This is Poetry?

Poetry?.  2

Happy Hour.  3

Who Snapchats Anyway?. 4

Clichés I Can Do Without. 5

Dirtbag.  6

A Poor Attempt at Profundity.  8

Jump. 10

Cannibalistic origami swan poem. 12

The View From Down South. 13

Beans and Broccoli. 14

Mental Breakdown Instigated by Bad Plums. 16

Temptation. 17

Drinking Coffee Black. 17

Humbug. 18

Meditations Starting in Falafel King. 20

A Found Poem of Wants. 22

Found Poem Generated by Microsoft Data Collection from an Assortment of My Own Words. 24

Outro. 25

 

Poetry?

 

Grey days what do you do?

Write poetry she said.

Really, like with rhymes and stuff?

No just poetry.

Where does it come from?

Where what?

Where…

I don’t know, like the other side of a reflection or something.

How can you see the other side of a reflection?

You can’t it’s just a figure of speech.

Like a cuckoo’s nest?

A cuckoo’s… Yeah I guess so. Like a cuckoo’s nest.

So poetry is like a willing suspension of the norm?

The norm…? Poetry doesn’t recognise a norm!

 

She wrote these three lines:

 

Ask not where the other side of a reflection lies,

Or what can reasonably be quantified,

Only where the lines blur in the mind.

 

I still don’t know what she meant.

I doubt if she did either.

 

Happy hour

 

On Division Street, a favourite haunt,

six rounds down and my turn at the bar, 

I start to think:

 

poetry should be a distillation of the essence of life,

something you can take like shots at happy hour.

 

I frisk my pockets for the last of my change knowing

these poems will never make me money.

 

If they did they would cease to be poetry,

they would become a contract between you and me,

 

a commodification of my imagination,

or of wherever the seat of poetry might be said to lie,

 

branded and bought by the dozen,

like shots...

 

Ah damn my happy hour simile just fell flat!

 

But at least I got my timing right,

because it's happy hour here for me.

Who snapchats anyway?

 

You know that when I'm half asleep

I’ll hug anything you put in my arms...

You slipped your beanie bear into my sleepy clutch and

tagged the picture on Facebook.

Dressed in my ones, the old boys duct taped a stuffed toy to my head,

while I knocked back Jägerbomb forfeits in Walkabout.

 

The next day I woke up, hung over,

hugging a packet of Ritz Crackers,

which wouldn't have been so bad,

but my mouth was too dry to eat them.

Your friends called me Uncle Cracker for a bit,

I'm glad weak jokes die fast.

 

I thought about what it would be like to leave you and

a snatch of a song drifted ripely through my head...

 

'If you wanna leave, I can guarantee you won't find nobody else like me'

 

But you probably could.

 

A few days later an Instagram appeared of me warmly embracing

a picture of Margaret Thatcher, touched up with a 1977 filter.

On the concourse a SWoPpy tosser in a Che Guevara T-shirt called me a fascist, 

his patchy moustache bristling with disdain, while Che looked on sternly.

 

 

The day after I woke up holding you.

You had put yourself there,

whether consciously or in sleep I do not know.

You looked peaceful like

a cherished thought had just drifted into the dreamcatcher of my limbs.

Do my encircling arms permeate your dreams and

suspend that thought in your sleep-animated mind?

 

I pull you closer and breathe you in,

then take an impossibly cringy selfie and

tweet it under #snugglebunny.

The joke has come full circle.

 

Clichés I can do without

 

I’ve never cared for people who say they can’t live without you

or for anyone who has presumed to climb a mountain,

or swim an ocean to be with me.

 

I’m bored of stars being compared to gems and

bored of trying to see those gems in your eyes.

If the sun shines only for you, I’d gladly be nocturnal.

 

If I am everything you will ever want and

everything you will ever need,

could this be anything but horribly overbearing?

 

If you really were an angel,

cloaked in dreams and borne by promise,

I’d want only the visceral part of you.

 

Don’t say you will always be there for me;

because always is a long time and

I don’t admire the undiscerning.

 

I’m tired of metaphors of stones worn by the sea.

Maybe stones aspire to sand,

the way all things tend towards lessening.

 

Dirtbag

 

So my book arrived today from Amazon Prime.

I open the book and breathe in deep that worn book smell,

a must with half remembered notes of moss and damp spring pine.

