Tag Archives: conceptual

A poem for Andrew Graham-Dixon

Andrew Graham-Dixon
Enthuses
And finds poetry in the raw
Of that which would
Otherwise bore me arseless.

He finds radical politicising
In a small painting
Of a warthog.
It’s all in the tusks,
He says.
He looks a bit like
Bryan Ferry.

The aurora borealis
Also
Bore me arseless.
Andrew Graham-Dixon
Talks about bleakness
With a Norwegian.

Andrew Graham Dixon
Enunciates.
Andrew Graham Dixon
Luxuriates in the last syllable
Of Van Gogh
Andrew Graham Dixon
Is the thinking mans
Maggie Philbin
Andrew Graham Dixon
Finds Pot Noodles
‘Hauntingly eloquent’
Andrew Graham Dixon
Uses exuberant hand gestures
At dull canvases
With a sad horse on it
Andrew Graham Dixon
Doesn’t move his eyebrows much
Andrew Graham Dixon
Would probably do the ordering
For me
In an Italian restaurant.

I turned up at work
With a side parting
And a shirt open
At the collar.
You’ve been watching him again,
My boss said,
Haven’t you?

I murmur something
About the stoicism
Of the early Romantics
And get on with
Things.

The elastic has gone in my boxer shorts

Something’s not right
It’s an odd complaint
There’s a certain looseness
Where there used to be restraint.
I get no joy
From my morning coffee cup.
The elastic has gone in my boxer shorts
And they won’t stay up.

The world has got such problems
With wars and such.
But there’s a certain sagginess
In my crotch.
I thought it would be fine
I guess I’m out of luck
The elastic has gone in my boxer shorts
And they won’t stay up.

Things just fall apart,
That’s entropy,
But now my only enemy
Is gravity
I rang the customer service desk,
They couldn’t give a toss,
The elastic has gone in my boxer shorts
And they won’t stay up.

Nothing lasts forever,
It makes my life hell
They used to be a large
Now they’re XXXXL
I hung them on the washing line
A squirell used them as a hammock
The elastic has gone in my boxer shorts
And they won’t stay up.

They twist and flop and tangle
Whenever they get the chance.
The man this morning is Tesco said,
Hey that’s a crazy dance
As I swivelled and gyrated
All around the town
The elastic has gone in my boxer shorts
And – oh no! – they’re down.

Robert Garnham Delivers a Ted (Style) Talk

Welcome to my Ted Talk
(My clicker isn’t working)
Welcome to my Ted Talk
(My clicker isn’t working)

How are we going to solve
Various big big things?
Three golden rules!
(Shame about my clicker)

Coming in to the coffee shop
I’m the bastard looking for
A power socket
Charging up my laptop
Charging up my laptop
Charging power to power my
Power point presentation
I have the power!

If I do this
(:::::::::::::;;;:;;)
You’ve just witnessed me doing it
And that’s an example of
POSITIVE THINKING!
Three golden rules!

1. Achieve the continuous
2. Apply it like a haberdasher
3. Can be split into twenty four subheadings

(This clicker is not working!)

If I put my hand in my pocket
And wander around
It makes me look more relaxed!!!

You’ve got to understand
That people
Always make
The wrong decisions.

Welcome to my Ted Talk!
Smug!
Life hacks!
(Fourteen different subheadings)

You can usually work out EXACTLY where
The bus will stop
And this will save you
TIME and ENERGY

There are eight different things I learned
SMUG BASTARD
When I lost my luggage while backpacking
(This clicker is just not working)

If I do this
(;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;)
It’s an example of sonic dissonance.

Madam, when did you last knowingly
Have spaghetti?

MY BOAT SANK!
And I didn’t even get slightly wet
My life is charged with a new purpose
I learned twelve new things!
Twelve new LIFE HACKS
LIFE HACKS
LIFE HACKS
LIFE SUCKS!

(This clicker is getting on my tits)

1. Technology
2. Murdering people is generally frowned on.
3. The power of positive thinking!
4. This clicker this clicker this clicker this clicker
5. I know six people called Ted and they all talk

Power point presentation validate it
Power point presentation validate jr
Let’s just validate if shall we?
This is an aha moment

Take on me!

You!
You fiend!
You bastard!

It’s a unifies mental model, Mrs McGough
It’s visual interaction.
It’s.
The.
Same.
As.
Every.
Damn.
Ted.
Talk.

This clicker
Definitely
Is not working.

Thank you.

Static

A show about going nowhere, a show about life, a show about growing up LGBTQ in a suburb of Surrey in the 1980s.

Performance poet Robert Garnham takes the audience on a journey from a time where everything seemed to stand still.

