Metropolitan Line poetry

2011-11-12T20:29:00.001Z

Convenience snacks

for times when I am down.
My fingers strain to stroke them,
lips to tease them, tongue to try them.

Fragile finger-buffet, mouthfuls,
slightly spicy, salted, citrus-zested,
lightly coating everything they touch
with happy ever aftertaste.

One last dance around my mouth,
enrobed in gorgeous textures:
tongue-toyed tricky shapes
that leave my taste buds singing,

wanting more and more...

After Twentysix

2011-10-25T23:22:00.001+01:00

I went to bed with your words.

Driving home, your bootlegged voice

beside me, bass notes in a duet with the

supercharger's countertenor.

Your reading rang out from my speakers,

through the open roof, through traffic roar

to coaches, cars and lorries on the Westway,

soul music on an outdoor stage.

Forty-Something

2011-02-24T13:16:00.006Z

Life sometimes seems like
forty-something Januaries,
diaries filled with good intentions
more than words.

And sometimes life,
when left alone with piles of diaries
filed away in boxes in my attic,
seems as if it's full to overflowing.

Sometimes life lived
backwards makes more sense,
each empty day an entry
too exciting to confine

to forty-something
dusty books in boxes.

Man Drag

2011-01-17T14:21:00.001Z

She stops me, geisha graciously.

Five minutes - that is all -
a picture maybe,
for a magazine,
for men, she says,
an article on how you dress.

“So why,” she asks,
“The suit, the shoes, the scarf, the glasses?”

Because, I think, I’m in disguise,
the grey, the brown, the olive, navy blue,
the moleskin, suede, the fleece,
designer glasses, hair cut boyishly,
the silver ear rings, one to right and two to left,
the open neck of one of fifteen shirts
(each cotton, white, its collar cut away)
its doubled cuffs both fastened with a silver stud,
my nails varnished matt and short-cut,
breasts pressed close to chest –

Enough.

I smile.

“Because,” I say,
“I dress for comfort.”

Nowhere

2010-12-07T15:30:00.001Z

you barge in unexpectedly

whip chord hard staring

thrusting trouser proud

twenty something strong girl

tomboy damaged woman

wearing frailty’s frustration

you march with rolling shoulders

seemingly confident strides

into my bed my hands my eyes

the unwashed smell of you

and last night’s supper hangs

on your animal nape

you’re all tough love on top

all treacherous flesh below

and somewhere in the middle

lies the end of our desperate love

which like the self inflicted web of

scars on your arms goes nowhere

For John

2010-07-28T05:27:00.001+01:00

You’re Prospero and Caliban on Quadra,
grounded, painting death and life in threes.

You show me your Mirandas (one is sleeping
on her mother, two are willing me to leave).

And I am Sycorax, condemned to lie
among your rocks and stones and trees.

Crossings

2010-03-31T11:11:00.000+01:00

The game begins: the green becomes
a muddy brown as boots blur touchlines.
Somewhere, there among the boys,
she finds a line she cannot cross
and leaves the pitch to join the others.

The edgy, endless ocean moves. Across
its length, its breadth, its past and present
people travel: hopeful, homeless.
Somewhere in the crossings and returns
the émigrés emerge, they change: we merge.

The station’s loudness crowds our senses:
people shout to one another, rush across
the concourse, run toward their homes.
You’re leaving; I am staying. Strange:
you’re standing still and I am moving on.

I cross the line, prepare to emigrate
but I would rather merge with you,
would rather stay with you at home.

Euston to Finchley Road

2010-02-05T09:13:00.005Z

They said you jumped, but not like that:
they made it so much more anonymous.
It hit you once, then rumbled to a halt
and hopefully you’re quiet now.

As I listened to the rumble under the quietness,
five times it hit me: everything is meant to be.
Five times amongst friends, I felt the stillness talk,
warmth welling up, exploding on my face.

I’ll never know you now, but know the place,
the platform edge, and will not join you yet.

I sat and was silent last night at Friends House, in Euston Road. Really still. One of us spoke, mentioning the rumble of the trains and saying that in her stillness the trains didn't matter. I agreed silently.

A little while later, and then time and time again, I was hit by a deep, wide euphoria, a firm sense that everything was for the best. It was meaningful only to me, so I kept it to myself. But I smiled: oh, how I smiled.