 

The book is stamped:

LAS VEGAS - CLARK COUNTY

LIBRARY DISTRICT

833 LAS VEGAS BLVD, N

LAS VEGAS, NEVADA 89101.

It has travelled far from bone-meal desert and roulette prayers,

to the galvanised sky of Sheffield.

 

As with all well-thumbed books,

the leaves betray its readers.

The pages inked with more than just print,

trace an outline of each of the lives that

 

suspended

 

themselves          between          its covers.

 

I study the imprint of these clues,

imagining myself bemonocled

beneath a deerstalker.

 

a) The word ‘unfaithful’ underlined in red,

    a ghost of past betrayal.

 

b) Coffee stains with the aroma

    of snatched office lunches and

    early morning commutes.

 

c) The biro tattoo of the student,

     scrawling notes between Monsters.

d) folded corners where

     life once again interjects with its drudgery.

 

I turn the pages, joining the ranks of these spectral lives,

wondering what the next person,

pulling this volume from a charity shop shelf,

will read into me.

 

Will they consider the eager hands that

leafed through these pages before them?

Or consider the imaginative space they

cohabit with each estranged reader?

 

I turn the final page,

The protagonist,

weighed with contrition,

crawls

out

of his

clothes

into a

lover’s

arms.

 

A yellowing scrap of post-it note below reads:

what a dirtbag!

 

A poor attempt at profundity

       or

"As the crow flies Rotherhamwards

 

Street lights necklace the seven hills,

lambent in the velveteen night.

The city heaves itself to sleep,

shuddering with barbiturate alacrity.

 

The air turns another full rotation in its apathy,

catching litter and hope

and dispersing them impartially

to rivers, gutters, dead ends and

the clutches of young infants.

 

Weak platitudes fade as those who were once close part,

one to the station,

one to the rail tracks.

 

Two children near feral, by the river,

empty their palms into the traffic coned waters.

One throws stones

imagining he could dam the river in time.

The other races sticks

dreaming of where they might wash up.

 

The applause of falling slates,

denotes the return of the sportless homing pigeon

to a dilapidated house,

years too late.

The urban fox dismisses this lean vagabond.

He too is too late.

Too late for the open country,

for heath and moor.

His is a dustbin buffet and

hated for it,

the way we love to hate the less fortunate.

 

Two students gem the pavement with liquor bottles,

their spirits rising.

Arms flung over shoulders in mutual support,

heads knocking like a newton’s cradle,

they tumble up Conduit Road,

pause,

look back…

Street lights necklace the seven hills,

lambent in the velveteen night.

 

 

Jump

 

You go to poke your finger in my mouth as I yawn at the breakfast table and I think:

what if I just threw my tea down your front?

 

I think of doing this without malice,

not to spite you

but just because I could.

 

I tell you this and you laugh,

a hiccup of a laugh, through a mock scowl and

tell me that yesterday you thought of

chucking your phone into the station fountain,

not as a protest to the modern condition 

or to see how people would react,

just because you could.

 

***

 

These impulses are like the warped love child of

Freud's ‘death instinct’: the drive that seeks to lead organic life back into the inanimate state,

and Jung's ‘shadow’: the unconscious aspects of the personality which the conscious ego does not identify in itself.

 

These murky primal instincts betray in us

a time before civilisation and social convention,

not so much cogito ergo sum,

as cogito ergo fació.

  

They are housed in the tiny voids that exist between thought and action,

never seriously entertained, but each

in their own small way,

with the power to bring the world to its knees

if acted upon collectively.

 

***

 

We stood under a steel sky and threw conkers in the fountain,

watching them dance in the jets;

the seed of a possibility.

 

 

You wore my duffle coat and

said it’s like a hug in a jacket.

The duffle coat bought in secondary school

for a rapidly growing boy,

who never quite came to fill it out.

 

You said if I ever died you would forever wear that jacket to feel my arms around you.

  

What if we all just jumped?

 

 

Cannibalistic origami swan poem

 

you know,

on the concourse,

his patchy moustache,

woke up holding you.

 

I’ll hug

the day

consciously or in sleep,

peaceful like.

 

my limbs,

cherished,

drifted into the dreamcatcher.

put yourself there.

 

The view from down South

 

F**k me Facebook is it snowing up north?

