Tag Archives: poem

Edinburgh Fringe Blog Part Nine

I’m back in real life, now. The Edinburgh Fringe is just a dim memory. A strange thing that happened. Of course, I was only there for a week, my friends and colleagues were mostly there for three whole weeks. How must it feel for them? How does it feel for me?
It took a while to adjust to normal life. When I got back to Paignton I kept thinking that the festival was still going on. Whenever I saw crowds of tourists at the chip shop I’d think they were queuing for a show. Posters in the library weren’t for upcoming Free Fringe shows. And it felt weird, walking through the holiday crowds and not handing them flyers.
I came away from Edinburgh with so much. The first thing I came away from with was a headache, but that’s just the eleven hour train ride to get home. The second thing I came away with was an appreciation that not everything that you plan for ever occurs. I didn’t realise the performance space would be so noisy! It was the corner of a very busy bar, not the quiet room that my director and I had assumed during rehearsal. Static has lots of quiet moments and subtlety. It’s hard to be quiet and subtle when there’s a stag party in the room. The other acts were fantastically loud and it was the second day that I decided to concentrate on volume.
But the biggest inspiration came from seeing other shows and talking to the other performers. I’ve got so many ideas for next year now that I’m really looking forward to developing something amazing, with less props. Carrying props around Edinburgh is not fun. Why did they have to build the city on the side of a mountain?
The other idea I had is to apply to have a venue at next year’s fringe. And for the venue to be in Paignton. Imagine how fun that would be! To have the Edinburgh Fringe happen in Paignton. Obviously there would be the question of travel and logistics, but imagine the symbolism.
So I’m back here in civilian life. I miss the camaraderie and the support. The Pilgrim venue staff were excellent and so were the other performers. I made so many new friends, and I’m full of gratitude for the help and advice that they gave me along the final week.

Edinburgh Fringe Blog Part Five

Well that’s another day done and dusted. I’m really into the rhythm now. The rhythm of expectations being cruelly dashed. Yesterday’s audience was a very minimal two. I asked them beforehand if they were there to see my show and they said, no. But do carry on. Don’t mind us, we’re just here for a drink and a chat. I did a couple of poems without any microphone and then took a couple of selfies. Can’t let an opportunity like this go to waste!
I made the mistake yesterday of going to the modern art gallery instead of flyering. I mean, I’m on holiday. There was an exhibition of Joseph Beuys, one of my favourite artists. I couldn’t spend a whole week here and not see it! The only trouble with Edinburgh’s modern art gallery is that it’s such a long walk from the centre of the city. So the whole trip took about two and a half hours.
Then an offer of a gig came through, representing Team Poetry at Stand Up And Slam, which is a poetry verses comedian slam. Everybody there was so young and whoopy, and the music was so incredibly loud, and the MC shouted and wailed and I couldn’t make hear nor tail of it, but I went up and performed and the place went mad, I won my round and helped the poets win the whole contest. At the end we had to come out with slick jokes or short poems on a given theme and the theme was drinking, so I did the following haiku:
The man with no arms

Fighting in the local pub.

He was kicking off.
Which also brought the house down, and it was only afterwards, like, seven hours afterwards, that I thought about the Fringe joke competition and how it might have stood a chance in that. Had they not already done the competition at the beginning of the week.
So here I am, about to go out flyering and stuff. My legs are aching and it feels like I’ve lost two stone. It doesn’t look it, but it feels it.
Just a quick word about the show I saw last night, Dandy Darkly’s Myth Mouth. It was flipping fantastic! Storytelling and humour, camp wonderfulness and a celebration of the joy of living. Go and watch it!

Edinburgh Fringe Blog Part Three

I am deep into the Fringe, now. Yes, I know that sounds weird. But I’m into the rhythm of the Edinburgh Fringe and what it means to be here, which is to say, the usual routines of flyering, exit flyering, chatting to people, finding out when other people’s shows are, and that big contentious issue, the Bucket Speech.
What is the Bucket Speech? Well, this is the free fringe, so we don’t get paid to perform, but we don’t have to pay the venue either. Because of this, we are not allowed to charge visitors entry, but we are allowed to pass round a bucket at the end. Now I was having serious philosophical thoughts about this and I decided not to do a Bucket Speech, (the bit at the end of each show where you ask for donations), and instead make the whole thing free. Yes, really. Absolutely free.
I’m not yet sure if this is a good strategy. For me the joy is sharing the words and meeting people. There’s no way that I’d recover the costs of coming here. Now it must be said that I might change this philosophy, depending on how things go.
I have been flyering. But I haven’t really done that much. Yesterday I did lots of flyering in the Royal Mile, but then got bored, so I went to the museum and I had an excellent time.
I’ve met so many friends up here, people who I know from so many different parts of the country, like Rose Condo, who I met in Manchester, Dan from Bristol, and Sam Webber, who I know from Barnstaple. Today a friend is coming up from London. It’s like the annual meeting place of performance poetry.
The plan for today? More flyering, and I’ll be performing on the Royal Mile with some other poets. I haven’t even thought about open mic nights yet, or anything like that.
And the Fringe Flu? I haven’t caught it yet.