When we'd finished and shaken hands, we introduced ourselves. I hesitated, grimacing. I was en bloke and now don't like using my bloke name in such places of utter honesty. So my friend named me. "Come on Sarah," she said. And I named myself and of course it was all alright.

When I reached Baker Street, on the way home, I heard that there had been a 'person under a train' at Finchley Road. A suicide I assume. This is the same line that rumbles under Euston Road.

A macabre connection.

Enough

2010-01-25T11:59:00.000Z

You (and I
can safely call you that)
are whole
and that's enough.

Not a hole
into which
I can screw
my preconceptions;

nor a screen
onto which
I project
my views;

not a mannequin,
a lifeless body
you can
carve or starve.

Entire and whole, in the
present, past and future:
loved, loving, lovely
- that's enough.

Seen on the Northern Line

2010-01-12T15:33:00.001Z

Look! You see my shape
across the one-way gangway,
unlike you, without a converse.

I meet your eye, reach out
and your eye doesn’t dye
but it fixes me all the same.

Look! You glance; I smile.
Look! You whisper; yes, it’s me.
Look! The circle tightens.

I frighten you
and cannot laugh
and will not cry.

I too am amputated.
I, an object, look for meaning,
feeling deep, immense and helpless.

Ice and Snow

2010-01-12T11:48:00.001Z

I am more at home
when out on icy city streets,
for all their seeming cruelty,
moving along salty pavements,
cold-surfaced, tramped bare,
endlessly worn, glassily patched
and, for all their occasional danger,
warmer somehow; less at home
when staying in snowy outskirts,
thick-blanketed, seemingly safe
but waiting under silent cover,
smothered by the oneness,
the over-wintering whiteness
which, for all its softness, hides
a hard and unforgiving earth.

Note for my mum

2010-01-11T13:28:00.001Z

Nope, nothing recently: I have poetic thoughts but few make it into lines.

I am thinking through two poems: one about ice and snow, and one about shape and colour.

x

Self Harm

2009-12-01T10:04:00.002Z

Your public act is secretive.

Your eyes cut left, right,
anywhere but me.
No blood: just pain.

Your silence starves me,
gags me, blocks my ears,
entombs me, scares me.

Little actions harm me.

Dedicated to the friend who, for reasons known only to himself, cuts me constantly.

Stephen, Woolf, Virginia

2009-10-26T09:02:00.004Z

Woman once,
you made yourself
one woman's room

and once alone,
you made yourself
no more.

I was reflecting on my new room. It's mine alone, and inside it I can be me without worrying about anyone else.

It's like the 'room of one's own' that Virginia Woolf said was essential if a woman was to write seriously. And even today I think it's a serious need, whether the time or solitude in a busy mother's life or the 'air space' amongst loud, contending authors. The Orange Prize has given women prominence that the Whitbread and Booker Prizes sometimes don't.

And I was also thinking about the name of a woman, and this woman in particular: her maiden name was her father's and her married name her husband's. What or who was she? Virginia, I suppose.

I'm not sure if she did that much for women in general: caught in her class and her time, she made a big ripple in the 'little lounge of literature' (as I think Salman Rushdie described it) but not much further.

And I thought about her end: suicide in a river. But just as she had made herself a career and a reputation, so she chose to take her own life: her choice to the end.

And this popped out (many words and an entire verse cut out to leave this very, very pared-down verse).

Charlotte Grace

2009-10-15T14:03:00.001+01:00

You’re here beside me, Charlotte Grace:
your driving licensed name and face
are looking up from pink surroundings,
pink like newborn cheeks, surrounded
by your family, their friends, their
hopes, concerns and expectations.

Your name: your parents’ choice.
Your face: your parents’ legacy.

You’re looking up at me, who named,
baptised myself and I, with all my
hopes, concerns and expectations,
smile back at Charlotte Grace, my sister.

Lost Rivers

2009-10-14T13:48:00.002+01:00

We are the Tyburn,
Walbrook, Westbourne,
Effra, Fleet, Falconbrook, Peck,
Neckinger and Stamford Brook.

We are rivers rushing downwards.

Down to the District, Hammersmith and City,
Piccadilly, Jubilee, Bakerloo, Waterloo,
Northern, Circle, Central, Metropolitan:
lines under ground, under water.

We are lost in the earth, in the flood.

We’re submerged, diverted,
sewered, turbid, caught in a culvert:
tide in a tunnel, grey-blue, suited
flotsam flecked with white.

We're so many: we are all undone.

