Old Master
The pale day means nothing.
Stay close by ancient flame:
all around is darkness.
Listen – page and fire crackle,
return but hollow from the black:
the sound of my whisper.
Your hair blazes redder than book-leather
in my orange breath; your white skin
gleams against my cave, my body.
Your wrought cincture binds
like a book-clasp; age, nature,
legend close you from me more.
Yet you do not fear me:
wisdom sparks beneath my wing;
we open books together.
Night comes sooner than you know,
night bearing torches:
can you not smell it?
Learn, daughter of man, learn
before black fires
extinguish my world.
Your fiery head must light their learning:
you they will not fear.
Tuesday, 14th February 2004, 02:00
The doorbell woke me up. I checked
my watch and groggily found it
was 2am. I stumbled out
of the living room and tried to
open the latch on the flat door:
who could it be? Someone must have
forgotten their keys; it’s a good
thing it’s too cold to sleep in my
bedroom in winter or I might
not have heard. My fingers managed
the lock and my feet fumbled down
the stairs to the front door and I
let in the cold and a man. I
didn’t know who he was but thought
maybe he’d just moved in. ‘Where’s the
back door?’ he said. ‘There isn’t one,’
I replied. At least I’m not sure
there is; if so then it’s in one
of the ground floor flats and I can’t
get to it. And he explained that
he had to pass through this building
to get where he was going (which
is silly because there’s no way
out of the back garden). By this
point I was wondering if he
was having me on or was drunk
or was high on something (but I
couldn’t tell because my youth, though
misspent, was misspent in other
ways) or was seeking an excuse
to come in from the cold (but then
why not something better?) or was
truly mad, which seemed more likely
as he went on to explain that
he was trying to get from one
part of Oxford to another
by passing through my building. I
was about to point out that he
was in Exeter when he said
that he knew this was Exeter
but still his route lay through the house
and I despaired of reasoning
with him. And so I turned instead
to trying to persuade him to
leave but he would have none of it
and parked himself by the table
in the hall. We must have been there
more than ten minutes. But I had
to work in the morning and so
needed my sleep, and I couldn’t
really leave him alone in the
hall with other flats in the house
and so (though fearful, and not a
little guilty about chucking
him out in the cold) I threw the
door wide and took him by the arms
and (luckily unresisted)
thrust him onto the front step and
went upstairs to sleep and paid
no attention when the doorbell
rang downstairs. But only the next
day did it occur to me that
if it was not my dream then it
might be that the dream had been his.
Programme
When I am yellow and you are grey
perhaps you’ll find me one cold day,
shut in a shoebox.
You’ll take it down, blow off the dust,
find me lying here. You’ll unfold
my twice-bent spine,
and read names, tuneless titles.
‘I sang with him,’ you’ll say,
‘but I cannot hear his voice.’
Come find me now!
while you can still sing, alone, your duet.
Come find me now!
while the song is still printed on your heart
as clearly as on my face.
When I am yellow and you are grey
perhaps you’ll find me one cold day,
forgotten, your memento.
Memories
The faux pas, the failures,
the dances, missed chances,
humiliations, hesitations,
timidities, stupidities,
and a spring,
packed tight, out of sight,
in a strong box, a long box,
steel-hasped, tightly clasped,
broken-locked, fully stocked,
with a spring,
out of mind, behind a blind,
collecting dust, amassing rust.
Yet it can’t take the slightest shake:
‘No!’ I cry as regrets fly
out on a spring.
Roleplayers
We gather in covens,
in hellish college basements,
before computers’ eerie glare,
in green slimy dungeon flats,
students and cyborgs,
unemployed wizards,
caped accountants.
Worlds and character sheets unfold.
We arm ourselves with rulebooks,
dice of many sides, crisps, pizza, beer,
a ten-foot pole, a fifty-foot rope
and our wits. We explore
realms seldom glimpsed beyond our cells:
a world tidelocked to an orange sun,
an outlaw’s struggle to restore his name,
a mermaid’s trials in getting clothes that fit.
Princess, planet, rogue and robot,
dragon, sanity and plot we save
or slay, till the last bus;
then cloaked in anoraks
we brave that strangest world
where we aren’t.
Reflection
I am rectangular, flat,
pressed against the back of a recess,
cold, sterile glass.
My life is small. I stare
at a white box
with a broken red hairbrush
filled with greasy strands,
a Remington razor, Kleenex. Beyond
is a beige box
with a desk, a right-angled
bookcase, a bed’s corner,
and a window. Beyond
is a grey box
with windows, from what
I can see. But I think
there are things beyond.
Sometimes I stare
at the bed’s corner and wonder
what the rest must look like.
I think it is a box.
The man comes and stares
at me. He pulls the brush
through his hair, or makes his face red
with the razor, or moves his mouth.
His eyes are wetter, redder,
the more he looks.
He tries to see beyond me,
but sees no more than I.
Songs
Through drizzle the road’s mirror
echoes the bus stop’s song;
yet it sings not of traffic
but of 99p mini fillets.
The lamp with bent silver trunk
sings its light to the ceiling
luring moths to die in its bowl,
cover its nakedness.
Boxed voices sing the themes
of democracy, of freedom:
death, outrage, sound bites
of self-righteousness.
The girl sings combing black hair; but strip
skin from flesh, tear
ligament from muscle, discard
the bone, and the voice is gone.
Poetic Method
To the solution salts have been added,
ideas, opinions, hypotheses.
It has been heated and cooled,
distilled, diluted.
For years it has been agitated,
exposed to the light.
And now, a crystal precipitates, grows,
homogeneous, translucent,
its edges sharp, cutting.
I extract it with forceps
and look through it at the strange crisp world
refracted, rectified.
And I cross the laboratory
and drop the perfect crystal of cliché
into the poetic solvent
and observe its clarity dissolve.
And I turn out the lights
and leave it for someone else to discover.
This poem contains an empty stanza (I’m somehow sure it was always that way, not just an extra blank line.) This gave me some headaches with HTML because apparently the standard way of showing a stanza is to treat it as a paragraph with BR elements for line breaks, but unfortunately empty paragraphs are frowned on, and by default would in any case be displayed wrong. In the end I marked up every line and stanza of my poems with DIV tags, which are described as a last resort but seem to be a last resort one often has to resort to. (I think in any case this shows the structure of poems much better than the standard, and would make it easier to add, say, line numbers.)
Actually, the situation is worse than that: it turns out that there is no standard way to mark paragraphs in HTML! The P marker explicity does no represent logical/textual paragraph but rather an HTML-jargon paragraph, so a P element cannot contain, for instance, a list. If you need to write such a thing they recommend that you write the real paragraph as a DIV instead. Of course, then if you want consistency you need to change all your other paragraphs to DIVs (which I confess I haven’t bothered to do). And DIV is supposed to be a last resort! Given there are many things more obscure than paragraphs that do have their own markup in HTML, I find this inexplicable - more so that this isn’t being fixed in HTML5. (‘HTML .next’ apparently plan to let you define your own tags, but are we really going to have to define paragraph tags in every document?)
I’m reasonably satisfied with the layout of this poem, but the markup still bothers me. Style sheets allow the separation of presentation from content, but here the presentation is definitely part of the poem itself. Perhaps all the CSS code should be inline to represent this. The long quasi-caesura also bothers me. I think it is a caesura (though it could be a displaced line, I suppose); in which case maybe I should use two half-line SPANs for logical marking. As it is, my markup is simply presentational.