Omnibus edition of the poems I’ve been writing this month!
Strident
Strident bright white,
You seemed to frown across the sky
With shadows cast flank, down,
The glasses jingling together in my
Uncle’s drinks cabinet.
On frosty mornings,
My teeth would ache
And you’d howl and scratch at the too-bright,
And the sun would hurt my eyes.
You’d sometimes leave black trails
And I thought there would never be any progress
Beyond the immediate.
Did I ever tell you what it was like
To live in an abatement zone?
Things suddenly become very quiet.
And that can be off-putting, when
The forthright and the obvious
Become even more so.
Keys
Propelled, some say,
By anger as much as fuel.
Adherence to principles,
As much as weather patterns.
A blazing row followed
By the rhino kick.
Ear split whine,
Juddering graffiti.
Easily the pantomime villain,
Easily angered, so they say.
The bypass you found was
Not the one you needed.
Deep Stall
And then there’s the tendency
To deep stall.
At the aviation museum
In a hollowed-out fuselage,
An old man showed me a parachute.
We lost a prototype, he says.
It’s all to do with turbulence
And the design of the T-tail.
The angle of attack.
The aspect of its nose.
And the parachute?, I asked.
We never needed to deploy it
On the second prototype.
We didn’t push her
Like we did with the first.
And then I understood that the parachute
Was not for the pilot,
But for the whole craft itself!
It would have given them a fighting chance
To improve the attitude of the vehicle, he said,
And I was left with preposterous images
And the thought that the parachute
Must have been very big indeed.
The old plane smelled of oil and damp
The old man smelled of lunch time wines.
He was an enthusiast.
There’s corrosion everywhere, I thought,
And technology becomes obsolete.
You wont be lonely
Dark places are everywhere.
They crawl right in on every soul.
You can stumble all your life
But you wont be lonely.
You held up your hand in front of your face.
You tried to stop the moment before it happened.
It’s hard to think that light exists.
You held up your hand in front of your face.
Dark places in between the light.
The black ever so invisible around the sun.
On the hottest day you can still be haunted
But you wont be lonely.
What’s torn from life is physical
And love is its own memorial.
What you fear most are just elongated shadows
Of the people who stop you from stumbling.
When you are in the darkest place
You are much better off
Being able to look out and see the light
If only you turn around.
Void
Those who waited
For their businessmen
Their lovers
Their Belgians
Are probably still waiting now.
A void opened up
In a suburban town.
A void opened up.
It cannot be comprehended.
See you later. Don’t forget
Your umbrella. You’ll need it.
It’s raining.
Mundane artifice
And nonchalant procedures.
An act of secular communal prayer,
Faith in science.
It cannot be comprehended,
And those who waited then
Are still waiting now.
The world
It helps to talk.
I will always listen.
The world is too big and too good
For the bad things to linger for long.
Tell me what is on your mind.
Tell me what pains your soul.
Tell me with honesty, spill it all out,
Learn to let go.
Things go well and things go bad.
And people are happy or sad.
Tell me what is on your mind.
I’ve seen more of life than you think.
What insulates a generation
Empowers the next.
I’ve seen some crazy things in my life
But I never let go of the truth.
I like it when you share with me.
I hate it when you keep it all in.
The world is too big and too good
To ever let go of the truth.
Split second
The clammy no-nonsense
Of the Sunday fall.
The moment it’s realised
That existence is merely a postponement
Of the fantastic.
How could it happen to me?
(And disbelief, of course.)
Surfaces are covered by panelling
In order to disguise the workings.
Robert Garnham 