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Burden
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Oh give me a friend
To help carry this load
And I’ll show you
What it means to be
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Burden
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Category Archives: Poems
What writing and fishing have in common
A foreigner in a foreign world Unable to return for the last farewell I drink white wine next to Americans And contemplate who the man was Suddenly An idea Comes to me Bookworms and fishermen are actually quite similar We spend hours in silence Looking in front of us Waiting for something To catch He probably thought me one of those Gallivanting Europeans Whose loose morals and liberal ways Are the ruin of our Empire I remember him once Telling me about Poles in Lincoln And all I could think of Was Walkers’ Crisps He and I never chatted much We at family parties Always shook hands Always maintained polite protocol Always took the measure of the man But there was none of that Knee-slapping Thigh-smacking Back-cracking Kind of conversation I am used to Oh ‘allo he would say In that Lincolnshire accent A working man’s drawl An accent I regret not hearing more of But one that sounded almost exotic In our family of Northerners “Oh ‘allo” was about as far as we would get And I would leave him where he was In a chair with the kids A beer in hand And a smile that showed How happy he was Nobody can be that kind My cousin said All those years ago When she brought him home He glided into the family Sometimes clumsy always kind Strong not stubborn Thoughtful not shy And now my aunt has Lost her DIY king and will Live in the realm He put together with bits from B&Q An outside toilet A set of shelves Crisp packets behind the radiator Hooks that have lost their meaning A row of twenty or more fishing rods A rustic sword of Damocles A box of maggots in the fridge And a full bag of soil That was meant for the tomato plants I’m sorry He didn’t get To plant His tomatoes. I really am. And now he finds himself In a poem that paraphrases Horace Live each day as fully as you can Put nothing off Plant your tomatoes catch your fish Even as you read this Your time has shrunk a little Anglers and writers Heart-broken wanting to help Know deep down The biggest fish Will always get away
A curious phrase
I love my past Like a brother And set a date To meet talk And while Our time away Here and now Engagement with Each absence Missed without Or on purpose Then and there To fill in the gaps What a brother Might have said What that memory Might have been Or is it I pause The reverse A backwards logic The curious phrase I love my brother Like the past United miserable Forgotten separation Presently future
Giants of an Electronic Age
We are surrealists, carrying the sacred box of literature to those who will never read it. What are we doing with those words, no… those sentiments that we dig up from those who went before us. You are the torn up letters of books I have read before and scream out loud to hear the ghost that you were.
You stole my time and so I’ll steal from you. I’m sorry.
I have looked in all those reference books and dictionaries that once took our ears by surprise and made us cry by the full moon. I kick my heels while you finish your lines and our friend sleeps on the bed lost.
But I will not be the first to point at him, and nor can you be – we have been there before.
And I am so happy to be here, writing with genius, listening to giants of an electronic age.
The Kingdom of No More
I have taken a voyage into the past,
And felt the golden kingdom of No More
Fill my body with cheap delight.
I walk by the Seine and remember reading Flaubert
Sitting in cafés, pretending to be an Existentialist.
My youth, the warm days of memory,
I have jumped dangerously into this pool, not realising,
Or not wanting to realise,
The dangerous game I am playing.
Is it cheap, now, cliché, to call them
Madeleine moments,
To smell Paris as it was before,
When summer musk rose from the trees?
Apart from those blue-capped mountains,
What am I looking for?
I tunnel, further and deeper,
Into my mind and try to
Pluck some lost root from a tree
I forgot to plant.
Shut the gate, young man, if you have any sense:
A deal with the past is worse
Than a pact with Satan.
Have you learnt nothing from books?
Have you learnt nothing from Nature?
But the past, the past – it calls
My name and sings a pretty song
To bid me stay a while longer.
Suddenly, I am aware, awake, alone
Inside my room,
Where I see nothing but the frenzied movement
of a fly that was born in earth,
Once more, a flower I did not plant,
But only inherited.
The wave returns, I try to cling to the shore of now, but feel the pull,
I feel the sand rushing behind me,
I hear the rush of a million shells sweep past me,
Giving into that powerful will –
The joy of the past,
The heady world that each creates,
The sickly simplicity of a time that is no more.
When you die, you cannot tell your story and so others will.
You, you as you, will be forgotten.
On the shore, further up, on the cliff,
I hear someone shout “Hector”.
Is this Achilles?
Or is this Homer?
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