Cargo vessel. (A new poem).

Cargo vessel
On a millpond sea inky black

Reflecting stars in all their celestial

Magnificence,

The container vessel MSC Mercury Thora Hird,

Hulking, it’s behemoth hull

Silent as a ghost

Ploughing between continents with

Crates of tat,

Plastic merchandise, dodgy exports.
I creep past creaking metal boxes,

Alone,

For it is a sultry night,

The hot metal deck throbbing,

Equatorial,

Towering containers intersecting,

Stacked upwards all angular,

Forming skyscrapers and city blocks,

Grid iron walkways,

An imaginary city

With a population of one.
And the breeze

Which whistles through.
I find a private place,

A rectangular courtyard of my own

Near the bow, stark,

That I might lay here

Surrounded by right angles

And commune with the sighing wind.
Deep powerful engines

Throb through me

Pulsing their diesel propulsion

As I stretch out flat on the deck

Coated thick sigh non slip paint

The stars above unmoving

The universe

So soothing.
Where have you been?

– Right here.

What brought you back?

– Why not?

What is the mystery of your life?

– That I should exist at all.
Are you Marcel Proust?

– Yeeeeees.
The sea heaves like a breath exhaled.

Containers groan with obviousness.

Stars in all their beautiful magnificence,

Omniscient.
-I bit the Madeleine.

And things were never the same.

I threw it all away
I think of you every day.
– I think of you

I think of us.

I think of the

Baron de Charlus.
What are you doing here?

– It might be that I stop clocks

Like that time

At the Shanghai Docks.
Didn’t I see you

By the light of the moon?

– Off the coast

Of Cameroon.
Down in the boiler room?

– My heart went boom.

Titty boom.

Titty boom.
Nights in lonely cabins.

My formative years at navel college

The whole time

Gazing at my belly button.

Then an apprenticeship

On a battleship

Learning the ropes

On the HMS Hindrance,

Lonely bunks and

Shirtless hunks

Dockside manners and

Gangplank dreams

A life surrounded

By seamen.
-Dance with me

To the music of movement

We all carry baggage

And various cargoes

Dance with me

To the memory

I’m serious

Delirious

Dance with me

In the midnight burn

This may be the bow

Of the ship

But I’m really

Quite stern.
Marcel

-What?

Do you love me?

-Do I not?

Is this the end?

-Mother used to read me bedtime stories.

Former glories.

-Big verdant palms.

Conservatories.

– Shall we get this hot dance done?

You and me and the wind.

-Begin.

Begun.
The tinny tap of workboot on the moving metal floor speckled damp by sea spray and hardened salt in this dank deck quick step so very much like falling through someone else’s dreamscape look at me now I got the rhythm baby I got the moves not like last week when I threw my back out oh how I have put everything into this ship, every emotion and every aspect of my being, oh, the hull is the sum of my parts.
I wind my way

Back through the darkened blocks.

The tall gleaming bridge,

The accommodation decks,

Letting myself back in to its

Industrial brightness.

Fluorescent lights and safety valves,

To the recreation room.

Sailors, deck hands,

Engineers and navigators in their

Jovial down time

Look up as I enter all

Camaraderie and brotherly love.
Heyyyy Robert,

Did you hear about the

Documentary I watched set at a

Corn Flakes factory?

It’s on again next week.

It’s a cereal.

The most significant full stop (part six)

Today I have been attempting to make the most insignificant full stop disappear completely, and then bring it back. I’m doing this because I’m sure that everything that has ever existed has a memory of sorts, even if that memory resides in the minds of those who utilised it or witnessed it.
Electronically, it’s a whole different matter, as the insignificant full stop exists only on an electronic plain. Having spent time zooming in on it and magnifying it through the editing processes of my IPad, I’m now doing the opposite and zooming out to see if there is any representable essence of the full stop left.
I then zoomed back in again to see whether or not the iPad in question could then find the almost non-existent full stop.
The results are viewable below.


And then the magnification  process began anew.

I think this demonstrates that the reality will always been superseded by the memory of an event, as the full stop exists now more as a memory than a visual certainty. What does this say about the world?

There are philosophical and even religious proofs definable through the certainty through memory process. The full stop existed at one point, and now it no longer does. Yet there was a definite physical act in pressing the symbol on my keyboard which resulted in a full stop on the screen. The creation of the full stop by me, that one fleeting moment, was the ultimate performance act.

