Saturday 25 June 2011

Welcome Mat


I hope you’re enjoying that cigarette.
That would make one of us.
I hope you’re enjoying your freedom
to smoke uninhibited, while
restricting mine to
breath.
Its hot, smoke going
down to that verging on painful spot in the bottom of your lungs.
I hope you’re healthy and you stay that way.
But more than that, much, much more than that I hope that
I am. And that I do.
See, every time you calmly, unknowingly, satisfied, exhale
directly into my smoke-hating, and until recently, decently-smelling face
rage builds.
Its cold: a snowball, growing, circling, collecting.
And if the unforgiving smoke doesn’t kill me
this grey loathing surely will.
So enjoy that cigarette, enjoy
blowing its refuse into my face and feel my fury as you go home,
relaxed after your café chat, climb your winding staircase and find a steaming, fiercely putrid pile of shit on your welcome mat!

Sunday 19 June 2011

Teach the Mountainside to Drum


I’m trying to pull what is quietly there in the back of my mind,
to the foreground.
Metaphor, piano notes, these things hold meaning.
Can I explain on ruled paper, rectangular, thin?

Can someone explain to a mountainside how to drum, each on their own djembe, congas, some leading now others some dropping back a little girl dancing clouds gathering?
Some things cannot be orchestrated.

Metaphor, images of a cloth-draped man calmly holding a flail,
Men linked together ankle-to-ankle, orange, no hair.
One look and you know.
Ideas of punishment-revenge, loss of freedom, loss of choice come and you feel it and you don’t need an explanation.

Play the game.
Wrestle the song to 5 lines 4 spaces. Remember the clef, the signatures.
It’s not enough to hear it; to play it. The proof waits on paper.
This is what we need:
We need the proof.


Friday 17 June 2011

Traffic is slow with no cars on the road

This poem is happy.
It’s happy because it is sitting in warm summer grass,
Because it saw a good friend today, and because soon its going to fly away.
When it’s written it will fly.

Clouds will rise, lifting the smog,
drivers will            slow,
then stop.
Guitar toters will put down empty cases and won’t replace them.
Mowers will relent, lawns will grow up around them.
Swings hosting kids will whine as they grind, moving only slightly
with the wind.

Everyone look up.
Words, letters, stretching like loose white cotton float gently up.
No destination, no constraints.

They stretch their toes, clap their arms.
Together they read:

                                                         i           M           
L   o      V                               t                                    e
                    e                 S       
                         TH   i