One in a month

is an unacceptable situation to have gotten myself into. Shucks.

I have learned to knit. I have been poorly. I miss swimming. My lungs still hurt if I cycle uphill in the chill nearly-winter wind.

A new poem, unrelated:



Spurn Head

The whip of dune grasses and cuts on the soles of my feet.
It alters, chances the river that feeds it. I race
to the tops and bottoms of dunes that no longer exist.

It is downwards that haunts me, giant slow-beat strides
in the shifting sand. My legs are salt-numbed and hefty; load-bearing
and practical, covered to the knee with every step.

I don’t remember the disappointment, the slowing down,
but lose myself in the towering impermanence
risen from the shining dark. Salt in my hair, cool sand between my toes.

I will return with you to this end of the end of the road
and lie myself down, my hair in my mouth and then your mouth there
with the wind whipping dune grass on us from the folding sands.

I will not tell you that there is permanence in its alteration,
that this is all I have dreamed of whether you are here or not:
that you could be anyone with sour-breath kisses in the dark.

Something new! Callooh! Callay!

Job’s worth

Occasional birds flash across the sterile white-out sky
and snap my eyes across the high-set windows.
This room is monotony too: rows of labelled content
and blank goggles reflecting strip-light white.
A clatter, and some sudden words—nothing we can look back on
from outside time. My memories are like the distant windows:
so far above the day-to-day that they seem experimental, avant-garde.
I remember days like these flayed bodies in exacting standards of sterility.
I am stripped back to colour and unapologetic.
I had thought perhaps I wanted the change of discovery,
but find myself missing the comfort of endless scrutiny.
There are no right-angles I can lean on now,
only dreams of white-walled rooms and so many little pieces
of thought, gathered in a bleak and chemical silence.

I just found this on my computer at work.

The blue and yellow roller-boots handed down to me from the 70s

I was in mid-air when I noticed the blackbird nest:
I soon felt the snap of flightlessness in my coccyx.

The cats would wait here at the bottom every summer,
tasting imaginary bones, re-enacting the catch

while the parents bred and fed like crazy
their fat, stranded children.

My hips are sore.

I have no cure, only stretching. And I have no particular reason except over-use. And I have no way to avoid over-use that doesn't involve sitting down for long, boring, periods of time. And I hope they feel better in the morning without me having to do anything about it.

And now, a poem.

This is the story of an urbanite

or so you say in that way you have
when it gets to that point in wine-consumption
that ignites a passion for the centre-stage.
Under the soft-focus light of an audience

I am nothing but polite.
You turn your gaze towards me,
indicate an appetite for a tale
revealing nothing but a crucial oversight. But we are not there yet.

The streetlights still orange the windows
and you have given nothing of me away.
I smile, wait
for the rest of the story to latch onto me like a parasite,

close my eyes. This is the story
of an urbanite, you start again, and her search
for a way to begin.

Science. Poetry.

I am not necessarily pleased with how my brain keeps these seemingly disparate subjects in different segments of itself that prefer to be cordoned off and virtually unaware of each other. I'm trying to get one side waving. I'm not sure which side has the longest arms.


Stem Cell Therapy Symposium, I


Trickery. Trickery and fiddling.
This is, we are told, the only way to heal the heart.

My heart overhears and it does not like this fact,
quotes back some facts that seem to offer counter-argument.

I tell it that its research is out of date, that it’s alone,
but console it with lies and emotion, hold it steady

from its fluttering. Do not falter, I tell it, just because of this.
And anyway, I say, breaking is a state of mind. Mostly.

I have been re-writing toads. So here it is again.

It's probably not that different now I think about it, but it's closer to how it was supposed to be when I got it down the first time.


Toads

At the thought of each toad, a shudder, and I
have my ears covered as the car pulls off.

My dad and I pick our way for the last three hundred metres
in the pitchest night through the slap-slap

of toad bellies on concrete. There is a flash of carcasses
with every sweep of torch, so it's turned off

and we are straining our eyes with our heads bent low,
afraid for our own weight on soft bodies.

The black closes in, so much so that it’s hard to imagine
a receding fear amidst the croaking and my hand

in my Dad’s hand. The search for the ground is pointless so
I close my eyes against the nature of the dark.

I'm really quite sad about not being able to see foliage any more.

I don't remember being consulted. And now I won't know which skirt to wear because there's nothing I can see that will indicate how windy it is in the morning.


In memory of the only tree I could see from my bedroom window.

Forgive me, but I am thinking of you again.
They were chopping down the tree in your old front garden
when I woke up this morning. The unknown bird
I hear sometimes will have no place to hide and sing.

