Serbia

It is June and I am moving again.
I have forgiven the broom its shortcomings
and allowed it to foul its old whiskers.
I have pardoned the own-brand sponges
which themselves permit the bathroom tiles to come
clean, drying out whiter and whiter
with each sweep. Now, with the furniture
pushed to the wings and calmly awaiting
their cues, I will exorcise the memory
of this place as I have those places
no respectable atlas still recognises.

It is June and I am eulogising
a country I never knew and owes me
nothing. And without any warning
but this one, my grandmother, herself
homeless, sweeps her way from one June
to another with all the lightness, the delight
in motion only moths and arrow-like
lapwings can know. Without stopping, she takes
my hand in her firm hand, and when she opens
her mouth to speak it is the sound
of water running from one place to another.

Netherlands

After forging both our signatures - Mrs and Mr
on the hostel register, the hostel somewhere

between limbo and hell, but all we could muster
with sunrise already red-spattering the air -

we rose as if in worship of each other,
intoning in the tongue of lovers or lovers'

image, and if we already shared a language
pre-existing and only to be gouged

from us as from a stone, then her mouth
was a wellspring where air met earth,

and on her tongue that was every river,
or black-reflecting puddle we had earlier

tripped over, was every drop of sweat
or condensation from every dancer and bar-light,

and in the light of a new year we were hesitant to face,
her dim eyes, her Indias of spice

glanced down at the feet that were never my feet,
then the eyes that were only mine, and yet -

even as the doors of our twin cells closed
and sky paled to eye-blue above the clothes

we had discarded - I settled down in my casing
and simmered to the accent I still have trouble placing.

Greece

I found him on the beach, half-starved on his driftwood
raft, barely able to form the sound of his own name.
Once he could, I heard his story, broke bread for him,
hardly gave him credence, led him to the palace
nonetheless. Nausicaa came later. But the day
I recovered overnamed Odysseus, naked
but for a leafy loincloth and flotsammed beard,
became the night I met you. Everyone we knew
crammed in a sandy cove, the bonfire's drowsy light,
the big man's susurrent tone, lulled me to agony.
I was ready to grab a bottle and vamoose

when I caught your steady, uninterested gaze
and the universal two-finger sign for 'smoke?'
You asked who he thought he was, whether his story
were fiction or recollection, his or someone elses,
what difference it made? And answer were overlong,
but mine was studied, earnest, and as far beyond
my recall as your pine-green shawl, your eyes pine-green,
even his raven-ish beard and his hands tucked behind
himself like a raven, weren't. These fragments coalesced
one night in dream as a sensuous whole. As for all
that happened next, you remember as well as I.

Côte d'Ivoire

As if there were nowhere in the world
but the ten-or-so yards before his back line,
Kolo Touré might yet hold his position
(kitted out in orange and still more orange)
somewhat better than another Ture,
Samori, who, in circa eighteen ninety,
saw his French-styled legions driven
by French legions east and further east,
his turf not so abandoned as removed
from the place between two European stones
that had once been his own back line.

As if the whole story could add up
to more than a matter of lines,
as if a field of battle could become
little more than a field of play
marked by bunkers and fox-holes
that might once have been called home,
as if this scorched and salted dirt
might yet show signs of blooming,
Kolo, in a white-and-green change
kit, fills the hollow in his defence
as if he might yet hold his position.

Slovakia

I followed the echoing voices and found the place
four teenagers, three boys and a girl, were skateboarding
in the august courtyard outside a bank, or an office-
block, the glass was too dark to tell. One skater fell
on his ass. Adam had taken our cash to look for food,
he’d return minutes later with salami and bread, cheese-
flavoured crisps, a cold fizzing bottle; I’d found a spot to sit.
I’m good at that. My cards didn’t work on the continent,
he doled out absurd IOUs, actual pocket money.
The kids hunkered in a bunch as one by one
they rumbled toward a staircase and by magic kicked

into silence, briefly, before the board skited off
on its lonely trajectory. Before recovering it
from the decorative bushes, hung low as if ready to ripen,
he shared a solemn high-five that cracked round the square,
holding on for a moment after the strike. I couldn’t read
his eyes. I couldn’t focus on the map I was pretending
to read. Then Adam returned with salami and bread
and I stung his hand with my own, he asked what for,
I almost said I loved him. We sat and ate,
a boy pushed off across the marble slates
and launched himself beyond what was under his control.

