I can pointlessly wallow in nostalgia.

“What do you think of it?” I ask Amanda.
“It’s like every other London suburb, it’s probably like Pinner or Hounslow”, she replies.
“No… no, it’s different, look, everyone in this pub knows each other”, I retort. And indeed they do, though that may have a lot to do with the fact that it’s the only pub for some distance. “What do you reckon would have happened if my family had stayed here?”, I ask, dreaming of some sort of non-city styled neighbourhood community.
“I reckon you’d never have gone to university,” she replies, which is a fair comment given that the local comprehensive here has an appalling track record, compared to the slightly-below average one of the school I ended up in. We drink up and go, catching the next London bound train just as a cold, wintry downpour starts.

We arrive home to find that a band from Manchester (whose name presently escapes me) are gigging in London for the next few days and also using the recording studio downstairs, produced and catered for by my housemate Jon. A flock of Mancs with indie haircuts clutter around the kitchen and the lounge, one of them arguing loudly with his girlfriend on the mobile phone. Amanda falls asleep way before I do.