I Googled you today; your online presence only lists
you at your old address, your other name that rare occurence
of ‘no results’ – you are lost. I watched the tree come down
in pieces and exclaimed to you, though I have no reason

to believe you care for birds. I will try just your first name,
maybe, and see where in the world you have flown.
I used to treasure my space in your life, the one last connection
to the past. But I understand, this is what makes me unknowable now.

The tree is gone and I am home, the bird unsteady somewhere and in flight.
If only I could put it back, crack trunk and green from air.
As it is, I am only waiting to happen across you – perhaps
face to face in some tree-lined avenue we don’t consider home.

..and another.

Lengths

I am underdog despite my 43 lengths
so far this morning and it seems my age
is holding me back. I cannot keep a straight line to myself

and no allowances are made for any mis-timing.
The only place I am alone is when I brave the front-crawler
whose arms boom at different pitches to each other

with every steady stroke. His journey is the bass-line of our orchestra,
straight and uncomfortable. The beats pound my heart
and I earn my first looks of acknowledgement

though it is hard to catch them with eyes
stinging from the backsplash.

Ok, so it's been longer.. but I've been writing new ones!

Toads

At the thought of each toad, a shudder, and I
have my ears covered as the car pulls off.

My dad and I pick our way, for fun,
in the pitchest night through the slap-slap

of toad bellies on concrete, their high-pitched
rumbles. I don’t picture a torch,

but I do remember the flash of carcass
in the passing of our own car ahead. The black

closed in, so much that it’s hard to imagine
the receding fear amidst the croaking and my hand

in my Dad’s hand and yes, I remember now,
my eyes closed against the nature of the dark.

A new one. And a nightmare in html.

Swimming

A polar bear pushes off with its left back foot
its fur a waving forest in the flow. It stands up,
shakes the wet from its ears,    walks back.

A pygmy marmoset is frightened
by the size of our faces; tries to feed while we peer
at its exquisite flash of tongue; plays hide and
hide with a quizzical look we treasure for days.

An oilslick raven buries twigs under dinosaur feet,
its beak a delicate tool in sand. The sun is out. Tapirs
surprise us with their heft on straw. The polar bear

   pushes off with its left back foot, its fur a waving forest in the flow.
It stands up, shakes the wet from its ears,     walks back.

A leopard looks straight at me through glass,
rubs its fur against the window pacing paw-shaped grooves
we do not notice for the speed at which it moves.

A raven, oilslick black against the sky, perches
watching twigs disappearing under sand.

             River hog bristles are still
                                           in hot air.

The polar bear pushes off with
its left back foot, its fur a waving forest
        in the flow                                              It stands up, shakes
the wet from its ears,
                                walks back.

It's nice to be able to post more than once a day

Birthday Sessions tracks 5-18

Only that it seemed the right thing at the time,
to keep pressing record, to tempt out tunes
you only appreciated as halves in a fishpond memory
you had willingly drained, to wait the several phrases
before your fingers found their feet, to push,
to remember myself a childhood spent bouncing
on your foot under the pretence of making you stop.

But listening back, the tracks are mostly talking
and the beginnings are missing. And the tinny tunes
don’t convey the mythology of it, the smiling
recollection of it, the fairy lights and dark curtains
that turned everything cosy, the journey
we were all taking with you, the absences
that have since come clear.

I've been reading an awful lot of Donaghy.

Snowglobes
after Michael Donaghy

They have long since lost the air of delicacy
you expect, but it is a common condition, the longing.
I too am convinced there is a word for them missing,
erased neatly except for the gap, but they are not metaphors.

They do not house importance in their swirling plastic storms;
remember how we stood that time with our most sarcastic voices
praising the value for money, the ‘igh quality purchases
we were mad to walk away from? It is just another way

of summing up a place for all the reasons you don’t recognise
in landmarks. Maybe we do hold them high above our heads,
but it is not carefully. In the same way we never visit
our hometown’s icons, they are long since plastic.

Cells speak.

Riding Out

We did not hear God’s words. If God spoke
it was not on a cellular level, but we ride out
with the rest of them on those intentions.

It starts here, we perform. A chemical reaction,
divide and replace. No words. Only ever
the endless balance, the timeless demands.

Forwards is not just on through the horse’s mane
and ahead into fields, but onwards into time as well.
We can see a lack of hope despite the hope

of thousands. We know this will not end well.
When does it ever end well? Function is repetitive
and not exact; we lose sight of the perfection

with every repeat. The future would do well
to take note, but we have no sway in the decisions.
You say we are remembered, but what is memory when God is involved?

A very new one, still fresh.