The most significant full stop (part five)

A few years ago I flew from Vancouver back to London having just caught a train from one side of Canada to the other. It was an amazing time with a lot of travelling and a lot of connections. With about ten minutes to go before the boarding was announced, I went to the toilet in the Vancouver terminal and, while I was enjoying a wee, I noticed a very small dot on the otherwise spotless cubicle wall. I remembered thinking, ‘That wall is not spotless’. But then I came over all profound and thought, ‘I will never see that tiny dot again. In a few hours I will be thousands of miles from that small dot. That insignificant dot’.
And do you know what happened? The plane developed a fault in one of its own toilets and we all had to get off and wait four hours for a new plane. I went for another wee a couple of hours later, and saw that tiny insignificant dot once again. Which meant that it wasn’t quite so insignificant any more. In fact, of all the dots in the world, it was now probably one of the most significant, because what were the chances of me ever seeing it again?
Here I am writing this at Manchester airport waiting for a flight to Exeter. It’s a 25 minute flight and it’s just been delayed by three hours.
I don’t want to repeat the significant dot experiment again because I don’t want to take precedence away from the dot that I saw in Vancouver, yet my mind is not so developed as I’d like it to be, and I’m seeing significant dots everywhere. Just look at this floor. It’s full of them.
This brings me back to the significant full stop experiment and how elements of the Vancouver Dot have been playing at the back of my mind these intervening years. Im wondering, of course, what has happened to the dot and whether the toilet in the terminal has been redecorated. It’s quite possible.



There. That one. There. 

Yesterday.

A man walked into a bar. It was actually a night club. We don’t know why but he killed a lot of people. The people who were there, were there to have a good time. Maybe he didn’t like people having a good time, but what’s known for sure is that he had a gun. It was a powerful gun and he was able to purchase it quite legally. The people who were having a good time were also doing so quite legally.
The man who did it had reasons which a lot of people would find different and quite at odds with their own way of living. The people who died most probably had a lifestyle which these same people would find at odds with their own way of living. But this isn’t about religion or sexuality, even though these are the labels which will be used for the next few days and weeks. It’s about a man who was angry or quite possibly deluded, and some people who were having a good time.
There will be those who disagree with the way other people live their lives, their own philosophies and methods of being. But life carries on and on the whole, people embrace the difference which makes being human so wonderfully diverse and interesting. We can learn from other cultures, belief systems, view points, and while we might not agree, we never enforce this with violence.
Having said that.
Fifty people died. And it was an attack on a very specific community of which I am a part. It happened in a place of symbolism, such as a church or a place of worship. It happened because of one persons ignorance. It happened possibly because of superstition. There’s no other way to look at it other than as a wilful expression of hatred. And naturally there will be underlying questions about weapons and religion (if indeed it was a religious act at all), and the response to it by those who commentate on such matters will be proportional to their own preconceived notions. But fifty people died, and right now, there is pain and suffering and disbelief.
There is no easy moral to this episode other than a man with a gun and a grudge, and how easily it happened.
 The doors.
For those who are the exquisite hidden in cupboards.

For those who fortune denies because they refuse to shout.

For those who would otherwise shine so bright were it not so dark and needlessly so.

For those who more conscious than the jaded so called moral imperative.

For those who multicolor the beige.

For those who feel that burning pounding quick-tempo heartbeat tick tick ticking absolute proof down deep within.

For those who don’t want to upset anyone.

For those who are being true to themselves.

For those who love.

For those who would dearly like to love but never will so long as they’re fumbling in the pitch dark.

For those who would spread compassion if given the chance.

For those who stand tall and proud in the face of ignorance.

For those who challenge the invented with the blinding torch of truth.

For those who caress and whisper sweet nothings and then open their eyes to find an empty bed.

For those who don’t want to shock and close the door voluntarily.

For those who care too much.

For those who feel they have no brothers or sisters.

For those who feel they are the only person ever ever ever ever to feel this way.

For those who make a thousand tiny differences a year.

For those whose revolution will knowingly take longer than their own lifetimes.

For those who would otherwise be flogged or hanged or stoned or cast from the safety of decent thought by those who profess to know the truth of words written fluently yet deliberately twisted ambiguous in order to hide the cultural anger seething beneath.

For those who delete their browsing history.

For those who try to prize open a door knowing that it will be slammed shut but keep on trying nonetheless.

For those who paid the ultimate price.

For those who resort to secret languages and those who give in and try to decipher filled with the eager promise of just knowing.

For those who are afraid.

For those who never will.

