From time to time, a gaggle of words emerges with no seeming desperation to rush into a song.
This one’s from summer 2014, as a response to an invitation to play at the Peace News Summer Camp, which was celebrating the incredible resistance (in the UK and worldwide) to World War 1:
A Declaration of Peace
An absence of artillery fire would be one way to tell
The blessed drone of combines
bringing in the harvest,
not the wintry purr of tanks
burning up the war chest
A couple standing proud, (in love, perhaps)
in the heart of the corn field
with no need to fear the sniper’s aim
or the rumble of
the warmonger’s unfillable stomach,
only the farmer’s gentle warning
not to trample (distractedly) the precious crop
in their wild glee at the news
(and eachother).
The shaky poet on the train catches
a flash of this as he passes
and cannot believe his eyes:
no (more) corpses in dugouts,
no (more) dirty bombs in the newspaper
read surreptitiously
over the shoulder of a stranger.
Instead, their delight collides –
an eye caught, a smile shared
in a flagrant act of fraternity.
************************
And here are a few dating from 2009 to 2012…
An A-Z of Ecstatic Mourning (2009-10)
Pt. I: Mourning
Adrift on a sea of doubt/the advertising rising and rising
Brokenness
Crumbs of comfort hoovered up by hangdogs/carbon offsetting/the coral, the coral
Drought/dourness/denial
Everything (sometimes)
Functions dysfunctioning
Greenwash by the gallon
Hoping against hope/hating everyone/Hummers/head over heart
Ism ism ism
Jam o’traffic/jeremiads
Kerosene/kerosinners?
Lying lawmakers/love deniers/lounge activists/luxury of pessimism/luxury of inaction
Murky mornings/the madness, the sadness of it all/the middle of the road
Nightmares by daylight
Overload
Parts per million/politicians’ shenanigans
Quarterly profits
Rock star forests/racket/runways (3rd or otherwise)
Species loss/speed of it all
Turncoat environmentalists
Unctuous preachers
Violence of this system
Work (to be done)
Xenophobic maniacs
Young people’s despair
Zzzz…the sleep of reason
Pt.II: Ecstasies
Allotments/Assam
Blockading baddies/bass/the baking of, the breaking of bread/breaking out/butternut squash/birdsong
Capitalism collapsing/chiaroscuro/clouds a-scudding/Curtis Mayfield/Climate Camp
Dancing/dreams and dreamers/dusk/dark, dark chocolate
Erotic delights
Freaks that we are/fossil fuel-free
Greasy spoons/gorgeous germinations/grieving/gospel music
Hills to climb/here we go/heading into the unknown/heart over head
Inklings of light/inklings of love/inching forwards
Journeying/jumping off/jumping in
Kindness – random acts of
Love of it all/leaving it in the ground/loudshirts
Massive social movements/make mine a rising sun
Never looking back/never regretting/nicer people
Ogling solutions/opening revolutionary doors/oceans – risen or not/oases of sanity/oases of species
Post-capitalism/permaculture/practicing & preaching/profit warnings
Quiet
Roast Jerusalem artichokes/Rising Tide
Soup to lift a drooping spirit/single malt whisky from an old friend’s hip flask
Traffic-free(dom)/treefulness/tilting for windmills
Unknown – heading into the
Voices raised in unison with a clarity of vision and an overflowing heart/vegan beer
Wind in our sails/work to be done/wassailing
Xstasies right now
Yowsa yowsa yowsa/yelling sweet nothings to your sweet thing
Zoning in on love
****************************************
hot sun on my skin
leaves outside turning red and brown
ghost of a moon stranded in the awful blue
one of us is gonna have to come down
sun, leaves, moon, man –
we’re pulling ourselves apart
just as I come to understand
with head and heart
the vast and tiny fragilistic beauty
burrowed inside and
bursting out of everything
so roly-poly down the mossy hill –
the stains are on my trousers still
*******************
burial ship
‘we are here to celebrate life
to unravel the past
to interrogate the present
and to germinate the future’
(but I am a creature of yesterday, staggering,
drunk on the stuff I stole from tomorrow)
‘if the planet is singing to us
in strange and wondrous tongues,
let’s translate its song into human music
let’s praise and curse death
with our every even final breath’
(but I am a creature of yesterday…)
**************
last night I slipped into sleep between flights
last night I slipped into sleep between flights
and fell deep into the stranger’s dream.