These Days by Leontia Flynn

Leontia Flynn’s These Days is an exciting book. The opening poem, “Naming It” not only does the work of placing her immediately, but not subordinately, in the realm of Longley/MacNeice and their concern with lists and names of things, but grounds the collection in its self-deprecatory and curious voice that is comparable to no other writer I can think of. Granted, Jen Hadfield springs to mind, particularly in their interest in Morgan, but Flynn is far more steeped in urban (suburban?) life, more wrapped up in the elaborate mundanity of being (variously) a student, a godmother, a waiter, a lover, and – very strikingly – a clued-in reader of poetry. There is a cluster of four poems, “When I was Sixteen I met Seamus Heaney” (“I had read The Poor Mouth – but who was Seamus Heaney?”), “My Dream Mentor” (“don’t write about anything you can point at”), “Snow” and what feels like its partner poem, “Nocturne” (“Whaddya mean already written? What? / Louis? Louis who?”), that make up something not unlike a centrepiece to the collection, a kind of hub from which the others radiate. Behind the humour is a playful up yours to her poetic forebears, a desire to evade the long shadows of Heaney and the rest. Flynn handles her influences lightly – besides the impulse to name and include everything, she also adapts Longley’s preoccupation with extremely short poems: “Doyne”, “Bridges”, “April, 7 P.M.” and “The Morning After Ruth’s Going-away Party” all clock in at six lines or under, while the book's first twenty-four are variations on the Longleyean ten-liner, in which his otters and herons are subbed for pints and pick-up lines. They are no less lyrical or gracefully poised for the change in subject matter. The collection is also littered with poems of one or two long, syntactically complex sentences that throw the reader off at odd angles. Look at “The Furthest Distances I’ve Travelled” – “why, if I’m stuffing smalls / hastily into a holdall, I am less likely / to be catching a Greyhound from Madison to Milwaukee // than to be doing some overdue laundry / is really beyond me.” Lingering only briefly on how sumptuous a platter of rhymes is likely/Milwaukee/laundry/beyond me, this poem is probably the best, or at least most memorable, of the collection, and bears a closer look.

It cracks off with “Like many folk”. This is a lie. Leontia Flynn is not like many folk, no matter how she might try and signal it. The poem’s delicate play with rhymes, line-breaks/lengths, its exotic vocabulary of places (“Krakow / and Zagreb, or the Siberian white / cells of scattered airports”) make it tricky to take everything in at the first go – the impression remains of a landscape shrinking, becoming intimate, finding uncommon nooks and hideyholes after the initial motions toward escape and dispersal and anonymity. That the poem breaks that particular word over a line doesn’t seem like a cheeky reach for rhyme – “anony / mity” feels rejected as a concept in what becomes a strong tribute to home, however mutable that concept might become during the poet’s “routine evictions”. The last few stanzas are the most formally consistent in the poem, and look and sound more recognisably like metric quatrains than the slippery early ones. Here they are in full, again, just two sentences draped over multiple lines:

However
when, during routine evictions, I discover

alien pants, cinema stubs, the throwaway
comment – on a Post-it – or a tiny stowaway
pressed flower amid bottom drawers,
I know these are my souvenirs

and, from these crushed valentines, this unravelled
sports sock, that the furthest distances I’ve travelled
have been those between people. And what survives
of holidaying briefly in their lives.

“[A]lien pants” might be my favourite thing in any poem. While you could argue that the last couplet sounds just a touch neat, I think it earns it. It feels more like an addendum – the full stop (rather than a comma) after “people” should be the end of the poem, but it keeps going, makes room for the scraps and physical memories of time spent trying to escape.

The collection has a heap of great moments. On the other hand, the brevity of each individual poem (and maybe the collection itself – 54 pages) makes it feel occasionally, if only momentarily, bitty or shallow, or lacking in broader significance. But Flynn seems alert to this as a potential difficulty – in “Satis House” she describes “[her] usual gift for avoiding ‘the issues’ with humour” – and provides too engaging and energetic a voice, too various a critical mind to let these instances detract from the book at large. Who knows what’s coming next?

#regularupdatefail

Gettin' fewer and further between these things. I'm on twitter now, of all things, @roxyreadings, and also shoutouts to Aiko who is going to be on the next SPL podcast which will update in the next day or two. While you're there, check out Stuart Kelly's cast, it will make you think. I have no idea what this poem is about, and while I probably say that about most things, I've got a much clearer idea that I've got no clear idea about what this one's about. Here it is.


Leith


The voice at night said, “Don’t
mind me. Don’t run each mistake
across your tongue like a spoon
of crème brûlée. Don’t slide open
the overflowing bottom drawer.