The Point

We’ll begin this time with the atmosphere—I am too tired
to consider the vastness beyond, though you do seem to be pointing
upward, outward, towards existence itself. But you say no,
you are not pointing at that. I bring the focus closer and clouds come clear—
I see ducks and the obligatory ice-cream cone. But no, you say, not that
not that. The tree, I think, and I begin to try to figure out which leaf
it is you’re asking for – because it is an ask, it seems to me, though not
a big one. What would I want with a leaf? you say. What interest would I have
in that? I am struggling, seek the answers in tricks of circumstance.
The window, perhaps, the glass. The very thing I am taking for granted. No.
Your finger, then, the nail upon it. I set up my own laugh as I search your face.
Is it that?. Your head is shaking, side to side to side, your eyes are sad
with decline. I am firmly in the room, the walls are puce, the smell a distraction
from the truth of it. My laugh is still waiting. It must be, then, the cells of you.
The failing, flailing cells of you, dividing, slowly slower. Your hand, still pointing,
wavers. Your heart beats on. Take care of the pieces, you say, look to the future.
I follow your point backwards up your arm and on to your stubbled face.
Why is it the future is always away, up and out?

Something and nothing. Probably not much.

from music #3

We’ve gone down low again, but this time with theatrics.
There is manipulation in chord progression, aspects
of sound that are not agreeable to the dizzying heights of relief.
We are not in it for relief, but revel with the worms
and the darkness, the filth shifting into subversion from embrace.

Dear cells of mine, dear body, is this how it’s meant to be?
Somewhere wholly imaginable in the muck, sharing
lack of surprise that there are voices speaking to us from the dark?
This must be the answer because there is nothing else.
How easy it is to turn from the sky. How clear its incomplete deceit.

The reply is not un-looked-for, but it doesn’t come as echo
from above. We live with it or feign surprise. We aim for the dark
because we want to be much as we started: microscopic
in proportion to importance; unable
to pull ourselves together in time to answer back.

Something new for me and for you.

Letter to a troublesome heart

Dear heart, please do not betray me
whilst I breathe with others in this room.
Please do not presume dominance
over the needs of my other organs. You do not
dictate my actions. I am going to try and take
good care of you, carry you more gently
than strictly necessary. I am not averse
to your slippery beating in my hands. Do not be alarmed
at the hole in my chest – I am cutting all your ties
to my emotions. It is for the best. I feel
there is a lot we can learn from one another
as separate. Please calm down. The pressure,
I know, is getting to us both.

Still it seems you deign to tell me how it is
these days are unsteady and unknowing.
I do not want to hear it but cannot block you out.
How easy it is for you, unfeeling and inevitable;
rhythmic and relied upon. There is blood
on my shoes but even that is not enough to distract.
I don’t know, any more, what I have to offer but
dear heart, surely there is something,
an arrangement we can come to?

Been busy today!

Extended metaphor for a washing machine

My thoughts are tired of churning
churning and my nerves are sick of being soap.
My only softener is hope and there is not enough of that

only turning and the inevitable spin.
So I’m ready for more spinning and spinning
and no way to stop it, to open the door

without something spilling out. The noise
is sleep-unbearable so I hope I don’t disturb.
It follows me to bed, and everywhere the judder.



A bird, too quiet, in a holly bush

I chased the thought of save it into the holly bush
and, bare-armed, pulled out a bird too willing to be well.
Triumphant I held it close, my palm covering its eyes
from freedom and it was still. I stumbled home
with its delicate heart beating fast under my thumb,
boxed it with holes punched for air and sat for minutes
in the dark, the box between my feet.
I told no-one for fear of the right thing to do,
and named the bird over and over; a mantra
as desire for its affections, as recognition of a deed well done.
The next day its hunger was palpable through its thin
cardboard walls, though it never sought to let on.
I took the box outside and whispered its name again,
once with every step and the lifting of the lid. The bird
blinked at the sky and went to it. I called its name
to the wind, but only got the wind back. It took days
for the cuts on my arms to disappear.

Salsa Workshop Poem

The truth of it

The monumental blue clouds sit heavy on our horizon,
but I am trying to tell a story of the inside, here,
though there’s something to be said for the looming.

It all comes down to your monumental I don’t know,
drama lent to it from the blue-cloud sky I stared at
to avoid your eyes. Or perhaps it was you
who avoided mine – who said outside, look,

the monumental blue clouds are filling the night
and me who agreed, who held on to it, who is here now
waiting for this I don’t know to happen amidst all the other unknowns
we wait for and prepare. I clamber out, slip between
the blue damp and home; a resolution, of sorts,
and your heavy I don’t know obsession in my pocket.