Did you snowball strangers and cars with seeming indemnity,

And score a face-shot without causing enmity?

 

Did you pelt your best friend's dorm window with snow?

And the same to that prick from E4's window too?

 

Did you watch the dogs skitting about Weston Park and

think how your own mutt loves/hates snow?

 

Did you nick a tray from the canteen and

hurtle down Bolehill Park,

laying prostrate where you fell and

carve out a snow angel?

 

Did you fall down drunk in the street bruising your arse,

find you could no longer climb Conduit Road,

the wrong side of a dozen Jägerbombs, then

try booty call that girl on Crookesmoor Road?

 

Did your fashionable shoes get ruined in the wet and

the dye from your cheap Primark handbag stain

the faux-fur on your expensive jacket?

 

Did a stranger lend you his coat to put on, then

put snow down your back in some weird kind of come-on?

 

Did you put your foot through a puddle and walk home toes numb

and argue with your housemates about putting the heating on?

 

Did you hold someone you loved tight against the cold and

wonder if winter will still be the same when you're old?

 

 

Beans and broccoli

 

"to my unidentified muse

 

I built a breakfast out of the scraps in the fridge,

topping it with the last can of Value beans.

Cold beans have a certain poetry among wastrels,

an artful laziness that at the backbone of which

is a healthy obduracy.

 

I set out unambitiously.

There are several things I have to do

and the longer they are left, 

the greater the imperative to do them will become.

But I can't work without pressure,

the way a nail won't work without being hit with a hammer.

 

Work can never begin without a coffee,

black, two sugars, drunk lukewarm,

watching the traffic on Hannover Way.

The tepid coffee is an eccentricity acquired in college,

when an anxious mother would leave a fresh brew on the nightstand,

like a peace offering to a mythical beast.

 

Outside the library I exchange platitudes with someone I recognise from class.

She is doing a Lacanian reading of The Picture of Dorian Gray,

I mumble something about simulacra in The Atrocity Exhibition.

 

We have talked too many times to ask her name now and

this uncertainty lends an anxiety to my encounters with her that

I perversely enjoy.

 

I remember people by their faces, always their faces.

Hers appears to me in portraits framed

between the intermissions of a strobe light,

the first night we met,

a stop animation of head-and-shoulder close-ups. 

 

Lips parted/pursed/pouting,

a supple tongue darting out to moisten them 

or test lip balm,

she inclined her head, 

exposing her gently veined neck.

 

I'm distracted. 

I've lost the thread of what she was saying.

I smile awkwardly and walk away.

 

If I'd remembered her name 

we could have become friends,

might've dated,

become lovers.

 

She has an unplaceable beauty and

is cuttingly funny.

But could she tolerate cheesy beans on cold, steamed broccoli? 

 

 

Mental breakdown instigated by bad plums

 

I buy reduced plums in Tesco.

They are flavourless and sour,

not even ripe,

despite being out of date.

 

I look at the label:

Sweet, Tangy and Juicy.

Bollocks.

 

I flip it over:

Country of origin: South Africa.

No frickin’ wonder!

Pumped with more steroids than Hulk Hogan,

or hormones,

or whatever?!

Fruit that rots before it ripens,

with a carbon footprint like a yeti!

Yetis have big feet right?

 

I think of the slave wage migratory workers

who probably picked these plums

and feel like a dick,

like that time I bought blueberries from Israel.

 

Buying fruit out of season sucks arse,

the same way investment banking

and Trinny & Susannah suck arse.

Why would you fly fruit half way round the world anyway?

This is not James and the Giant f*****g Peach!

At least his fruit was delicious

and everyone got a share,

although I will admit he exploited those seagulls.

 

Why can’t we all just live in giant peach stones?

I wish I was living in a giant peach stone.

 

Temptation

 

Do you want a mars bar?

No I’m alright thanks.

A bite of a mars bar?

No thanks.

I’m really hungry.

Have a mars bar.

I think I will.           

 

 

 

Drinking Coffee Black

 

I like you slightly less than you think I do but

I am still glad you think that I like you that much,

It makes you happy and

knowing I make someone happy,

makes me happier.

 

Too many people break the illusion for the sake of honesty and

do nothing but make the world a slightly less happy place.

 

Honesty is like a bear knee deep in a salmon run.