“Don’t unfold the neat green throw
that holds the red-wool plaits
from her hair as the air
of her scent expires, packed
with a snap shot of her smiling,

“flattered to be found. Don’t
go out. Don’t leave me here.”
I posted my keys through
my own locked door, walked
to the hilltop and eyed the spot

where the sea began. The water
tainted pink with the sunrise
as if bleeding from the strain
of making day. This won’t be
easily solved, or soon.

When we are rich, me and You –
you, still nothing but potential
until we decide who you are –
when sushi is not a reward,
when we’ll consume nothing but sushi,

we will raze to ashes each building
between our home and the sea, so
wading birds and otters will make
the trip unhindered to our door –
even otters have second homes –

when we’ll throw away our keys,
yes, and strip off our clothes
and our phones, our hair and skin
and dander, should the fancy take us,
to the spot where the sea begins,

then keep going, have the talk
that will take the rest of our lives,
and not drown – to drown is painful,
and pain too much like hard work –
but become that shadowy kingdom,

forgetful, forgotten, notched by
the claws of the herons on our skin,
admit the otters’ late retreat
to their hovers in our alcoves,
safe in the grass and close to home.

Thanks for reading,
Dave.

Suddenly! Three Weeks Later!

I've given up on trying to give titles to these friggin things. I kind of feel like I'm letting my children down, but I just want them to grow into their names, let their names choose them. God.

Anyway, this was inspired by a painting by George Braques, which at this point down the creative road is almost irrelevant, but still just relevant enough to warrant mention. Check it out here. Poem here:


How many of those candles flashed their small semaphore
that night, how many tussled in a bag by the fridge
that night, when the fuses shot in the bar and by candle-
light we searched the shelves like Diogenes,
and the colour in the glass was only candle-made.

How could we compete with that marbled darkness?
A man giggled as we totted change in the glisteny haze
and carried a gift of tea-lights to his girlfriend’s table.
And then the angles the candles lavished seemed to constellate
a new scene where the candle was a row of candles, and then a row

of rooftops candlelit, where we slubbed together for heat
and shared the icy fuzz of sweat on our cheeks in a gesture
as simple as the brocade on her duvet. I touched her hair
as I might a candle that catches but refuses to hold a flame.


Oh oh oh and and there's the Bowery/Roxy thing tonight. COME SEE COME SEE.
Thanks,
Dave.

2010 2010 its like a brand new yeeeeear

So on Sunday Ida Mae and Gwen went to the Meadows and made a snowman and generally frolicked around. Ida is from the Tropics and had never made a snowman before. Anyhow, I'm just saying this because this poem has the snowman in it but neither Ida nor Gwen and I don't want them to feel left out. This poem does not have a title, but it really should. Some day I will come back and add the titles in.


I left you, dear, and your duveted warren,
your butter-orange french toast and darjeeling,
to crack my lips on the crispening air,
though, to be fair, I kept in mind your hair,
your mouth, your embellishing flanks
when I passed a patch of untouched snowbank,
untouched but for the orange of Irn Bru,
two neon cans. I blanked the Big Issue
man, his evangelic don’t be shy
come and buy, my less-than-sacred alibi
waiting in the Meadows. The floury snow
was barely wet enough for snowmen, snow-
cairn, Jabba the SnowHut. Another can
full of fag butts I stacked where I rammed
in his arms, angled for hosannas; a switch
and some leaves made his face a Buddha of kitsch,
shielded his eyes from the Irn-Bru-toned sun.

That night, we tottered home, cold-nosed and drunk
and saw yer maun alone and here’s you: cmon
and we’ll build a snowmate like the bride of fucken
Frankenstein and with just one broken stick
made arms eyes ears nose mouth and, with a twig
doused in muck, her sandy hair. We left them there
together with the dogs and orange stars.


More soon,
Dx

Merry Solstice!

As promised, here's the second of them two poems I promised. Still haven't thought of a title. The lines should be staggered slightly, Mark Doty-style, but you'll have to use your IMAGINATION.


The music is skipping, then the radio
goes livid with interference. The waiter tinkers
with it briefly, then leaves it to its silence.

The tea is nut-brown and body-hot and on the wall
on what passes for a mantlepiece
is a mug, some candles, a wooden

mule, a vase with purple-black flowers
and above that the painting that caught
my attention: a single raven

silhouetted against something like
twilight, the oyster-blue of dawn or just after
sundown, between two splintered trees

and another raven half-
lurched into shadow. The first raven
- centre stage, our raven -

is peeking back across its shoulders at some
signal maybe, maybe some threat. No sign of you
yet, and in a minute you'll be late. It's nearly dawned

on me that ravens' eyes are on the sides
of their head, the whole body at an angle
when a draught shifts the fire of the candles

on the mantle and there you are
with your hair raven-black and silhouetted
against the silvery dusk outside the door



Thanks for reading,
Dave.