It's Always Words

2009-10-14T10:21:00.004+01:00

It’s always words with us.

Words that attempt to defuse
the bomb, diffuse the laser
creeping closer to the mark,
disarm the sighted weapon:

What?

It’s…

Words that deflect attention,
chaff in the radar’s eye,
white noise to hide the unspoken,
answers avoiding the question

Why?

It’s like…

Words that flatly deny
what is patently true,
retract what I cannot redact
and bluntly refuse to tell you

Who?

It’s like this…

Words that delay
what has to be said,
would sooner be dead
than finally tell you

When?

It’s like this:
this is what it’s like
and why and who I am
and when it came to be.

And when we’re together,
face to face, beside the fire,
ready to speak and to hear,
I’ll tell you how I feel.

Like Sardines

2009-09-22T12:44:00.001+01:00

This is for Rob, whose idea it first was. It's just the beginning.

Like sardines, packed close to one another. Oiled, gently broiling, their silvery skins shimmering in the heat. The resemblance ended at the left of the row as one of the women turned her head to face the other two.

“You still awake?”

“Mmmhmph.”

The grunt of acknowledgement came from the head on the right.

“Sweat’s trickling between my legs.”

The head on the left was clearly unhappy. There was no response, so the head on the left turned back. A breeze blew sand across the three, like a light dusting of salt. The figure on the left wriggled her legs and shook her feet. Her head turned again to address the other two.

“How long are we going to stay here?”

“As long as it takes.”

The head on the right had expressed its impatience. The head on the left slumped back, sighing.

A heavy thud, thud, thud and sigh of sand preceded the shouting child. The new arrival’s right foot fell close by the head on the left. The head moved quickly to look up at the child.

“Watch where you’re walking!”

The child’s laughter receded. The figure on the left turned her head to the left, lifted her left hand to her face and the flicked away the sand from her eyes and cheeks.

“Bloody children. Why don’t their parents look after them?”

Her head resumed its position so quickly that it seemed unlikely that she had been expecting an answer.

So...

2009-09-07T10:55:00.000+01:00

So monochrome:
so you and me
with you on top
and me behaving.

So black and white:
so him with her,
him, her with her
and all beyond me.

So grey: so why
not colour too?
Let me be me
and not what isn't you.

Lines texted to a friend

2009-08-20T10:56:00.001+01:00

ONE

I love the lines
on your face
when you laugh:
young and passing,
there and not there,
there again
and gone.

TWO

I love the lines
that you hide
on your arm:
white and angry,
furtive, covered
carvings, there
for good.

THREE

So let my lines
make love to you,
my passing sadness,
laughter over supper,
message on the phone,
my friend.

In Your Eye

2009-08-11T14:08:00.001+01:00

It’s strange, the way that ‘I’
so neatly fits into the object
that defines me: in your eye
I find my stage, my self respect,
my audience, my reason why.
But if you close your eyes, reject
me, my performance starts to die.

Red

2009-08-10T09:58:00.001+01:00

On my toes,
around my neck

and in your eyes; now
running down my face

to my blouse,
to the floor.

Mutatis Mutandis

2009-08-03T11:22:00.001+01:00

You
upon a beach:
curves reforming in the wind;
channels, openings emerging.
Time is changing
everything.

This is for Elodie Isabelle Daniels, 17 years old and on the move. It arose because I, like Elodie, find something in walking along beaches. When I am on holiday, I get up very early in the morning and walk along Cardigan Bay, feeling the constantly changing environment around me.

Move Along

2009-07-08T14:13:00.006+01:00

The fence's cracked and greying teeth
still smile at passers-by from this
most sociable of gardens.
I stand for a while and smile back.

The fence was raw, upended.
You and I, conspiring,
(father, daughter) bridal-dressed it,
messed ourselves and minded nothing.

The fence ran round the hours we spent
as wife and husband, side by side
beside the busy road, bent double
then, benighted, benched together.

You ran along the fence,
my five year-old explorer,
safe inside but sensing danger,
looking out and moving, moving.

We moved. The fence remains.
A tooth is loose, the bridal dress
is wearing thin, the nails stained
(they strain to hold the whole together).

The fence, the garden, bench
and flowerbeds - our past,
are passed to someone else,
and I must move along.