Happiness is learning to drink coffee black.

 

Humbug

 

I sit in the library eating celery and grapes (and feeling depressed).

The celery and grapes would be depressing enough on their own,

but I also have a two thousand five hundred word essay to write.

 

As I wrestle with the sensory might and sublime wit of the Romantics,

 

(That's Romantic with a capital 'R' as opposed to the ‘Love Actually’ kind,)

 

I notice some dyslexisms nestling in my incomplete first draft,

familiar mistakes which still defy orthography after twenty one years of schooling,

and the passive insistence of Microsoft spellcheck.

 

('dyslexisms' is almost certainly not a real word.)

 

A mirage of tutors,

imploring me to proofread,

bends my eyes,

until I regain focus,

again confronted by grapes and celery.

 

I landed on the grapes and celery going through the reduced section of Sainsburys.

They were the only things on offer besides a cohort of out of date 'Christmas Feast' sandwiches,

 

People clearly don't have an appetite for Christmas in mid-November.

 

What is reformed turkey breast anyway?

If it was turkey breast, it would come in breast form,

and anything reformed would no longer constitute a breast.

At least celery and grapes have a kind of organic honesty.

 

It is 2.30am

 

I have now eaten an entire punnet of grapes, a whole celery plant and

have even been back to get, and consumed,

a Christmas Feast sandwich,

 

Not even a festive humbuggery enough to keep at bay an impulse to comfort eat in the face of boredom.

 

The essay is half finished,

but has yet to see its obligation to the grammatical rules of English.

 

I cannot make it.

 

It is a monster grown beyond the control of it progenitor,

and is fast bearing down upon its creator,

with the intent of devouring him whole,

like some fucked up creature in a Shelley novel.

 

But let us not forget who the real monster is.

 

Meditations starting in Falafel King

 

I'm in falafel king sober for the first time in ever.

I order a chicken and falafel wrap and

the guy asks if I'm vegan because

I don't want mint yoghurt sauce on it.

 

I ponder veganism as I eat my wrap and think, 

 

If I was a fish in the sea...

 

But I'm not a fish in the sea,

and never will be.

I'd be a s**t fish anyway;

I'm useless at swimming

and prefer to breathe air.

 

But then I think,

 

If the Buddhists have it right, I could one day be a fish in the sea…

 

I've led a pretty benign life but definitely won't be reincarnated as a human,

and I most certainly haven't found nirvana,

unless listening to late-eighties grunge could put you in a state of eternal bliss.

 

However I'm not such an arsehole as to come back as a spider,

or a snake,

that kind of wasp that lays its eggs in live caterpillars,

or One Direction,

or whatever.

 

I'd say if I had a natural propinquity with any animal,

it could well be a fish.

I will most likely die in the dark,

killed by something much bigger than me,

without really understanding why.

 

I wonder if I would be a dolphin friendly fish.

Dolphins don't seem to be very friendly to fish themselves.

But if I'm going to be a fish,

I want to be an ethical fish once I'm canned.

 

 

I could sit on the fence like a pescatarian and

consume carbon based lifeforms on no more coherent principle,

than their aptitude to express humanly recognisable emotions when they die.

Emotional responses just don't map the same with an eye on either side of your head. 

 

I wonder what I will look like as I die?

 

Can pescatarians eat dolphin?

 

 

 

A found poem of wants

 

Christopher wants to be reminded of your birthday every year.

Jonah wants you to laugh. Jonah wants you to be surprised. Jonah constantly throws the unexpected at you and waits a second for you to react.

Jessica wants to be the Victoria Beckham of Asia

Camilla wants to be the person Darryl goes to for support and, more important, for approval. She needs to know that Darryl cares about looking good for her.

Lucy wants to put this information in her brother's hand the moment he arrives. Though Billy abhors the assignment,

Dickens wants to boost neighborhoods.

Chumbawamba wants access to the media, access to radio; we weren't content to be carefully and quietly shunted gently into a dead-end siding

Jesus wants you to know: I knew you before you were born. As my hands formed you, I whispered purpose into your bones. I can’t not love you. (Ps. 139:1-6)

Hitler wants to go to Yorkshire

Buddha wants to wish everyone Happy Holidays! #haveyouhadyourshaketoday? #ComeOnIn #happyholidays

Van Gogh wants you to come check out rin tin tiger at the hotel utah tonight.