Yesterday there was snow

I have a poem to show you! And another one that will come either tomorrow or Monday, depending on when I next get to a computer. Neither of them have titles yet.


She is watching for you from the tree-house.
Judging by the tulip-blackness of the sky,
the corona of moonlight, you are late.
The ginseng root in your hand has come alive,
and when you touch the tree with your other hand,
too patched and grubby to live, and all this
luminous scrub, these overdone set-props
seem too flat, too farfetched, will you filter

back to life where her snoring fills the morning
as if she's angry to have missed it,
and all things seem connected to that
one abrasive sound that breaks from dream,
because air would no sooner meet your lungs and leave
and not believe your body something sacred

than you would stop her goddamn snoring.
How can desire live in what's perfected? Root
yourself in the pillow, the wet jewels of her sweat,
when there is nothing between you
but the bundles and nooks
of the blankets and a little human sleep.


Thanks for your patience, it's been a while.
Dave.

CAPS 2: DARK VERMOUTH

As promised, there is a brand new poem coming your way in just over four sentences. Also, if you are reading this today (27th of October 2009) or tomorrow morning, then might I invite you to the Bowery, 2 Roxburgh Place, tomorrow soir at 8pm? I think I may just have done. There will be poems and stories and all kinds of lovely drinks in teacups and cocktail glasses. Now it's time for that poem I mentioned!


Curtains


His cue is the flute.
There’s over a minute to kill, he’s thinking of food:
roast parsnips, turnip mash, all the trimmings
of Thanksgiving and the snacks in the dressing room –
the donuts that are there and the donuts that are not
her, mis-lit by the stagelights in the last rehearsal
and the meat of her limbs lithing in the boudoir
of his dreams, the seams of her crosspatterned dress
yet unable to release the last inches of her svelte
shifting thighs, a faint return of hair to her once-shaven pelt
was the last thing on his mind when the flute
started playing, and, at a loss for a script,
started mouthing
and thinking of nothing
except

now
no, now

no


Thanks for reading, and I hope the formatting for that poem works. Else I shall be sad. The next gap between poems will be much shorter.
Yours,
Dave.

THERE ARE NO CAPS BIG ENOUGH TO HOUSE MY EXCITEMENT

HOLY

GODDAMN

SHIT

I'VE WRITTEN A MOTHERFRIGGIN POEM

here it is


Zion


What I learned at Church
is that the body is a Temple
and the Church too is a body,
and I have never been to Jerusalem
but I have touched your body
as the angel touched Jacob
and made him Israel,

and I have never been to Granada
but I have heard Spanish
read from Poet in New York
and with your English tongue
seen you light up like a little town
beneath where a star hung

like the carvings in Yorkminster
of the broad-tongued heads
with wide eyes and fig leaves
or oak leaves or banana leaves
or just leaf litter through their hair

though I have never spoken
in tongues or knelt before an altar
or carved pagan good-luck charms
in your Temple, your new-found land.


And there's another one tomorrow! :O
Thanks for still reading,
Dave.

done

Whheeeeeeeeelll I'm done. Portfolio handed in and switched to relax/watch the athletics/play guitar hero mode. To mark the occasion, here is the last poem that I added to the manuscript.

Little Lucifers


The night is over and a gull has abandoned
a pigeon’s collarbone, or its splintered thigh-bone.

It skitters and skites by the daybreak lunette.
I am only a guest in my fourth-storey flat.

Did it see me behind the grey-clouded glass?
Did it have me in mind when it tore from the carcass?

Is there another bird so human as a seagull?
At the foot of the stairs is the bearable hell

of bottles, polystyrene, a pair of black heels
and a coven of gulls like the Morningstar’s angels.

Having balanced our garbage at the edge of the kerb,
I hear the screamed half-laughter of birds.


I will return soon. Thanks for reading,
Dave.

wahoo hoo hoo

Look at widdle Wolvie there. So happy to be lobotomising that fishdude. With his disturbingly pregnant-looking bicep.

Another poem today, a reworked version of an old poem, as per the norm. I am massively hungover having slept on my own sofa last night. On the other hand I think I'm just about done with my portfolio!

:D

This means that after the next three or four updates I'll be taking a fair old break from the blog. Hopefully not too long, though, and I plan on coming back with a vengeance. As for now, I'm going to crawl back into bed, or just into the warm, welcoming bosom of that corner over there. Bad times.