And fingers

2009-06-30T12:33:00.011+01:00

You and I,
we're sometimes like this paper,
double-sided, back to back,
two pages in a story, telling
one another how we feel,
what scares us, what we need;
but other times we're folded,
lying face to face, together,
arm in arm, hand on hand,
mouth devouring hungry mouth,
and fingers –

For Elodie and Me

2009-05-28T16:58:00.003+01:00

He’s there behind the makeup,
looking out from firm foundation,
rosy-tinted lips, emboldened eyes,
beneath the casual hair I happy-finger

absently.

He’s there behind the mirror, smiling,
sorry that I’m sad and knowing
how I hurt and how I hate and wishing
he could wave a wand and make it better

instantly.

I look him in his understanding eyes
and smile, and he smiles back and nods
and gently steps aside to let me pass,
but promises he’ll watch me, love me

constantly.

This is because we wrongly hate the male/female bodies we inhabit. They're part of us. Those are our eyes looking at us. Those are our smiles. Forgive them, love them and say goodbye because as time goes by they'll fade away. But they will always be a part of us, with their good, valid experiences.

An Early Morning Ride

2009-05-27T09:24:00.001+01:00

Ian, you and I are out today
on separate paths and cycles,
riding hard against the wind,
against the contours, on our own,
heading homewards slowly,
riding side by side with strangers
on their own familiar paths,

and yes,

we're sleepers waking up to different days
but when we dream, we see one sky,
one moon, one set of stars, one earth,
one diurnal cycle, many paths, one home.

On your coming of age

2009-05-25T20:57:00.008+01:00

"I'm telling you stories. Trust me."
Jeanette Winterson, Art and Lies, p.71

Sweetie,

let me read you
(like a father, mother to a daughter)
stories that you’ll feel inside
are true. All happy ever afters,
ending with a goodnight kiss
that tells you I'm still me
and you're still you.

Darling,

let me write you
(like an old familiar friend)
long letters full of what will be
and what is now,
of who we are,
not what we were
or how.

Honey,

let us tell each other
(like a pair of naughty children)
lies about our selves,
our names, our natures,
all the things we say and do,
and always knowing inwardly
that every word is true.

And You?

2009-05-05T09:09:00.000+01:00

I’m shucked,
a spine-cracked book,
a gravel-crusted graze.

I’m spatchcocked.
I am a frog laid out
for vivisection.

I’m an eye with a stye.
I am partly finished
demolition work.

I'm a handbag’s contents
scattered, clattering out of reach
and into other people’s hands.

And you?

Tombstones

2009-03-10T20:55:00.008Z

You’re breakfast news, you’re
chewed by morning millions,
smiling, singled out, surrounded
by the blackened stumps of language,
words that sound like ashes in our ears.

We wash our hands and wring them,
shrug our shoulders, shake our heads
and take your teeth. We make a mess
inside the mouth that said we mustn’t,
tear you open, fill your head with holes.

We steal your smile and leave your
lonely tongue to feel its darkened way
around, to search for walls and edges,
smooth and sharp surroundings,
slippery certainty instead of bloody gaps.

And then we wonder why you lie there,
tongue-tied, wild-eyed, as if you’d died
and found the cave, your grave, robbed
silently, and sealed it up to anyone
who might be back for something else.

But this is just a headline, nothing more
than lines inside my head, imagined
space, a whited sepulchre, its mouth
shut tight in case your ghost gets out
and tells us things we do not want to hear.

When I read the story below, I wanted to tear at my clothes and myself, so immediately did I empathise with both Sophie and her parents. My fellow passengers on the train that morning just shrugged their shoulders, said, "There's probably a lot more to this than meets the eye" and turned the page. I couldn't turn away.

Nor can I absolutely condemn the clinicians and managers involved, because, as the passengers said, there's more to this story than I am reading. And as they are human beings, they will be living with more guilt than I could bear, and will be getting on with treating other children in the knowledge that they - wittingly or unwittingly - contributed to the death of a child. The simple answer for the rest of us is not to get into situations where we might have this effect. Don't take risks with your feelings and you won't come a cropper.

So I write "we" because I find myself floating between all of the players involved in this, trying to understand - not through research or reasoning but through imagination and feeling - what went on and what continues to go on, now that this story recedes into the archives of newspapers. Google her: a ghost lives on in countless on-line sources.

I have a terror of dentists, though far milder than this. When I had a crown fitted, I had to have a sedative that knocked me out so that I wouldn't have to feel anything.