I dreamt I was floating out of myself, up over the hedges and
streetlights of Sipson.
‘The darkest hour is just before the dawn’ –
that’s what I kept whispering to myself
wrapped in a blanket, sitting singing on my dew and kerosene-soaked lawn.
When I look up at the jets, I can’t help it –
all I can think is that the passengers are gargoyles,
staring down out of a broken-hearted sky,
unable to hear the deafening roar of their restless, rootless
hearts, longing for a connection to
a billion scenes of injustice
played out in every moment
on the beautiful disintegrating stage down below.
Last night I slipped into a semi-detached sleep,
lying in my semi-detached bed
in my sweet blighted house buried so deep
under the jumbos roaring overhead.
***********
money burns everything
‘please, don’t offer me money,’
his gesture seemed to say.
with the rotors threshing overhead,
his emergency friend put his money away
and evaporated from the village with his wounded wife
leaving dust, memories and
secretly bewildered policemen,
heading back eventually
to his automated life.
money burns everything
I think I know that to be true
take it out of the transaction
and love will grow anew
when I saw his friend refuse the money,
my hand rose to my mouth as tears came to my eyes
and I hoped desperately that the beauty of his refusal
to allow his moment of instinctive heartfelt help to be commodified would be
the absolute heart of the film
‘cos money burns everything
I think I know that to be true
I wouldn’t dare to presume
that my truth holds true for you,
but out of countless financial transactions
a perfect, sweet-natured snapshot of cashless collaboration
is dying to emerge
money burns everything
I think I know that to be true
take it out of the transaction
and love will grow anew
*********
7.27am, Gatwick Express
I lean to the window to drink the dawn.
Little fireflies are tearing holes in the sky –
tiny gashes in my heart.
My kids fly out this morning
I try to melt my ego, quieten my righteous and
let them work out their own way
to Departures,
though they look set to wander
quite a way from Empathy Avenue
where I keep a fancy house,
many windows in which to be framed
Tonight they text to say they’ve landed
safely in Tobago.
Back on the ground in a London abandoned by winter
I celebrate my low carbon freedom
by lashing out on two
of my dentist’s finest fillings
The night before they fly,
my red-eyed, sleep-deserted daughter asks to spend
what’s left of the night in my bed.
Tonight it’s back to the two of us, the cat
curled immaculately
in the crook of my weary legs
The next morning
I miss the dawn
********
the walls speak of detention centres
The walls speak of detention centres –
an exhibition of photographs from them on the walls of this café,
and of the church alongside it.
An inspiration it is to stumble across such solidarity
in the heart of what has so often – for me at least – been a
Heartless Paris.
And even a low energy light bulb by my side,
to illuminate these words.
Earlier, into our Sunday morning hotel room crept
the faintest glimmer of song, making its labyrinthine way towards God.
It drew me to the unwelcoming door of the Church of Saint-Merri, where the service was
making its defiant and apologetic way
to a conclusion.
‘La justice…la justice – toujours, la justice,’ said the priest at
the culmination of his sermon, to a huddled scattering of the faithful,
as I, ears pricked, skulked in the shadows of a side chapel,
afraid of disturbing them, or afraid of being drawn in perhaps.
There, I was drawn to the small photographs depicting
the desperate boredom of French detention centres with
frightening repetition. They hung beneath the
gloomy depictions of dusty scenes drawn from the bloodiest and most joyless
episodes of Jesus’ life. The photos are looked down on by them, but still they hang on unstraightened, undaunted, protected by the passion of the priest.
‘No one is illegal’ mutters the small green badge on my big black shiny coat.
I want it to shout loudly enough to call the priest over, and for him to share some flinty but warm words of solidarity with his English interloper.
I leave with my fantasy unenacted, before he and his perhaps slightly less passionate congregation file past me to the blessed exit.
Back in the café, an hour later, the charming host
takes a candle to light the gas heaters in the
smokers’ greenhouse outside.
He climbs onto a barstool, smiles and shrugs apologetically as if to say
‘What can you do? If we don’t have them the smokers go to a bar that does!’
I drain my weak Earl Grey
and absent myself from this version of the passion play.
Then climb the winding hotel stairs
to see if my daughter is awake.
