Something unremarkable this way comes

Recently I've found that there may be some creative glimmers of life slightly closer to the surface than previously thought.

I'm not going to make the same excuses that I always do, if you know me then you'll know what they are, if you don't know then you'll likely find them somewhat dull.

But suffice to say I am writing semi-regularly again, as opposed to extremely intermittently. I'm returning to old themes, but maybe it's because I now recognise that they are my themes, the ones I'll come back to and worry at. Sense of place, being adrift in one's own history, the oddity that lurks beneath the surface and our refusal to acknowledge it (I was thinking of this when I watched everyone studiously ignoring that vast swathes of many countries are on fire, but the papers and politicians still howl of the dangers of net zero).

Anyway, I'm putting this here to keep myself honest, and also as a way of thinking through what I have in mind. I'll try to post more regularly, though we've all heard that one before, haven't we?

Happy as a pig in Bicester

Is the sea wet, Papa?

Non Armand, but you are

           Searle: Whizz for Atomms

A dismal Breton mizzle

A stone quay

Limited horizons

We've been here before

Whipped salt

Air with braced struts

you know the drill

Oh God. Two figures.

It's taking old shapes

I am struggling, said Conklin

Ah, she said, that's nothing new

I am trying to comprehend, said Conklin

Ah, she said, you've notions

Would you give me a minute

I'm trying to contemplate the infinite

You've yet to master the finite

Walk before you run

Better yet, do neither

Think back, simpler landscapes

You've simply not the toolkit for this yet

It's simple enough

It's not, it's damp underfoot and you've

Not the balance at your age

Let's start easier

Let's start with orchards and summer

Let's build up to miserable

Lets try happy, first

The Astonishing Bus Ride of Alan Fairfax

Alright? How's it going lad?

Not seen you in an age, let alone on a 2A

Heading north to Preston

Tamping the flatlands flatter still

They've put the prices up

That's one in the eye for all of us

Stoic, zealot, convert, True Believer

And non-believer alike, company men

Thieving our, no, I've seen, it's lovely

I know you've a bit

Tucked away, how's Sheila?

The kids? Alan, on your way home, bussing

A slow trail northwards, regular

Stops. You see nine crows, a wyvern

A hare pauses and listens a flock of linnets

Are so much careless punctuation

No one left at Kershaw's smiles for you

Laments your early dart and I, engaged

On matters of a nature I shall not discuss here

Have left my book at home and so...

Huh, when I get back they'll say

Why didn't you get the train?

Why didn't you rob them blind?

Turn the whole town

Upside-down and roar defiance at those

Who kill us with their beautiful numbers?

Let the 2A grind their bones deep into the stuff

And matter of the A59 and I'll say

I got talking

Alright? They treating you okay, son?

Doesn't matter, does it

You spend year after year

A number-monger, a clever fucker

But it never quite adds up.

As we roll through Rufford

Religions are born, flourish

And die. There's a dragon

Curled round Winter Hill

You can see it quite easy

If you're minded to look

Alan: everyone blames everyone

It is what it is, everything's fucked

But now? Right now? I really *believe*

In the book I left at home, and in

The rightness and justice of all our causes

Write it all down, seal the book

Leave it behind the bar of the Black Horse

It's got three doors, they can't watch all of them

Tell them History sent you

It's knocking on the door, it's coming

A December poem

You don't like tinsel, you never have

A waste, spurious plastic, undying

Slowly shredding itself over decades

But we need to make the place look

Festive, it's expected, and we're tired

And running short of ideas

I've not made my peace with it, you say

Draping it over picture frames

Call it a detente, if you must call it anything

I don't mind it, for myself, I've barely 

Thought on, but I love that you have

And reached a rapprochement

It's never an easy thing

Meeting something halfway

More people should, you're amazing 

A Walking Poem

 Something of an experiment, composed by dictating into my phone as I walked into town, I've left most of the phone's misunderstandings in as happy accidents. It's invented a word, clever phone. Anyway, solvitur ambulando and all that, and not, as my phone seems to think "solitary ambulance". The boundary between human and AI is ever more uneasy. 