Juicy

https://youtu.be/KUP7KC3r-ZY

This is the show that I was supposed to have toured the U.K. with this year. Alas, it was not to be.

Life can be so juicy at times. Juicy like a sweet apple, filled with goodness. It’s the small things that make it so ripe for exploration, for prodding and poking. Robert Garnham’s new show is an hour or so of performance poetry and spoken word, comedy rhymes and whimsy by the bucket full.

With poems about life, LGBT issues, being envious of beards and the pitfalls of fancying a surfer, Juicy culminates in an extended theatrical piece about love and lust set at an airport departure lounge.

Multiple slam champion and longlisted as Spoken Word Artist of the Year in 2016 and 2017, Robert has performed everywhere from the Womad Festival to London Gay Pride. He has recently featured in a tv advert campaign for a U.K. bank.

Robert Garnham’s 17 Golden Rules for Getting the Most Out of Life!

Robert Garnham’s Words of Advice

1. No one is ever worth writing a poem for, though every now and then you’ll meet someone who’s worth a limerick, particularly if they come from Chard.

2. If someone tells you that they love you, it’s not always a test, it’s an affectation of the status quo, a joy delivered in the beauty of a relationship which actually works, so it’s best not to answer with, oh, that’s good.

3. Shrimp will always give you raging guts ache.

4. Hold on to your nostalgia, otherwise you’ll have nothing to be nostalgic about, except possibly for the time you used to be nostalgic about things, so maybe you can be nostalgic about that.

5. Look at your life. Isolate your fears, your demons, and anything else that gives you the willies. Engage with them and dance, and banish them with a smile and a wave and a cheer. Unless, of course, the thing that scares you the most is crushing loneliness.

6. It’s never too late to learn. It’s never too early to forget.

7. Only concentrate on that which requires no thought.

8. You might not ever mention the elephant in the room, but you can certainly wonder how it got through the door, and up the stairs.

9. Look at the mirror every morning and say, I am loved, I am loved, I am loved. At least this way you’re prepared for any other bullshit that comes along.

10. Everyone you see or meet or talk to has been born. Even Avril Lavigne. And if you think being born was difficult, try getting a mortgage.

11. Go on, help yourself to the last cake in life. Living is all about grabbing the last cake. Go on, have it. Enjoy it. The dog licked it.

12. Get up early one morning, when the dew is still on the grass, and go for a walk barefoot in the park. Let me know when you’re doing this so that I can come round and borrow your vacuum cleaner.

13.Do something that excites you every day. Subvert the rules. Turn things on their head. Naturally this does not apply if you’re an airline pilot.

14. How do we know that opening an umbrella indoors is bad luck? Who was the first person to discover this? How many similar things do we do which are good or bad luck without us knowing? Brandishing a vase on a Thursday? Sitting on a pouffe just after lunch? The mind boggles, Mrs Henderson, the mind boggles.

15. Give as much joy to the small things in life as you do to the large. Which is why me and my ex split up.

16. If at first you don’t succeed, then maybe catching bullets with your teeth isn’t the job for you.

17. If you don’t think you can get it out, why the hell did you put it in there in the first place?

Poetry has no relevance.

Poetry has no relevance. That’s what I hear a lot. Oi, knobhead! Your poetry has no relevence! That’s a hell of a heckle. From my publisher.

But it does. Poetry is useful. Honestly.

I was in an airport. Just minding my own business. Just browsing. Hanging around the arrivals gate with a sign reading JUSTIN BIEBER, you know, just on the off chance. When all of a sudden is call comes up. ‘Is there a poet in the building? This is an emergency! We need a poet!’

Turns out this plane was in trouble. The pilot had collapsed at the controls having had an allergic reaction to a Pot Noodle. And then the co pilot, on hearing that the plane was full of zither players on the way back from a zither convention, succumbed to an undiagnosed zither phobia and became a gibbering, incoherent wreck.

So I’m up in air traffic control and they’ve got a zither player in the cockpit and I’m relaying to him the types of controls that he should be operating.

The aerilon speed flaps are the colour of fine Devonshire cream in the early evening sun.

The throttle control knobs are kind of shaped like a veteran Shakespearean actor stooping to pick up a 20p coin

The rudder pedal is broad and flat like a clumsy child’s first attempt to draw a map of Utah.

The undercarriage lever looks like ennui.

And we did it, we landed that plane, between us, soothing it down to a very smooth landing lulled by sonnets and iambic pentameter, just a classy addition of enjambement on its glide slope, we landed it, oh yes, we did, and everyone was saved!