*********
approximation of night
in this corner of the city
the darkness never falls –
it just hovers
safely out of sight of
the ruthless army of streetlights and houselights.
it’s always ready to pounce,
which it did one evening,
as I looked out on the washed out day-for-night of my street –
suddenly, there it was,
in a bloodless, lightless coup,
the dark – glorious, deep and unrepentant –
like an ageless, still-nimble lover seeking out
a long-dreamt partner in the dance.
it was ready to declare undying love
in the cloaked gloom, I could tell…
but before it could find the right words,
it was flattened mercilessly by
the return of the deathly pallid electric shroud,
and we returned, pulses still pumping, to
a poor approximation
of night
********
White Velvet Swansong
The hem of her dress
drinks the darkening dew,
greedily
She is sailing soundlessly
through the whispering green ocean,
dress blessing the occasional gravestone
with an absent-minded caress
Observed,
deep within the melancholy cemetery, she floats,
creamily, or aspires to.
Her laments do not appear to be
for her quietened companions;
can you hear her thinking?
“It’s this dress that’s carrying me…
It precedes me, it engulfs me,
it underarches and follows after me.
It illuminates and overshadows me –
look how it surrenders itself to the lens,
ravenously!
It will outlast me,
and perhaps even these trees,
effortlessly.
(Is this where you want me?)”
And, just this once this late afternoon, the dress speaks.
It says “From wardrobe to cemetery in moments…
But I don’t need time to adjust –
I am always ready, (wearisome as that may be).
Any photoshoot suits me,
down to the ground,
exquisitely.”
The dress pauses, then smiles, knowing this will please
the photographer,
who captures it,
instinctively.
“Sometimes I feel I was destined
To swallow the dusk
And then sleep,
eternally. Anyway,
I am doing my best
to blaze a trail
through this forest of sleeping souls.
But the colour is draining
from the face of the sky,
and soon I won’t reflect
enough light to shoot by,
unless the moon makes a play
for you, my dear, thus attired?”
But with no moonlight emerging,
and 36 poses exposed,
all three soon take their leave,
possibly to take tea,
and for 21st century black jeans and T-shirt
to usurp still defiant dress
unceremoniously.
********
marking the bounds at the poetry retreat
a wisp of wool snagged on a dead branch
a speck of leaf on my notebook,
brought by the breeze
(the breeze is the sea on the shore, to my ear)
twigs the tips of umbrellas,
ready to have my eyes
the tree is a snake,
shedding its bark
poets are observing, partly
obscured by undergrowth
how many leaves have left their trees
to make their epic journey
back into the earth?
laminated buddhas,
guide us onward!
somehow, we walk on
(I move with the others)
in our notebooks, and in our walking,
a harvest bountiful enough
to see us through the week,
perhaps even the winter
then a bramble bush catches
the eye of our Lear.
‘Pudding is served!’ he declares.
The blackberries are patchy, but their word is good
we climb to the western corner and rest in living shadow
notepaper and prayer flags flap merrily,
as if carefree.
Today, at least,
a gazillion green things are thriving,
including me?
including me
animated buddhas,
guide us onward!
******
Edinburgh courtroom afternoon
overarched by the steely girders
of bludgeoning authority,
the junk-wizened flotsam of the underclass
float, barely,
centimetres above the seafloor, while
doors slam overhead and
bewigged bigger fish thrust their way
across the walkway nearer the surface of
this poorly lit pond
ah, this place has me bluer than the
‘you’ll never see red again’ blue of
the colour-drained toilets down here,
where the ‘size-’em-up-and-send-’em down’ militia strut
their subjugational stuff.
‘yo! team innocent!’
called out a defendant just now to bring us motley supporters to order.
soon I will be called to give evidence for my friends and for what they did
‘stay in this bubble’ I advise myself, as noisily as my pen will permit.
‘stay in this ridiculous, joyous, only occasionally heartbroken
bubble of resistance,
and you’ll not be drowning today’
As part of that year’s Climate Camp, the ‘Superglu 3’ glued themselves to the doors of a branch of RBS in Edinburgh in August 2010, as others played music, gave out leaflets and tried to speak to customers and staff about the bank’s heavy lending to fossil fuel-intensive projects like the tar sands in Alberta, Canada.