And one of the things that makes it worst is when I lose my trust in a dentist. For some biased, prejudiced and superstitious reason, I seek out women to be my dentist, in the belief that it isn't in their nature to be callous, clumsy and careless. I am in between dentists: one - a man - spoke to me so bluntly that I couldn't face going back to him. His replacement - a woman - was much kinder and suggested the sedative. But she's left now, and it's been 18 months since I've dared to go near a dentist.

Now the mum of one of Ellie's friends from school, Janita, is treating the rest of our family. I'm told that she is incredibly diligent - and causes some necessary pain. So I will brace myself for the pain and book an appointment.

An NHS hospital has apologised for failing to provide an adequate standard of care for a schoolgirl who starved to death after all her milk teeth were extracted.

Sophie Waller, an eight-year-old with an extreme phobia of dental treatment, died in December 2005 after refusing to eat or drink following an operation to remove all her milk teeth at the Royal Cornwall hospital in Truro in November. An inquest into her death of found she had an undiagnosed psychological syndrome.

The inquest heard on its final day today that her hospital aftercare was not organised or managed properly.

Dr Emma Carlyon, the coroner for Cornwall, said the severity of her condition was not realised and this "prevented her from receiving the medical support that could have prevented her death". Dr Ellen Wilkinson, the medical director of Royal Cornwall Hospital NHS trust, apologised to Sophie's family. She said: "There were shortcomings in the communication between the health organisation and Sophie's parents."

The eight-year-old was referred to the hospital by the family's GP after cracking a tooth on a boiled sweet and starving herself for three days because she was terrified of a visit to the dentist.. During the operation doctors at the hospital decided to remove all her milk teeth to avoid later problems. Her mother said the decision had left her daughter "devastated" and she again refused to eat and drink.

The inquest at Truro city hall heard that Sophie had been sent home to be cared for by a community psychologist and her GP, but that the eight-year-old was not seen face-to-face by any medical staff after her discharge. Her medical notes were also sent to the wrong GP and no GP was directly contacted by the hospital regarding her case. There was confusion over how ill the girl was because her GP did not receive full details of her condition from the hospital.

The inquest heard that Sophie was so emaciated in the days before her death that her hair was falling out and her spine was clearly visible through her skin.

Dr Charles Holme, a consultant paediatrician, said Sophie's situation was so unusual that a GP should have been contacted directly and briefed on the case when she was discharged. A care plan should have been set up to weigh and check her regularly, he said. "It would have been easy to have just picked up the phone and spoken to a GP. That was not done," said Holme. “The GP should have been spoken to on discharge. It seemed to me to be an unsatisfactory way of doing things." Holme told the inquest that a full psychological assessment of Waller should have been carried out before the operation to remove all her milk teeth, which he described as "a very major procedure for a small child".

Dr Arnon Bentovim, a consultant child psychiatrist, told the inquest that doctors had failed to organise a proper care plan for the child. "There was a failure to ensure that her ongoing medical care was fully managed and planned," he said. "The concern about her that was shown on the ward was not reflected in the day-to-day care plan in the community. There needed to be a joint physical and psychological follow-up. It was optimistic to believe that the initial positive response was necessarily going to mean that this child would make a reasonable recovery." Bentovim said an opportunity to save Sophie was missed when her mother, Janet, contacted the hospital four days before her death and asked for her to be readmitted but was referred back to the community psychologist. "At the point when the parents phoned the ward, and were clearly anxious enough to do so, had that anxiety been picked up then there would have been an opportunity for the death to be prevented," he said.

Following the operation, Sophie had been kept on a drip before being formally discharged from the hospital. She died at home 11 days later from acute kidney failure caused by starvation and dehydration.

Mortified

2009-02-15T21:20:00.003Z

I am constantly losing acquaintances in my desperation to know them too quickly.

The emotions rush to my head as fast as the blood to my face when I realise - too late - that I have put the person off with my impetuosity, my impertinence, my excessive intensity.

I can love ten people in as many minutes - a compasionate love that wants to hear their dreams, their problems and make the one possible, the other go away. This morning I watched one of my young swimmers race so strongly and beam so proudly at her father that I stood and cried with pride for her, then had to rush away, so foolish did I feel. On Friday, walking along Harley Street, I saw a woman walking towards me, tears running down her face. I only managed to stop myself from asking if I could help by reminding myself of the times this has backfired.

It is right sometimes - many times this bottomless rushing-out of care is just what is needed. And my curiosity and deep interest in people is often welcomed. I just wish I could exercise some judgement. Sometimes.