It is the end of spring or it's the start of summer, the liminal space between the two, where it's hard to tell where one season ends and another one begins, but we're all worried we rule worried because there's been too much sun too much son.

And because we are english because i'm a fault state, it's worry we think of ourselves is that it for the year, gotta be it for the year. For me, a man in his late 40s is walking a country line. Thinking about where he's up to.

Tolerating the cars with ill grace because I'm at the age where I'm wondering where I'm up to, I'm at the age where I'm wondering how I've done, I'm at the age, when I'm wondering how I measure my life is this enough, am I? Enough what's the score.

Sunderland late afternoon streets.

Think it's happening. What's everybody? Why are all the cars were white? 234 white cards. A slight breeze to shift the droughly days, no more than that.

Slow down, listen

I've been trying to change my listening habits recently, it bears some relation to me changing my phone, too. Neither of these things has much to do with poetry, you may reasonably say, but as there is some relevance to this blog in them, I'll explain:

One the blessings, and also curses, of the age of digital music has been the inexorable rise of playlists. Putting one together yourself is quite good fun, it puts me in mind of the painstakingly compiled mix-tapes of you're, in which one would either show off to friends or attempt to impress a girl (neither would ever work) with a carefully selected list of tracks designed to prove the coolness and worldly taste of the compiler. Nowadays, the ease of compilation lends itself to more prosaic usage, exercise, housework.

The playlist is also handy for discovering work new to you, I try to keep my listening habits fresh and not get stuck in a rut, so lists compiled by others are helpful for that.

But the case against is that your listening becomes atomised, variety becomes the default. Gratification is instant, neophilia the watchword. You bounce between artists and genres at a dizzying rate, something is lost in the maelstrom.

Recently I had to upgrade my phone, not something I particularly like doing, I find the short shelf life of a lot of technology somewhat depressing, and can't shake the feeling that I'm participating in my own destruction by ripping through rare earths and minerals at the rate of a phone every few years. But still, had to be done, and what with the state of the old phone, downloading all the stuff I had on there onto the new one was a non starter. 

I had to start again, a tabula rasa. This included a certain rapacious and notoriously tight-fisted streaming service (I should say here, I do buy gig tickets, merch and actual albums: support artists people!), who are one of the apps foisted on you as standard. As there was a free trial, I thought, might as well.

My first instinct was to put a playlist together. But I stopped, here was a chance to change things up, see what happens. I picked an album, one I hadn't listened to in many years (the Afghan Whigs "Congregation", since you ask), popped the headphones on and went for a run.

  

I won't say it was a revelation, but it did feel like a homecoming. I do listen to albums in their entirety at work, as I have an ageing CD player (and some aged CDs) in the corner, much to the perturbation of my youthful staff. But it's not really "listening" as such, more background music. To listen to an album start to finish, in order, with nothing else to do but hear (and put one foot in front of the other) felt fresh and unusual. I felt, suddenly, the urge to write.

I know, I know, being inspired by music, nothing new in that, but it felt like something I'd forgotten about. A disused room in the house, to use a somewhat hackneyed phrase (the urge to write may have returned, but that doesn't mean that I'm any better at it).

In a short-form world there is a case to be made for the long. In a time of sound bites and snippets, tweets, skeets and reels I've discovered I need to slow my mind down and allow it to work at a slower pace (easy when I'm running on these knees, fast isn't an option).

Since that moment I haven't abandoned the playlist entirely, but I'm making more effort to listen to albums in their entirety. And not just delving into my back catalogue, this only works if I also listen to new (or at least, new to me) music. Suddenly, I am exposed to new voices, sounds and concepts (the latest Kendrick Lamar, for example, is a sonic marvel), all of which feeds into the urge to create, to talk back to the new world I've consciously chosen to step into.