Queeny wants it reversed and it has not been reversed.

Disraeli wants to create a context where the marvellous is possible.

Hello Kitty wants your space messages. Who better to deliver your greetings from space than Hello Kitty?

Gandhi wants those who have been able to subdue necessity to see that they have a duty to those who have not.

Blair is looking forward to winning over the Mansfield Town faithful after being the town's public enemy number one

God wants us to live. I was abused by my father throughout my whole childhood and I married the first guy who came along when I was still a teenager.

Jazzy Jeff wants to know if you're going to eat the rest of that.

J.D Salinger wants to emphasize the importance of being thankful to given circumstances.

Boko Haram want to be seen by their peers as grown-up jihadis.

The Spice Girls want their children to marry each other

Pinky and the Brain want to! Well, I wouldnt want to.

Einstein wants to E-Date Olive

Justin Bieber Wants to go to Israel with a Random Guy He Met on a Plane

Hermione wants some of my carrot.

Yogi Bear wants to help you start the Halloween season off right!

Che guevara wants you to rebel, Shakeera. #SayingsOn3Wheelers.

Audrey Tautou wants to be a sailor

The crazies want to sue me, they have every right to sue, and by crazies I'm not talking about the people we're going to be helping.

 

 

Found poem generated by Microsoft Data Collection from an assortment of my own words

 

Will your lack of ambition become tedious,

Could this ever be anything but horribly overbearing.

diffident indifference with rain

Cuchulainn

indentions

I open the book and breath deep in that worn book smell,

intolerence

when prompted at the boarder.

way they move in self affirming

even appear to all intensive purposes

How do I start it when there is no clear resolution in sight

Hamid Khan was a tall, lithe and awkwardly handsome boy, school captain of everything…

After a rather difficult, muted time at day school in Cambridge…

although I will admit he exploited those seagulls

and everyone got a share

A word meaning to be so foolish, absurd or unreasonable as to…

Way of controlling mental health disorders. Father had always encouraged sport…

Remember who’s habitat you destroyed to create yours.

Che

 

Outro

 

This university has become a sort of dolls house I do not fit in.

Not that I am saying I am too big for this uni.

 

Frick no!

 

I just mean that all the furniture seems uncomfortably small and

I can’t bring into focus those tiny, tiny books that hold all the answers.

 

I don’t think I understand this.

I don’t understand any of this.

Yet papers come back,

64, 67, 61.

 

I am probably jinxing this paper.

This one will come back with a 49 or a 56,

if I ever get it finished.

 

In my critical essay I will try and find words other than ‘meta’

to describe this poem.

 

If 110% is the ideal work rate,

I quite likely fall well below expectations.

 

I probably won’t include this poem in my portfolio.

If you are reading this poem I have run out of ideas.

 

I am washing my hands of this.

This poem will be the closing piece of my portfolio.

Good night and goodbye.

Reviews

[Coyote Poetry]

I liked this poem and the thoughts. I liked the set-up and the way you open each subject and made each topic a worthwhile read. I'm saying this. I want to re-read again. Thank you for sharing this outstanding chapter.
Coyote

[Carol Phelan Aebby]

What a roll of thoughts and ...can't help but smile. On...on...is all I can manage!

Wishing you creativity, and bliss!

With respect and smiles,
Carol Phelan Aebby

[Frank]

How could we not write a poem that had no cliched words, no common expressions, not use repeated words. How could a teenage girl not write of her knight on his white steed, dreams are made from these.

The good poet is a rare poet, he stands and writes for and from his own. He may read a newspaper and imagine a story or narrative, write an essay or a poem, but he crafts it with his own mark, like those biro marks you spoke off, its his egg yoke on the page his breakfast from ten years ago, same as his memories and they will die with him and no one will remember him. But they will remember his words, if he writes them down.

I find this a most unusual poem, quite rare in its imagination, and I found it very good, what else can I say.

One thought struck me if 100% is the fullness of a world how can we get 110% ? W can only so that if we accept 100% is the norm, and in the very rare cases we can get that ten percent extra, this poem could be that one, the one that did it.

Exclusion clause: Please ignore bad grammar, typos, spelling mistakes and bad punctuation of this critique as my tea has just been called.