Awakenings
A sort of hibernation seems to be over and the Poetry spring is bursting into life, I have events lined up in Swindon, Cheltenham and Ely and looking way into the future have an Arvon week with Mark Doty booked for November. The downside of all of this is that something is going to have to give, I am not getting as much time as I need to plan my classes and actually write some proper poetry or prose, I’m doing a very unwriterly thing and looking at how I can use my time better. I’ve also been working on the Poetry Swindon website, so there should be some exciting news on that before too much longer.
March 5, 2012 Leave a comment
Never Happy
This is the poem I read at Holocaust Memorial Day in Swindon today;
Never Happy
In 1993 I visited an exhibition in Prague of children’s art and poems from the Terezin ghetto. 15,000 children entered Terezin, only 100 returned. In 2010 in the Bristol ‘Books for Amnesty’ shop, I saw a book with a rainbow spine. The book is called ‘I have not seen a butterfly round here’ – it is the catalogue of the exhibition I visited.
I
Terezin famed for its knitwear -
you were cold.
Terezin famed for furniture -
you slept on the floor.
You were never happy.
II
Fifteenth birthday -
a number on a guest list
a train without tickets
To a place with no return.
Hanus Hackenburg, died 12th July 1944,
Auschwitz Birkeneau -
held a mirror to the whirlwind,
hid a song in his heart,
then wrote it down.
III
Reflections – Hanus Hackenburg
I stood at the corner, and stared at the window
There where heart is severed from heart
The Hades shades, meagre and wretched, lay on beds
And one of those poor idiots lifted a hand, calling:
“Mother!
Mother – come and let’s play together!
We’ll kiss and talk, we two together!”
Poor souls, madmen, figurines,
So are they all, these who go half-naked,
Shivering with cold, as though they must cry out
Before the days surge in and overwhelm them.
“Mother, cherish your child, I am a leaf ripe for falling,
See how I cower here shivering, I am so cold”
Like a dreadful chorale it echoed through the barracks,
And I – torn asunder by the whirlwind, was singing with it.
IV
Hanus Hackenburg
melts regret,
anger, fear,
in a blood black crucible,
casts strength
from curdled emotion.
V
A goods wagon door
drags sun from the sky -
darkness surges,
overwhelms
poet, painter, singer, child,
never happy
again
January 27, 2012 Leave a comment
Tripping Clowns and the end of the Dinosaurs
This week I have been teaching Salvador to debate (argue, to use the technical term). It started when he told me about some Dinosaurs so huge that if they fell over they would not be able to get back up . They would, he said, die where they fell. I let that concept fester for a couple of days then decided to challenge my son’s evidence based debating skills. We were eating our dinner as I introduced my theory;
‘So Salvador, are you sure that you’ve got it right about these Dinosaurs?’ I said,
S: ‘Yes, why?’
M: ‘Well, what if these big beasts were running along towards a forest and just inside the forest a clown was hiding behind a tree with his giant shoes poking out into the Dinosaurs path?’
S: ‘Dinosaurs and clowns didn’t exist at the same time Daddy’
M: ‘How do you know Salvador?’
S: (in a very patronising voice) ‘In my books clever men called paleontologists have found the Dinosaurs and not even cavemen existed at the same time as the Dinosaurs’
M: ‘Anyway Salvador, the Dinosaurs don’t see the clown’s shoes and fall over, they die and the clown eats them, how about that?’
S: (getting angry) ‘Daddy they didn’t exist at the same time (launches into a ten minute speech about the cretaceous, the jurassic and other completely incomprehesible pre-historic things) but if they did the Dinosaurs would have seen the clown’s shoes anyway’
M: ‘Aha!, what if the clown had put up a small tightrope and a budgie on a bicycle was performing tricks on it, that would distract the Dinosaurs and they would trip’.
S: (breathes heavily)
M: So, you know the Amazon rainforest? How many Dinosaur fossils have they found there?’
S: (looking relieved at a more sensible question) Well, not many because you’d have to chop all the trees down’.
M: Well, what if the clowns had evolved separately under what is now the Amazon Rainforest? What if we dug it all up and found it was full of ginger hair, red noses and cars with falling off doors?’
