The tinnitus of love

...says it all really, doesn't it?

Cold Strawberry

(This one's from the end of March)


You are like a cold strawberry -


bitter

until you hit

room temperature.

Want Some Wine?

(Written in March)

In the beginning, she tried to follow them.

Onto their trains, bandwaggoning
their homeward trajectories,
as she clutched the flagon's worth
of wine to her side, through
the thinning canvas bag
slung drooping across her shoulders.

She hovered, like a waiting
acquaintance, in a deflating
social encounter, ignored
and unworthy of introduction,
an awkward loose thread hanging
off the structured blouse of a
housewife, noted and
dismissed with irritation.

She would open her mouth wide
like a post box slot,
issuing forth all she had received
in unstamped, authentic gibberish.

Want some wine?

When they shrugged her off,
she learnt. Learnt to sit
next to silent consumers in Burger King,
learnt to pick the ones
who were least likely to shoo her away
with an irritable scowl,
most likely to permit her presence
for a few precious moments

Want some wine? she said, foot nervy
and fettered at Waterloo.
I wish my lazy compassion
had proved me more worthy,
when all I can say,
to this woman with the mad croaking laugh, is
Did you have a good day?


[Now this is as far as I've got. It could go on with "As she hunkers off, da da...", I'm not sure. We'll see.]

Oswald's Pale Persicaria is Up Here

I've just read Alice Oswald's poem "Pale Persicaria", from her newly-Ted Hughes' award-winning collection Weeds and Wild Flowers. It's beautiful, and really resonated with a poem I wrote recently, called Up Here, just below this blogpost.

Especially the fourth stanza, with its daintily optimistic, intangible, delicate frustration:

"Smoke-faint floating hope
Impatient hope. Immense
lustless listless wishfulness
under her angle-poise heart."

In fact, there are so many lines I want to snap up like a dragon and hoard for future enjoyment. So here are the first two stanzas, for sneaky future peeks -

"In a ditch by the roadside,
full of sorrow sleepless,
under her breath, encouraging herself,
hands clasped in hope, long fingers.

No openings, no outlets in her eyes.
Lit dimly from within,
enclosed in longing.
It's dark in love. No sign. Still waiting."


FYI, I read the poem through this fab facebook application:

http://apps.facebook.com/fiftytwopoems/

P.S. I have to say, that checking out a cheeky photo of the flower itself on Google, it's not quite as delightful as Alice Oswald's poem. But I guess that's what the imagination is for!

Up Here

So, this one's about a few things - foundationless hope, madness, paranoia - the usual bag for a whinging poet. Let me know what you think. I'll be intrigued to find out.

I

I'm suspended in a mad crush
A rushing influx of bad dreams
and nightmares, up here.
They have seized what was sane
And plain incinerated much of glad reams
of daydreams, up here.

II

Transfixed, in my fixations with a virtual world
That fix my fertile mind with sprouting roots
Springing future-wards without water, steam
without a flame, fanning upwards until I dangle
and am finally dropped to the Earth with a rush
of flushed fears and flustered paranoia. Help me.
But there is no help for the wicked, no one mourns
their quickening belly-mind teaming with Kind,
Sickening for their helpless existence in a hapless
fraudulent destiny that can only work up here.

Up here, I'm a fucking psycho, I feel the strains
shriek through and need to scratch at my brain's
itch, that's like no itch I've felt before, a monster
birthing itself with my cells for military muster
As skull-wide, an unprompted tide flows out
into a sea of eternal bliss and without doubt
this madness hinges on unfounded forces,
relations not destined for the pain of divorce's
weight. Sky-high, my hopes rise and rise
in hot-air balloons with the limitless lies
of an unruly pilot, steering my imagination
up, up, up and away; "Hello, institution."

III

Up here,
I am on my own,
I am mother,
I am daughter,
I am wife.
I am lover.
I am writer,
philosopher,
I am neither.

And I can't stand it
any longer.

Arrow

An arrow would best describe you.

The simplest communication
a human can utilise -
effortless, efficient

one line bent in half
by another

I'm not sure which one
I am

I like to think I'm
forceful, strong

But I'm broken in two
by you

And you don't even
know it.

So I'll get straight to the
point

Please find me soon, or
I will be lost.

Greedy - A Photo-em