After two court appearances, they were admonished and convicted of Breach of the Peace, (a wide-ranging charge often used to arrest campaigners). However no fine or sentence was imposed.
http://climatecamp.org.uk/blog/2011/01/09/superglue-3/
********
where freedom lives
down
into
the tear-gassed streets
I am afraid
to travel
I’ll support
you from afar
but please don’t make me
unravel
the comforts of
this cosy spot
where I concoct
these missives
I run for cover
when my phone rings
I thought I knew where
freedom lives
*******
THIS IS…
The man arrives in the Loomis van
to take away Tate Britain takings.
(The Loomis strapline: ‘Managing cash in society’).
He is escorted out by an employee. He is helmeted.
‘THIS IS BRITAIN’ declare two of the sail-like banners out front,
BP logos nestling comfortably bottom right.
On a terrace, trapped in oily black bronze,
muscular human figures wrestle a minotaur,
nose pierced, head tilted
playfully, quizzically, mockingly.
On closer inspection, it is a bull,
seemingly bewildered at this random attack.
A cleaner in a turquoise T-shirt takes away
two half-empty oil-black bags
from the bins at the top of the steps.
He has a wheelbarrow for the purpose.
The bin alongside the square of grass next to the gallery is
overflowing.
It’s an unseasonably warm April day.
At the bottom of the steps,
a bony, inky man hopes to sell The Big Issue.
This is Tate Britain
On the other side of the gallery from the patio bull attack
is a similarly-styled depiction of The Rescue of Andromeda
(from Medusa), by Henry Fehr (who campaigned tirelessly
to have his sculpture taken back inside the gallery.)
The hero holds an inoffensive-looking woman’s head. It is distressing.
He carries a useful-looking scimitar or sword in his right hand.
It bears no sign of having just decapitated a Gorgon
by sugar, oil and money bitten
A steady stream of battle-unready
teenagers fall silent and
shuffle into this hushed homage to reverberation.
The British youth are unlikely to clock the BP logos –
ubiquitous, invisible to all but the subconscious or obsessive eye –
or am I just a man for all preconceptions?
with BP’s oozing smile so smitten
On this site was the biggest prison in Europe, for some of its time (1816-90),
now an imperial mausoleum
where uncomfortable employees
sometimes refuse to be BP apologists,
in moments of quiet candour that can’t but
distress the management.
“Please help us to keep TATE BRITAIN tidy.
Thank you.”
The discreetly laminated
glide past purposefully, then
disappear through invisible doorways, one or two
highly skilled in the art of brand enhancement
and dissent not forbidden,
I stumble (as if blindfolded) into the Art for Whom? Room.
What’s it like to be a ‘political’ British artist asked to contribute to a room dedicated exclusively to modern political British art,
but sponsored by BP?
I slip uneasily between empathy and judgement
thus ethics intermittent
Down in the penitentiary cafe,
the acoustic is infernal
but at least some of us are free
to come and go.
Cafe workers wear red or orange T-shirts reading
‘By Tate for Tate’.
The parsnip soup is vegan and very good.
(My boycott must still be at the formulation stage)
What’s it like working here?
What do the cafe workers think of the art,
or of BP?
Do their aching feet sing more loudly
than any more distant-seeming songs?
“Please help us to keep TATE BRITAIN tidy.
Thank you.”
In the shop sit bags announcing
‘EARTH AWARE’
*********
my incarnation of heaven
who could? who might? who ought to
lift the piano lid of earthly delights
and peer at the apparatus within?
might that be the gleaming ivory road
to damnable sin?
or might that just be
ancient clerical spin?
for dancing is sure as hell permitted
in my incarnation of heaven
let those syncopated limbs blur, slip and
slide together
********
RED BALLOON, NYC
something’s gone awry
I seem to have floated up from the parade
I was right there (in the thick of it)
a minute or so ago
but I must have been let go
must have been
let go
so is this to be my journey,
this to be my fate,
to become the slipstream’s plaything
and watch more than relate
to events as they’re unfolding
across this curious metropolis?
hang on – if that blue boy was holding
my string like there’s no tomorrow, why did he let me go? this
being a day like no other, for once
his eyes round, his brow clear
then suddenly I am distance
I cannot grieve, I cannot steer
I am only the wind’s
to be dispatched on its whispered mission
to scud between the inhuman javelins
they call buildings, only wishing
I could shoot out of sight
far beyond all creation
beyond a blue boy’s night
beyond tribulation
he let me go