Stop and Motion

Some nights you can batter and twat and tinkle the keys and it’s just squat, nothing, nowt doing. It’s just stall after stall after stall after stall. Sputter and crunch of tyres out along the hard shoulder. Climb out. Slam door. Kick gravel away. See the smoke of it lift off and scatter like ashes. Think of this plan of yours as dead, gone, cremated. This hope you once had of being one of the greats, the all-timers, the old-timers, eventually, when your books have all made it past the century mark. A scrap of immortality. A sliver of worth. Hot student bodies in tight sweaters with their breasts leaning over the desk as they search the mass of your text for its myriad meanings. The smiles on their faces when they find the few lines that really, truly, undoubtedly work. The few lines you left behind from nights when there was something doing, when you were just in the groove and shut-out from doubt, and only world left was the world you were writing. Page after page of it. Written, read, edited. Calm in your head as you lay down to sleep. Not stuck by the roadside, pissing into the hedgerow, watering the wildlife, and staring hungrily, angrily up at the stars. Not telling yourself over and over it’s high time you quit. When you simply climbed back inside and let the road take you. When it’s just word after word after word after word, and all of them feel necessary, and useful, and all of them feel good as they make their way out. 

Charcoal

last                   

                                bare                      tree

   of

      spring,               it                 seems

          like,              in             that

           motorway-         adjacent    

              field;  its  scrawny               limbs

                  upreaching,                   in

                    echo   of                  a

                   clutching         bunch

                    of          cave-

                    wall dancers,

                  which    a

                distantly

              ancestral

            twig, perhaps,

           was once employed  to draw. 

From Hay-on-Wye (three poems)

That hill there in

the distance

with its tonsured

top-point

low on trees

maybe once was

home to forts

and war

though now stands

peaceful

people-free.

***

Orchard, like a

host of Van Gogh

peach tree

prints

remaindered

in a warehouse

waiting

for somebody

for some somebodies

to come with practised

hands to pick their

fruit.

***

riding shotgun with

a biro and

a notebook –

making spirographing

seizmographing

lines –

if I could drive

I

might have found

these places

sooner

but riding shotgun

with a biro

suits me fine

Minstrels

Sugar’s there, he said, and stirrers, he said, gesturing towards the anorexic lollipop sticks spearing out from a jar by my elbow. He nodded then, as if to indicate that was all of the extras, even though, as it happened, it wasn’t. But then, I suppose, there was no need to mention the rain.

It’d started on the drive down that morning, and hadn’t so much as paused for breath or re-fuelling since. It was the reason, indeed, I was standing there anyhow, queuing for coffee, rather than watching a medieval minstrel show, which I had tickets for, and which should have been happening on the other side of the high, nearby, castle wall, in the field that seemed to constitute its grounds.

It was unscrupulous, the rain, in its indifference. To the minstrels, to the festival, to me. One drop or two? it didn’t bother to ask, before promptly pouring three or four, of differing volumes and velocities, into both of the open-topped cups. The latte foam parting at the touch like quicksand, and then, like quicksand, re-coagulating to cover it up.

For a moment, as I walked with those two cups outstretched before me, I thought you’d left. But you hadn’t. You’d simply moved to another table, slightly more hid from the weather. Had pushed out a chair for me beside you, so as I, despite having taken a soaking, and this being the first coffee of the day (which was already into its afternoon), still knew where it was I should sit.

We were in the lower part of the castle’s outer grounds; sitting beneath an awning on one side of the flagstone path, inadvertently staring at those beneath an awning on the other, who were, inadvertently, doing the same back. Roughly every quarter-minute, a larger droplet was trampolined loose from atop the awning, spraying my thigh and my right shoe, blearing my eyeline a tad. A tad further.

It’d been an early start and we were both tired, and now, to rectify that, to counter it, we were making quick work of our coffees, and so not saying much.

The two men behind us were talking, though, even as they knocked back beers. I hadn’t even noticed they were there when I sat down, but they must have been, because, looking outwards as I was, I surely would have noticed them come over.

What eventually tipped me off to their presence, to their talk, I think, was that one of the men said he was a singer-songwriter. Not that such a fact necessarily made him of interest in and of itself. Rather, it was when he told the other man he’d only come here for the festival, and had been around all the pubs, asking if he could perform during the week, telling the owners in the process of such asking exactly what he was. Nothing special there either, perhaps – I suppose they’re inundated by such requests, especially at this time of year – only, along with that bit of background info, he bundled in a confession: that he hadn’t felt the usual snap in his voice or his mind when he’d been going round doing that asking; that he was no longer embarrassed to say what he did.

They went on from there about quitting jobs and saving up, despite quitting jobs, to go to Thailand, but I, no longer eavesdropping with all attention on anything but inward me, didn’t register the outcome of the plans, or even whether they’d been done or were still there yet to do.

Along with the water, and the water-weakened coffee, I found myself logged down by envy. Or, perhaps, not by envy, but by an anger at myself. I had found myself almost nodding along to his confession, his recounted revelation, the first time I heard it, away from the semi-martial drum-loop it’d settled into in my head. Yet, afterwards, staring out still, and still inadvertently, across the quarter-minute dripping and the flagstone path, I chided myself for pretension, for thinking what I do – what I want to keep doing – could continue to override basic economic sense.  

People like poets do not own castles, I thought, looking up at the back end of that old stone building, which seemed cookie-cut from, but lighter than, the gloomy, marshy grey above.