S: (crying and shouting) There were no clowns.
M: There was no meteorite more like, the clowns wiped out the Dinosaurs, put a Big Top at the other side of the forest and trapped the Dinosaurs in there by leaving the flap open with a car door on the ground to trip them up’
S: ‘You’re being silly Daddy, stop I don’t like it’
M: They could have stretched out all of those hankies they pull from their pockets and tied them across the Dinosaurs path to get them that way.’
Then I played Salvador a YouTube video of a budgie on a bicycle on a tightrope.
January 22, 2012 Leave a comment
3M
Yellow post-its were sticking to every flat surface, curled at their edges, trembling in the draught from the gap at the bottom of the back door. On the table a brushed aluminium spotlight feathered with fluorescent squares was turned off.
A white imitation leather bucket chair stared open jawed from it’s swivelled away position jammed against the wall. Hanging from the garden fence beyond the pond, a crow, black and dead. Next to the table lamp, a pot of sharpened pencils, a quiver of words, waiting. Just visible, stroked into the window pane mist, were the words ‘fuck my luck, I am stuck. My inner demons gloat, erase my Post it notes. Give me more time and I’ll think of a rhyme’.
January 22, 2012 Leave a comment
Basket Case
Basket Case
I am the mini litigant who stands up in the trolley
One tiny slip, one over reach and mummy gets the lolly
Next I’ll try the checkout and in the belt get caught
And Daddy can start screaming it’s the supermarkets fault
I try to make a difference and every little helps,
In the car park, in the toilets, you must have heard my yelps
And if my mother loses it and joins in with the shouting
You stand well clear but stay to watch the perfect family outing
January 7, 2012 Leave a comment
Galapagos
Previous Applicants Need Not Apply
Lonesome George stared with raisin eyes
through the chicken wire of his compound
the Swiss was coming again
George’s wrinkled burnt bacon back
re-coiled against the inside of his shell
at the thought of the creepy sallow scientist
and her early morning visit
Since Shelley, his mate, had been picked dry
by gulls in the mid-fifties
life had been very frustrating for George
now feted as the last survivor
of his sub-species
all very well for neutral biologists
and David Attenborough
but a disaster for the lumbering libido of a giant tortoise
As he hopelessly scanned the volcanic panorama
he lamented the fact that his DNA was destined
to be the last of its type
one hundred years young and all alone
His early morning visitor arrived and knelt alongside.
‘Here we go’ he thought ….
Caterina gripped the tortoise’s member and pulled vigorously
‘they never said anything about this
at Fribourg University of Biology’
she huffed
George imagined grass
Caterina imagined an Alpine lakeside bar
Just like every other morning
George went limp
withdrew his scaly head into his carapace
and sighed heavily
The Swiss put a cross in a box on her clipboard
and left the enclosure
George opened one eye
watched her head back to the main block
and wondered what sort of CV she had presented to get her job
January 7, 2012 Leave a comment
Dear Diana
Dear Diana,
This may seem like a strange request. Please bear with me.
I do know you are dead however you fascinate me and I wondered if I could talk to you about your life.
I understand that you may not be available but I’ll be in the Savoy pub by the Town Hall on Monday night at 6:30pm. You’ll recognise me, I’ll have a copy of the Swindon Evening Advertiser and I’ll be sitting by the double doors. Hope you can make it.
All the best,
Michael
****
A cold wind clawed under the doorway, the pub was empty and full of stale labourer’s sweat and I was beginning to doubt whether Diana would show at all.
I saw the white fox fur stole first, then the glint of rhinestones on her jacket. Death hadn’t spoilt her at all.
She spotted my newspaper straight away, came over and sat down.
‘Fluck, Diana Fluck, reporting for duty, you must be Michael’
‘I am, thanks for coming Diana, it’s wonderful to see you, why not Dors then? Do you have to trade in your stage name at the pearly gates?’
‘No it’s not that’ she said as she lent in to whisper ‘it’s Swindon, I feel like a Fluck the minute I set foot in the place’. Diana smiled a smile of theatrical filth and sipped the G&T I had bought in anticipation of her arrival.