Penelope


No gulls flock at the horizon.
Unadvancing, unreceding,
hiding riches in its folds.
My boat glides in a wash of stars.

The water has hoarded loam
and other shields from light.
The moon’s torn reflection
runs in a line from my feet.

Minerva, grey-eyed Athene,
there is no sweetness
in this grey serenity.

Send head-turning winds,
send rollicking water,
send earth to dirty my feet.

Thanks for reading,
Dave.

Edinbleurgh

Edinburgh is currently full of needy, desperate twats like these hilarious people. No particular offense to them, they were just the first ones I found on google. Anyway, the whole city is swollen and bloated with talentless people making tits of themselves for £12/hour. Amazingly it is also full of people willing to pay for it. I'd been looking forward to the Fringe for some time and I struggle to remember the last time I was so disappointed.

LOOK AT OUR FUNNY HATS. LOOK.

LOOK

Poem to ease the pain. More tomorrow.

The Bridge


If I should lose myself in sleep and find myself
out of body and floating above the ocean,
may tidal winds take my nightshirt like a man-o-war
and make my mooring-place the Brooklyn Bridge,

and because this is a dream, let the bridge
stay empty and so broad New York dissolves in mist,
let one ship drift in below like a lily pad
on a sea turned doldrum-calm and silent enough

that I could whisper and still be understood
by the young man calmly discarding his suit-coat
and leather shoes and mounting the guard-rail,

and as he falls I will scream it is a joy to have a body
and as the sun rises on the bridge’s pitch-black rivets
let it catch a lily pad that blooms and quickly withers.

Thanks for reading,
Dave.

Edinburgh-related kind of ish

Another poem, a day late. Time flies.

Beasties

Put in mind of a rollicking bonfire
we kindled with handfuls of bracken,
and our drowsiness in its quilting light,
I invite you to leave the rumpus and racket
of the city’s summer liturgy of flames,
to leave a legion of groping arms,
to leave behind even your blood-red
body-paint, your coal-black face-paint,
to find the burnt-out spot from last night
and to impress once more with our presence
the home of migrant barnacle geese,
oystercatchers, this perpetual sunrise.

nom nom

The cricket is back on! There's a very slim chance that England could win this one - they need to make a high score (500?) and skittle the aussies (can they get all 10 in two sessions?), but it'll likely be a draw. Still, there's been some decent batting, though they've been making a score then getting out cheaply far too often. On the other hand, a 1-0 lead going into the last two isn't a bad position.

Poem? Poem.

Two Days Later

Don’t offer to store your squeeze’s junk.
Don’t schlep a scanner through town,
the cables are fried, you’ve nothing to scan.
Before you borrow her Rimbaud and Rilke
green-light-it that they’re both translated
and legible. By all means take the wine.
But for the love of Saint Christopher,
don’t unfold the neat green throw that holds
the red-wool plaits from her hair as the air
of her scent expires, packed in a grip with a snap
of her smiling, as grateful are you are to be found.
Don’t be surprised if you wish you’d taken more.

Another tomorrow, then a break. Thanks for reading,
Dave.

Here's a real-life panel from Action Comics #377

Yep, it's time for a whole new month of fresh material. Hand-in date for the final project is the 21st of August, so expect a fair bit of new stuff in the upcoming three weeks, then a good long sabbatical from writing bizniz. For now, here's a completely new poem.

The Night Before

Your hold was as strong on my arm
as mine was round your belly and breasts
when I woke in the night and, still dreaming,
saw a face between your pillow and hair
and made a noise like the heart inhaling
that half-woke you. The roll and rise
of your rest grew shallow, then crept back
like a cat or peaceful breeze. Your hold
was strong on my blood-numb arm.
I held my breath and dozed until dawn.

New poem tomorrow,
Dave.

Face/Off

Check out me and my face at the SPL blog! Also this poem that I made!

Better Words

hear the melody of names
blood-streams incantations
sound them like a spell

shearwater meadow brown
cormorant yellowtail

go topless in saltwater
feel the blaze in the eyes

the breeze tangling your hair
fingers tangled in your hair

palmfuls of horse chestnut
explosions of jackdaws
love and grassy jeans

witch-hazel valerian
ragged robin lady’s bedstraw

god or a thing
for which there is no better
word than god

the word that says there is one life
and we are in it

on your tongue
and spreading like petals
in the palms of your hands

is this dwindling list of flowers
may it be forever autumn

One more tomorrow...
Dave.