I have nine birch trees in my garden, nine beautiful, white saplings. I will tie the names of the acquaintances I have lost, one to each tree. I hope that I have little more need to walk up to the clump.

And I will bury my head and blush into my pillow tonight and regret, regret, regret not knowing when to shut up.

An Imperfect Enjoyment

2009-01-19T12:03:00.004Z

So was it me or you? Who asked who first?
And who was it that mentioned making love?
Perhaps, with teenage desperation nursed
by dormitory fantasies, I tried to shove
my growing fondness onto you, let lust chase
more than kisses, look for more than smiles bared.
But once in bed with one another, face to face
and thigh to sweating thigh, I was too scared.
First love, when looked at like a movie in reverse
is always awkward, often fumbled, rarely right.
Perhaps if we could practise, act it out, rehearse
it in advance, we’d make love alright on the night.
Enjoyment more than Rochester's or Aphra Behn
is easy now we’re old, but so much harder then.

To my Owner

2009-01-15T22:14:00.002Z

Dislike, unlike the feeling
found in other people's sonnets,
leaves me empty, stealing
joy and leaving irritation on its
own to tap a left, right, left,
right rhyme and rhythm
out of tiresome words, bereft
of passion, stuffed with boredom.
That's enough: I'll end my verse
with something more exciting
than the way you smugly purse
your lips and trash my writing.
Love for life, my family and friends
is where my poetry begins and ends.

Café Table

2008-12-22T22:36:00.016Z

At the edge of the shore,
in the roar of the sea,
shout of the wind, hiss of the sand,
there’s no one here but me

and you at the table.

Words, birds on the beach,
encircle each other, lost
in the clatter of cups, Gaggia roar
and hiss of cappuccino.

And as we speak, all sound is drowned
by your eyes, your mouth, your movement.

Maybe Maybe Not

2008-12-15T13:43:00.009Z

Here, at the point between
my question and your answer,
between asking and knowing,
please and thank you,
offer and acceptance,
wanting and having,
send and receive,
message and response,
dreaming and waking,
trial and error,
maybe or maybe not,
I hold my breath
and count the possibilities.

Played Out

2008-12-02T14:06:00.007Z

I’m caught in my cross-garters, crossing
the square from where you said we’d meet
to where I started, between ‘You’re here’
and nowhere, eyeing the lines of diners,
crossing back to where you might be, waiting,
re-crossing, re-tracing the lines to find your face
then losing mine, outside in the rain, ridiculous:
my yellow stockings hanging at my ankles.

You Asked

2008-10-13T11:45:00.003+01:00

You asked me once, while we were rushing,
crushed together, stuffed onto sweating seats,
if I could write about the New York flight
you had planned to take that evening.

I smiled and closed my eyes, and saw you
watching the in-flight movie, peering out
through the sideways windows, looking down
on the clouds, the mountainous mists,

felt the sun stab your eyes, heard the engines
strain to keep you there, high above the earth
that they sprayed with oily micro-droplets,
choked, carbon-blanketed, carelessly killed,

and I wished you back beside me, here
at half-past seven, staring out through
tear-streaked windows at the streets,
the tracks, the trees, rushing backwards.

Separation

2008-09-20T14:51:00.008+01:00

You’re standing like a stranger and your eyes
are lying, leaking sadness in embarrassed puddles.
All the time you’re trying to say she's leaving.

When it's out, I hug your shaking body, hold you
tight and cannot speak. And then I let you go,
you lovely boy, and we resume a manly distance,
pressing tears between our awkward words.

This senseless kitchen drama has no lines for me.
I want to unknow everything you've said, send you
back towards your car, see you driving home to find
your marriage sleeping, only dreaming it had died.

I can't. You don't. My wife and daughter crash into
the house and all that we can do is snap on smiles
and say hello, and cry inside, and go our separate ways.

John and Helen

2008-08-15T08:59:00.007+01:00

John, while my left leg lay beneath me
like a broken twig, and I lay underneath
the apple tree I’d tried to prune, entwined
in the ladder I’d assumed would hold me,
told me how he’d climbed his fir tree,
forty or fifty feet, and how he’d clawed
and hacked and ice-axed up a mountain.
John was seventy-three. At his funeral tea
I talked to Helen, fellow climber. Yes, she said,
we did. But not again, not now. And she,
like the Nivea-covered leaf, never crumpled,
never cracked, now never seems to age.