‘Do you ever see Alan, Diana?’ I said getting straight to the point.
`Never, the suicides go somewhere else. I’ve tried, but I can’t make contact.’
I folded my newspaper and tapped it on the table
‘People here think he had the second sheet of codes you left, the trail to the £2 million inheritance’.
After a moments silence, Diana narrowed her eyes,
‘And you Michael, you are the exact reason why I left this place first time around, small minded, moon raking money grabbers, you just can’t resist it can you?’
‘It’s not that’ I said ‘Your story fascinates me, local girl made good, cover star of ‘Sgt Pepper’ and leaves an encrypted will to her husband who kills himself five months later’.
Without giving me another glance, she drained her drink, stood up and strode out of the pub, full of the same elegant arrogance that she oozed fifty years ago for the premiere of her first movie at the Savoy Cinema, Swindon, in the shadow of the Town Hall, on the brink of fame.
January 6, 2012 Leave a comment
I stare at broccoli
I spoke to my ex-wife yesterday in Tesco’s, I usually only speak to her in my head. Without her in front of me I spit fabulous retorts back to her as she throws a beer glass at me or I hide Icelandic schnapps under my sleeping bag smiling ‘Didn’t find it this time did you?’. Eye to eye was far gentler, we talk about work, home, kids and she inexplicably reads me her shopping list. Her little girl crouches in her trolley, I stare at a thick undisturbed forest of broccoli on the other side of the shop and ask her toddler what she got for Christmas, a yo-yo, I can see it, up waiting to go down, down waiting to go up. I’m lost in broccoli, undisturbed, waiting for a stranger to boil me.
January 6, 2012 Leave a comment
Peruvian Poem
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PASÓ SILBANDO EL VIENTO ROJO
Ella vive en una piedra en un país de piedra.Abre y cierra cada tarde su ventana de piedra y golpea con piedras la puerta de piedra de su casa.
Afuera pasa silbando el viento rojo. ¿Eres de piedra? le pregunta. Pero es una pregunta inútil. Aquí el viento es de piedra, igual que las lunas y pájaros que vuelan por el aire sólido y se elevan hasta estrellarse contra el cielo, o el mar que camina entre las duras olas detenidas. Ella escucha su pulso golpeando. Levanta de piedra sus cabellos. Abre sus brazos y en una felicidad difícil recibe al viento rojo. No importa, le dice, quédate conmigo.
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THE RED WIND WHISTLING
She lives inside a stone in a stone country.She opens and shuts her stone window each afternoon and knocks with stones on the stone door of her house.
Outside, the red wind whistles. Are you made of stone? she asks. But it’s a useless question. Here the wind is made of stone, just like the moons and birds that fly the solid air, rising until they dash themselves against the sky, or like the sea that walks among the hard, halted waves. She listens to her pounding pulse. She lifts her hair of stone. She opens her arms and receives, with a difficult happiness, the red wind. It doesn’t matter, she says, stay with me.
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Carlos López Degregori
December 30, 2011 Leave a comment
Very Occasionally
Very occasionally (usually when the conversation has dried up in a pub) I get asked what Christmas is like in Peru. This is a blog entry of mine from 2006 ….
The build up to midnight tomorrow is nearly complete (for me it’s completely complete because I’ve had enough). No more trips to the shops listening to out of key kids choirs on the shops’ muzak system. Esther and I have both agreed that Christmas in Peru isn’t a patch on Christmas in England. So next time you´re moaning about how devalued it has become, imagine that you are in the land of the tackiest lights and decorations where nothing really happens until midnight on Christmas Eve and nothing at all happens on Christmas Day. The best Christmas related thing I have seen so far was on the TV today, I was flicking through the channels and found a chap putting together a cardboard nativity scene in black and white, twenty minutes later when I flicked through again he was still there glueing away. We are celebrating tomorrow night with Esther’s Aunties and Uncles but I am still not sure where, such is the level of organisation here. We will have Panetton and Hot Chocolate at midnight that’s for sure by which time Father Christmas (or the Pope, its hard to tell them apart these days) will have visited Salvador.
December 29, 2011 Leave a comment