For those who see the world quivering ecstatic and reach out with trembling fingertips ever so eager to be a part yet knowing deep down they never will because they are really not as brave or as fortunate as those who color the world with love. 

For those who hide behind masks of dubious preferences just to make it look like they are one of the crowd.

For those who are furious.

For those who are curious.

For those who log on with an alias.

For those who dance ecstatic the most writhing sexual beautiful hypnotic dance but only to themselves alone alone alone in the mirror.

For those who feel that everything is hopeless faced with ninety six percent against, newspaper editorials, fuming spitting evangelists, political bullies, idiots with guns and clubs and religious texts, charismatic spirituality, cultural commentators and peddlers of hated.

For those who burst out so fast that the world never could catch them.

For those who burned up too soon.

For those who took a chance and flowered briefly then disappeared leaving behind them the hint that if done differently it might actually work.

For those who are vehement in their love.

For those who are just plain unlucky.

For those who are scared.

For those who are scarred.

For those who would otherwise be sacred.
You are the real

And your time will come

When superstition loses and common sense takes over.

Pile up your love right now

So that when the doors finally open

It will all come tumbling through.
Performance Poet, Writer, Spoken Word Artist. 

The most significant full stop (Part Three)

It was murky today, delightfully so. The day dawned with a thick set fog which loomed down with a strange intent. And this was weird because I’ve been looking at the full stop again, the fact that it exists, zooming in and trying to focus on the exact place where the full stop ends and the world around it, the non-full stop, starts.
Which makes me wonder if there really is any boundary in life at all. Because the more I zoomed in, the foggier it got, until it began to resemble the weather itself. Indistinct, a place with no form, no substance, no being.
When I was a kid I was obsessed with insignificant moments. I remember once my sister walking down the stairs. She got as far as the landing and banged her hand on a book shelf, she said, ‘ow’. But she continued walking down the stairs and by the time she got to the bottom, she had forgotten that she had banged her hand. The banging of her hand had been such a monumental event at the time that it warranted an ‘ow’, but seconds later she had forgotten that it had ever happened.
How much else in life do we forget? I asked her if she remembered banging her hand and she said no, she wondered what I was talking about. Life is full of insignificant moments which we forget, just like those tiny dots 

The boundary between one facet and the next is often so hard to define that it cannot be successfully declared where one thing ends and another begins, even with a full stop. Rather than worry about this, perhaps it is just better to wallow in the present moment, and not care too much about such boundaries.

The most significant full stop.

The aim is to make this the most famous full stop in the history of mankind.

It was originally typed at 0845 on a Wednesday morning, at a Costa coffee shop in Paignton, Devon, UK.
There will never be a full stop as momentous as this one.
Why, you ask. Why should it get all of the acclaim? To which we reply, why not?

The font is irrelevant.

This full stop could have gone anywhere but it gave up on all that potential because it sees the bigger picture.

Feel free to share this full stop. It needs you help.

What is Static?

I’ve been developing Static for almost a year now. During that time it has metamorphosed into something completely different from its origins, and the discovery process has been both fun and rewarding from an artistic point of view. Along the way, I have had to learn a lot of new things and come to terms with concepts which is not known anything about, such as ‘scratch nights’, ‘blocking’, ‘mind maps’. It’s all been a little bit scary.
‘Static’ the show sprang from a short performance art piece which I’ve performed here and there, also called ‘Static’. Indeed, the show ends with this piece, which people have often described as thought provoking, sad and subdued, which isn’t my normal style at all! During the piece I would examine issues of movement and geography, expectations and identity, all during a five minute ‘poem without words’.

When it came to thinking of ideas for a one hour show, I thought back to this piece and I decided that I could expand it, make it autobiographical, and yet encompass much else, focussing more explicitly on issues of identity. This forced me to look at my own life and upbringing, my own desires and motivations, my own life. Born and raised in Surrey, there was always this sense of movement, which is something I touch on in the show.
The writing process has been fun. I started out with a loose narrative and some old poems which I’d performed all over the UK, but I soon realised that I should write new material for it. And because the show is autobiographical, the poems are more introspective than normal, with one or two of the usual comedy ones thrown in for relief. Four of them are brand new and will be heard when the show is performed for the first time. Two of them have wriggled free of the show, and I have performed them for the last couple of months: ‘Jamie’, and ‘The Doors’.
The show also incorporates some prop work which I have been developing, including a theremin, and a large hadron collider.
So I’m looking forward now to the challenge of learning the show, working on it and perfecting it. I’ve been working with Ziggy Abd El Malak, a fantastic director who has completely changed the way that I perform and approach both performance and rehearsal.
The show will be performed at the Artizan Gallery in Torquay for the first time on 29th May, then at the Guildford Fringe, before a run at the Edinbrugh Fringe in August.