This happened, but not quite the way it appears in the poem. John Espir rescued me the second time I did my leg in. But he did take my mind off my snapped patellar tendon and shattered kneecap by telling me how he climbed his tree to prune it, and how he still went ice-climbing. He died of prostate cancer a little later and Helen invited us to the funeral tea. She's one of those old ladies who can't stand the fuss of make-up and hair-dos. She has her white hair back in a bun and gets on with life, as an expert in oriental porcelain. She still writes, researches and lectures on it, and never seems to get any older.

I want to be like her when I grow up.

In a Valley of Stone

2008-07-31T10:07:00.003+01:00

A slumber did my spirit seal;
I had no human fears:
She seem’d a thing that could not feel
The touch of earthly years.

No motion has she now, no force;
She neither hears nor sees;
Roll’d round in earth’s diurnal course
With rocks, and stones, and trees.

William Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads

Some months ago Wordsworth transmitted to me a most sublime Epitaph ... whether it had any reality, I cannot say. – Most probably, in some gloomier moment he had fancied the moment in which his Sister might die.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, April 1799

What is genuine? The genuine inner soul you say you want to discover? Nothing’s absolutely genuine! You aren’t the same person with everyone you know. You act out different roles.

Patricia Duncker, James Miranda Barry

I

December 1986

The figure runs out of the laughing mouth of the pub and into the path of three young men. One loses his footing and swears at the figure as it disappears around a corner. None of them could later give more of a description than that the runner was tall, strong and in no mood to stop and say sorry. But they are drunk, it is near closing time and you half expect a bit of trouble this close to Christmas.

The runner runs on. Up the street, into an alleyway on the right and through the network of paths, back gardens and parking places that lead to the edge of the town. The rain is icy and insistent, the kind of rain that shepherds dread, taking its toll of their lambs when it came in the spring. At this time of year it is to be expected, though not, it seemed, by the runner, who wears only jeans, a sweatshirt and training shoes. To the limits of the town, the way was streetlit; now the road is illuminated only by the occasional light of the moon and the hard, probing eyes of cars as they splash past the runner. The figure is gaining ground now, and the trees are trailing behind, left to watch with the houses, shops and harbour further back. One of the runner’s feet finds a rut in the road, where the tarmac has been torn and eaten away by the traffic and the unforgiving coastal weather. The foot turns and the ensuing shout would, to anyone who had been walking past on that Saturday night, signal an early end to whatever race this was.

But still the figure runs. Unevenly now, a little lighter on the left foot than before, but no slower. The rain is easing off, but the wind buffets the figure, sometimes to the side, sometimes head-on, depending on the direction of the winding road. Finally the figure reaches the top of the first hill and is still, only in the sense that it is no longer running. It bends forward, hands on legs, gulping at wet, icy breaths, shaking a sodden head and looking back to the half-hidden lights of town. The figure rights itself, clenches its fists, clutches at its head, lets out a howl and begins to run again. Its course is now the middle of the narrow road, presumably because neither edge can be trusted to offer a sure footfall. Twice this tactic almost proves disastrous as cars emerge from behind, horns blaring at the oblivious figure, headlights lighting up the alien eyes of startled roadside ewes. These monstrous intrusions don’t seem to deter the runner, who move a little to the right but otherwise continues its long, long journey towards the next village.

The only lights that give away the eventual approach of this huddled community come from the unwitting windows of people’s homes. These lamps, Christmas lights and fires would at any other time have seemed a welcome smile; tonight they sneer at the incomer. The runner staggers on through the place, soaked again by the returning rain. The figure looks left and right at the windows and in their glow the distinction between raindrops and tears is a meaningless blur. The runner’s right hand rips away at the blinding water, but the pace never slows. And again the edge of the community comes into view. The lights stutter out and the dark deepens. Again the road rises, steeply to start with and then into a gentle slope between the rocky shoulders of the valley.

Almost at once the weather abates. The road runs flat now, between grassy expanses and high, stone-strewn sides. A little way on, the runner cuts off to the right, across the grass and onto the high hillside. The figure’s feet are ensnared at almost every step by tussocks, rocks and rabbit holes, but at each stumble the runner recovers and continues upwards. The course is meandering, like a tack against a heavy headwind. Through the zigzags there emerges a line, insistently up and onto the hill brow, over to the edge of the cliff. Crossing this course is the coastal path, which the runner now joins, glancing again to the right and out to sea. The wind has resumed at the ridge and has ripped away the ragged storm clouds to expose the nakedness of the half moon. The harsh, cold light trickles across the waves, crawls up the rocks and clinging grass and comes to rest in the cliff’s crags and clefts. Into one of these the runner finally falls and slumps.