People like poets – like singer-songwriters, even – wind up standing in wet fields, like those medieval minstrels must have been doing just then; hanging around for the chance of a pittance, willing to perform for it whether the audience shows up or not.  

I thought.

Those quarter-minute drips still blearing my eyeline, spattering my jeans and my shoe. The coffee not quite yet kicked in.

After it had, and had kicked off again, I stopped worrying about money. I bought books. You bought books. I stopped worrying about the rain. On the way back to the festival grounds, we stopped in your car and I dried my hair with a towel. Whilst you looked at me and laughed, and made me feel not self-conscious, but loved, in spite of my numerous failings. I care for you. I cared for the books we had, between us, wedged into my backpack. We double-checked that the tickets for Roger McGough were inside that bag, before we set out for the venue.

And after we’d seen him, heard him, had our books signed, I chided myself again; this time, not for my choices, but instead for that earlier chiding; for letting my mind get away, for a while, with that old, usual snap. 

To Hay-on-Wye (four poems)

Brecon on a blue day

with greens green

and fields brown and tilled

and tanning

lazily awaiting

later harvest

when benefits of this weather

as with memory

will ripen

into sustenance to

see you through whatever

cold may lie ahead.

***

What if Van Gogh

had been waylaid

by Wales instead

of lingering in

London?

Would he have

found happiness in his

colours in

his art

before the madness

was too strong?

***

The smell of the

concrete, alive in

the rain, the

Brit-summer

soundtrack,

the green, wet

refrain.

***

Maybe this is poets’

country;

the Beacons’ shade,

the borderlands;

blood/brain barrier of

landscape; animal &

scientific both; body’s

inner rivers, & edging

verdance of the mind.   

'...who cares what picture we see?'

No smoker’s breath passes up across the projector lens, is carried down the tiered rows to ghostdance on the silver screen. No fan rattle invades the ears of those in the back row.

Dust motes – no longer hand-drawn animated fairies, demons, pixies – swim up through the light-stream in silence.

A cough, perhaps.

A sneeze.

A stifled belch, and the crunching, grinding, swallowing of popcorn or cheese-soggy nachos.

Adverts. People making use of the time allotted to such shitty salesmanship to have a last-gasp dick around on their mobile phones before the feature starts. Texting someone or other. Updating a status, a location, mapping their whereabouts and whispering, affectless, look where I am.

Smartphones going to blackout, mostly, like fireflies or dry lightning dying. Caught splat against the windscreen of a car as it races into that wide-open vagueness direct after dusk. No particular destination in mind.

Waiting for the trailers. Rattling by on the highway beside them. Haulage company names on the side. Sloganeering for this or that way of life. Fitting so carefully into one lane or another.

Occasional voices.

Nobody really paying attention.

This, the point between awake and sleeping, hasn’t really altered. Not anything like as important as the dream will be, when it comes.

And, when it comes, it unfolds in such a way as to keep all eyes fixated, flitting, open. Not necessarily entertained, or enlightened, but diverted from anything else they might not want to see.

Light does still come out through that little square hole near the ceiling, and does still make its way to the screen. But that screen seems more and more like the inside of a blindfold, less and less like a canvas rigged and tricked-out to do magic, show motion, make art.  

A lot of these hi-def dreams, they don’t seem to have morals or meanings. No real interpretation is required or rewarded. Eyes watch, but what they see seldom makes it back to the critical faculties. If it did, maybe the eyes would go into lockdown.

A lot of these hi-def dreams are things that can’t be fully recalled or described after waking. The house lights go on, and that lone, muted torchbeam is consumed, garbled within them.

Some people rush faster for the exit than others.

They can smoke outside.

And, besides, there’s always somewhere else to be. Maybe some workplace to visit, succumb to.

And a TV back home. Or a laptop, or a tablet PC, or their phone. Watching videos on the train with no headphones. Fellow passengers get tinny sound but no pictures.

Nobody focuses much through the windows. Blur-blend of grey into green and back again. More trailers.

Some people simply sit tight til the end of the credits.

Not reading the names, they just don’t want to leave.  

Chain

The child who played football out on home street. Child who I was. Whatever the weather, always out there. Kick-ups. Trick shots. Dribbling to the top of the road and then back down to the bottom. Dimples of tarmac felt through his shoes. Felt through his trousers at knee-caps post-tumbling; body-checked by unseen ghosts of mistakes. Demons leeching off our trying and our trials. Was always fuzzy on religion, that child. Despite or perhaps because of C of E education, singing hymns in church and trying not to kick the pew in front. Got up and didn’t cry off, not at that age, and kept on kicking the football. Would dedicate an hour or two as afternoon sank into evening, attempting to perfect the Cruyff turn, the Maradona turn, rainbow-flicking the ball up and catching it between shoulder blades and back of neck. Flicking it up again and trapping it between concrete and sole. Child wore, most practice sessions, a thin gold chain, affixed to which was a small gold football boot. Would take that ten-carat talisman between his hands, upon a string of failed attempts, and turn eyes skywards, whispering. Exact words that child said are lost now, but strong feeling they amounted to ‘Please’. Praying more to what he believed findable within him than to what he wasn’t sure was findable without. Tucking chain back inside T-shirt and, whatever the weather, carrying on.

Looking out the window lately, I do not witness football practice.

Worse still, I do not see myself.