And at that moment I saw the potential of poetry in all its glory to affect the world as a power to be used for the greater good, elevating ordinary souls above the gods and deities, for are we not all messiahs of the modern age, we poets, we brave poets, pens aloft like spears of triumph!

Poetry. Is. Useful.
Hooray!

And then I got home to my normal life of crushing loneliness.

Things I think about when I’m working on a project.

Things I think about when I’m working on a project.

Lately I’ve been putting a show together. In the old days it was simple, it was a process known as ‘putting a show together’. Now it’s called ‘project management’. I’ve been to plenty of meetings where I tell people I’m putting a show together and they say, ‘oh, you’re project managing?’ And some even say, ‘Oh, you’re a theatre maker?’, which is something I’d not heard before and I had to go and look it up. But apparently I’m in project management now and the one rule for project management is that I shouldn’t lose sight of the bigger picture.

The second rule, apparently, is that I can’t just see the bigger picture.

You’ve got to narrow down and focus. But if you narrow down and focus then you lose sight of the bigger picture. So you’ve got to have one eye on the bigger picture while at the same time you narrow down and focus. Often though you may not even see the bigger picture, so you forget what the bigger picture looks like because you’ve been narrowing down and focussing, or perhaps the bigger picture has become another picture entirely while you were narrowing down and focussing, and now that it’s big picture which doesn’t even include the bits that you’ve been narrowing down and focusing on, and the bits that you’ve been narrowing down and focusing on are now out of the picture.

And then you get bogged down in too much detail. Is the bigger picture even a picture? Is the bigger picture portrait or landscape? Why am I faffing about with the narrowing down when the bigger picture needs attention too? And how big is the bigger picture and how much wider is it than the narrowing down? And if I narrow down how far can I narrow down before narrow becomes too narrow? And anyway, who’s checking on all this?

It’s at times like this that I just decide to give up and go and make a cake.

How we danced to the time of music!

How we danced to the time of music!

An autumn park an hour before dark
A council workman leaf blower and bare deciduous branches
Stark against a late low sunshine sky,
The world itself aching to monochrome, a
Glimpse of anorak amid the lengthening shadows.
It was you.

Caught up, tapped your shoulder, you turned and smile
And the years melt like Himalayan snows,
And we hug on the path by the tennis court nets,
Zigzagged and crisscrossed by chain link silhouettes.

You look good, I say, so do you, he lies,
It’s been so long, I can see in his eyes
That it takes a while for the years to unwind,
To bring the details of our shared life to mind,
He’s handsome still, but in a way much more rugged
Than the man I so often hugged as if he were the meaning
Of life
But I was young and stupid
And so was he.

How we danced to the time of music!

He says,
Let us not talk of the past,
Let us build up the present moment,
Rejoice in our shared existence,
Acknowledge the nights that would never end,
Celebrate the fact that we are still friends
And love this present time,
This moment right now,
And this moment too,
That’s what we should do.
Why?, I asked.
Ah jeez, he said.

The contentment we feel as we stand in this park,
Is more than our past, and it will make its mark,
So that we might celebrate the very essence of
Our being here
As two distinct people.
Let’s take this absolute second, this one,
And this one too,
And maybe not that one,
But this one definitely,
And rise with them above the years
We spent together.
Why?, I asked.
Ah jeez, he said.

Let us dance divine in the moment!
And twirl amid the autumn leaves!
And rejoice in the fact that
Two incredibly sexy and gorgeous young men
Can meet in a park so randomly
And not immediately ponder baser activities
As if a giant machine has zapped from us
All ability to lose ourselves to throbbing temptation,
And also,
I have a bus to catch.
Let us celebrate this!
Why?, I asked.
Ah jeez, he said.

Life is a journey we only pass once.
The skies above, weather patterns,
The subtle moving of continental shelves,
Evolution in its slow mutation,
The planets a dance in this ceaseless rotation,
The absolute thrill of being alive,
The miracle of time, the fact that we thrive
Against all odds in our permanent drive
Through time, oh, it is a blessing!
So let us, oh, let us come together
And celebrate this, the present moment, now!

Why?, I asked.
Was it really so bad, was I really so mad?
The moment it ended, did you feel kind of glad?
Did I not provide the love that you needed,
Comfort and companionship on which you feeded
Like a ravenous beast, a ghost for the haunting,
Was being with me really so daunting?
That you wipe me so brazen from your own history,
Wipe the slate clean, pretend it wasn’t to be?
But you were my lover, my one and my only,
And the nights ever since have been so very lonely
In a world that now ached, I managed so slowly
To lift my head nigh and feel slightly less lowly
That . . Hang on . .
Is this about the two hundred quid that you owe me?

I don’t know what you’re taking about, he replied,
And off he suddenly ran.