It seems oxymoronic, to embrace the new by stepping back to an old form, but I do find an album a more enriching experience, out on my painful, plodding runs, I am learning anew.

Coming around again

(Or, further steps on the road back from wherever it is I was to wherever it is I'm going)

I've had cause of late to think a little about how things can come back round, how concerns which you thought you were done with can suddenly be back in your writing, as if from nowhere. 

It was while idly just doing a bit of daily writing, I'd managed to grab a spare bit of time and had the opportunity to just get a few words down, I wasn't thinking anything in particular, but for some reason I found I was writing in a tone and register that I'd ceased using a long time ago.

Now, it's not for me to say what I'm "like", I've been cornered by far too many bores who are convinced that "their" way is the only way to be convinced that one should only ever write in a particular style. I've always found that a very constrictive view, and I'm pleased to say that what little I have come up with to date has wandered around a lot in terms of style, concerns, formality. The idea of being "the same" throughout one's entire writing career is one which I find somewhat stifling.

So it came as something of a surprise when a little bit of free-writing slowly started to take on a tone and style that I thought I was done with. Not because I dislike it but more because, well, I was done with it, I'd done my work with it and it always seemed redundant to continue. I'd done that, to keep going with more of the same would essentially be to be pastiching myself, or so I thought, whenever I thought about it at all, time to do something new.

At the risk of getting too cryptic, I started writing in the style that defined my first chapbook, L39, most of the poems for which were written over twenty years ago, so you can see why I was a little surprised at this turn of events, it felt like having a conversation with my younger self, in a sense. 

Still, as I did so, it felt a little like coming home. It was an easy tone and rhythm to fall into. I'm wary of pursuing what comes easily and naturally, because it's all too easy to become glib, to become a caricature of oneself. The original concerns of small-town weirdness and parochialism, and the slightly mock-heroic tone, they've been done, so it's not really something I intend to do much of, but I enjoyed a brief foray into my writing past. Not sure I'd pursue it any further though, so here seems as good a place as any to park them for a bit while I think on.

Two asides

1

Sat, marinating in the stale bath of the sermon

drawn up through soil and down through air by indifferent hands

to my horror, I felt the words slip in, incubate

and after a while, I grew gravid with Middle England

my belly swelled with boundary disputes, I carried

complaints about noise, borrowed lawnmowers

and to be frank, I felt put upon to be poked by midwives

as a hitherto disinterested bystander, why me, but within me

parked next to their swelling grudges, pushing on my bladder

I knew why various experts prodded and tested

my urine, my semen, I was a wonder of the age

but they never hung about, couldn't meet my eye

Papers were written, but in truth I knew

that I was set up for this

 a sacrifice on the altar of politesse

For without me, bursting and groaning and crying to Heaven

they'd have had to carry their spite with them

and it would have drowned them, each in turn

2

and here at the crossroads we can see

through the sheeting sleet the site

where Roscommon, lecher and gossip

was hanged for the sheer malice of his words

lack of intent not precluding guilt

his protestations of inanity, insignificance

were swallowed by the rising tide of townsfolk

a scrum recalling ancient games of football

he should have known better, a man of his vintage

so refined in many ways, well-dressed, a lover

of fine coffee when so little was to be had

(his delivered by liveried men in red bags)

but the irresistible taste of slander

the flavour of sensation, the way

that lewd descriptions of the widow Fairfax

felt in the mouth...

he was a sommelier of gossip, revelled

in the viscosity of Rimmer the Carter's son's dalliance with Carter 

the Rimmer's daughter -  and her not yet sixteen

and on the altar, I heard

Bliss, the floral top-notes of Billy Chisholm's

eye for the lads, the lengthy, languorous aftertaste

of Dredge's bankruptcy - but it's all hidden somewhere

just ask the widow Fairfax

And they say, if you wait at this site, all these years

after the mob swallowed him whole, you can still hear

his last cries on the evening wind

But none of it matters! None of it!