Closed Doors

 

They’re everywhere. From suburbs into town,

outnumbering the open ones by day

and, home by home, replacing them by night,

and leaving, flatly, plainly on display

the true and sheer extent of privacy,

which flanks us, wall to wall – a great unknown.

 

And in between, on narrow thoroughfares

is crammed the public space, itself scaled down

by cars, clothes, headphones, and, should there be talk,

the need for what we hear to go unshown.

Give me a hand to knock, or hold a flashlight.

A fire is on there, somewhere through the dark.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

An Addition to the DSM

There are many things that poetry is not. Big business. A way to earn a fortune. Trending. Something millions of people look forward to all day. What scores of foolish young hopefuls move to the city to make it in. What keeps Waterstones going. The cause of a sudden publishing phenomenon that fills warehouses and crashes websites. The force raising lines of tents from the ground outside ticket offices. Something to which personal assistants, or casual staff hired to deal with fan mail, owe their jobs. An art form generally loved, respected and, indeed, gone to by the public. (Oh, and what I should be doing with my life).
Nope, poetry is obscure. Poetry is minority interest. Poetry is... what ought to go and stand over there, in the place that, if we really admitted it, we all consider a bit weird and pretentious. And unnecessary: that's it, it just doesn't have anything to add to our lives after the novels and the music and the films have been in and bestowed their lavish gifts. Thanks for the stanzas Poetry: just hang on to them for the time being if you would, over there in the weird and pretentious corner. Yes, all the other art forms have office space within popular culture as well as without, but not you, I'm afraid. And by the way have you considered using a rhyme once  in a while?
Still, precisely because of that, Poetry should have the saving grace of being sparsely dusted with actual practitioners, of being easy to break into compared to the other more popular art forms. Shouldn't it? Surely the most underrepresented and non-lucrative field of artistic expression there is couldn't be twice cursed by also being one of the most oversubscribed, competitive and generally teeth-gnashingly difficult to actually make it in? Could it? And if that were the case, why in God's name would you ever want to try? What sort of masochist are you to endure poverty and prohibitive odds both at the same time?
A poet, that's what. And here I am: a poet. It surely qualifies as a genuine psychiatric affliction under the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. There are other forms of writing - ones that in all probability I'm better at - that I would practice instead, were my madness not of this incurable kind. Let's hope they can begin to cure some other people of it, then I might just have a chance. 

Some Rejections

I recently submitted some poems to Magma for their clothes-themed 56th issue. I must admit, I was rather miffed to get the inevitable rejection, at least until the dim apprehension that my ability to send off the very, very poorest of my work for consideration had struck again, and it would probably have been worse for such embarrassing stuff appear in print under my name.
Naturally, then, there is only one thing to do: post the poems here instead. Two of them, anyway. The third one is another sartorial confection I created specifically in the hope of getting into this issue - a not-so magic bullet, I suppose. Judge for yourself whether I should have included that one....

Iron

This is the steamboat that sails the lake flat;

this is Time’s arrow, forced to point back

to the shop and the promise. This the

implement we take to new skins, this is our everyday cosmetic surgery -  where do the creases go this pallet knife scrapes over the edge?

  

The Between-Coat The zip is stuck. It’s stopped doing up and the teeth behind it have peeled apart leaving my coat as its spreading wake. It hangs on me dead with mouth open. What if there’s no way to get out of this in private or public? I’ll pin on the looks. Inhabit the halves that no longer fit. It will be the spectacular frill I raise to terrify, my flying-fox cape as I swoop tree to tree, clerical robes of a surely absurd religion, and garbed in the moment of transition I will observe people in seams, unknitting.

Letter to the Editor, Scarf Enclosed

Sir, a certain haruspicy is possible

with all the ties, scarves and socks

we have received as gifts but never worn.

I have pulled mine from the drawers  like viscera

and, observing this heapof misbegotten largesse on the floor

seen rivers, seen motorways – maybe characters –

seen definitely, all of the train and criss-crossing

car routes that bring them to me

on Christmases, Birthdays, and other miscellaneous gatherings,

seen the bonds of a lifetime of inlawship and polite acquaintance.

             Sir, one cannot help but prognosticate

with all of this evidence before one

what a mess polite acquaintance will make.

Flash fiction

Sometimes - not often enough - I have the insight to realise when a piece of my writing is throwaway. Here's one such example, a piece of so-called flash fiction, which format I'm indulging in because you can win big prizes with in national competitions, and three and six figure sums for less than 350 words seems like rather a good investment and not much effort wasted in the event of failure. Someone else will be winning these fabulous riches, of course. In this piece, I just don't care about the characters or the human situation (nothing new there), and that has to matter, even in 350 words. Squashing all the action in at the end when I start to run out of words is not really my shrewdest literary decision either.
Nonetheless, maybe it has a certain something in the idea...

                                       High Noon

Exactly the sort of thing billionaires should be seen in: private aircraft, skywriting Saturn-style rings around the equator as they soar at the precise speed the earth turns, so that wherever we are, it’s always mid-day. Yes, in this state-of-the art uber-contraption we’re magnetised to the high noon sun; we will never lag behind the planet and get caught up by its dark side. Not since I was held up in Indonesian airspace last year have I seen the night sky. All the right people have been paid off now, and I don’t expect to be bothered by the agents of darkness – sorry, that’s you – for as long as this baby holds together.

From the glass belvedere at the top of the craft, I watch a refuelling jet sidle up. Whatever was night like? I imagine it as an oil-slick. I imagine you waking up in the morning with gloopy black night all over your pyjamas. It sullies you, spoils your natural oils like ambition and ego. As for morning, it is either an intruder or a false prophet: I suffer no such tawdry characters up here. Likewise, the afternoon’s not to be trusted, stager of siestas, Sisyphean slope the sun rolls down. And evening is the brothel we all fall into. Up here there is only noon, the fulcrum, the balance. Dynamic equilibrium, as they say: the serenity of rushing around at beyond the speed of God-knows-what.

The plane is almost level. There’s that squeaking again.

I go get more champagne. Once, I caught a pilot in a bubble. But in the chill cabinet something else is reflected: a second plane, which can’t be right. Are we over Indonesia again?

Then I get the tweet. Ernest. Arbuthnot. Care for some company? He can’t have. Pop over, it’s twice as roomy here! He has. The sky darkens; the belvedere filling with shadow. His craft arrives.

Right. I have my own dark, thanks very much. And he’ll never have thought of it, the plodder. I press the button and, smooth as oil, down come the blinds.