It is now half past two in the morning, three and a half hours since the figure left the pub in Porlock. Here, twelve miles along the coast, the figure crouches and screams on the edge of the Valley of Rocks. It isn’t clear how much this is from the pain bearing down or from some inarticulate anguish, but it is heard far out to sea. A night fisherman later reported a strange bird’s cry that had called time and again, then had fallen silent. Slowly recovering its breath, and with quieter cries now, the figure rises to its feet and begins to strip. First the shoes are kicked off and socks pulled from shredded feet and bruised ankles. Then the jeans and underwear, bloodied, are shrugged to the ground. The figure tears at the sweatshirt, ripping it along its seams, then rents the t-shirt underneath it. Such an old-fashioned word, but none substitutes for the way that the hands grip the neck of the garment, tearing downwards and outwards. After a few seconds’ struggle, the shirt is in tatters on the grass. And the moon looks in horror at the bandaged body beneath.

The figure pauses to shout words at the sea, bellowed so strongly that they threaten to burst the throat that sounded them. Spittle shoots out, lost in the spume far below. The words disappear in the crashing of the waves and the keening of the wind. The figure begins to undo and unwind the bandage from below its breasts. Once, twice, three times round the slowly loosening body. Then a pause to cough, forcing the bare, stark ribs against their constraints. And then she – for there can be no doubt of her sex – continues to unravel herself. Once, twice and three times more, her hands and the bandage cross her body. And at every unwinding, the belly beneath seems to spring outwards, reaching out to the sea and the moon.

Stripped of the bandage, the runner stands, five months pregnant, more a girl than a woman. She shivers violently and her skin, rapidly cooling in the freezing night air, raises every follicle in its futile attempts to warm itself. Suddenly she is pulled down, bent double with an extreme pain. She fights at it and stands again, crying and shouting incoherently. But again some force compels her to bow to it, to scrape her knees on the rocks beneath her. Blood, as if from some slowly dying sacrifice, trickles down her thigh, faster than the tears drizzle her cheeks. Her mouth is set in a rictus, wide-mouthed, her eyes clamped shut. Each hand makes a fist that hits out at the pain. Gradually she composes herself, moves closer to the edge and looks down. Once more the pain hammers her to her knees, but this time she is on her feet in a moment. Stretching up her arms, looking up at the sky, she prepares herself. A quick lowering of the head and arms, a flex of the legs, feet and hips and she dives into the sea.

II

January 1987

The night after they buried the girl, the boy sits on her bed and speaks for the first time that day, to her. He hears nothing, so he goes back to his bedroom and puts his clothes on. He leaves the house and walks five miles, through the rain, to where she is now lying. He vaults the railings and walks over to the grave. There he lies down, brushing the flowers to one side, careless of the wet mud on his clothes, hands and face. And as he speaks to her again, he begins to dig. Just a small tunnel, using one hand. The tunnel becomes deeper and deeper. When the ground meets his shoulder, he stops and falls back.

‘Where are you? Why didn’t you talk to me? I could’ve made it better – whatever it was. What am I going to do now without you?’ After a long silence, he shouts, ‘Please answer me! Talk to me!’ The only sound is the rain on the trees and in the growing muddy puddles around him.

The rain wakes him around dawn. He gets to his knees and scrapes most of the mud off his body and arms, then tries to rearrange the scatters wreaths, as if remaking the girl’s bed. Keeping to the hedges and back lanes, the boy makes his way home. He’s left the back door open, so he makes very little noise as he walks into the kitchen. He kicks off the wellingtons and shrugs off his clothes, pushing them into a corner behind a pile of boots.

He walks into the shower room beyond the kitchen and turns on the taps. The pipes shudder and bang and his mother’s voice comes from upstairs. ‘Mark, is that you? What time is it? Put the kettle on, will you?’ The boy steps back from the shower and into the kitchen. He fills the kettle and switches it on.

Back in the shower room, he stands in front of the mirror. He wipes away the condensation and sees a black, streaked mask, with white eyes staring at him. He turns away and steps into the scalding water. By the time he is clean, his mother is in the kitchen. She has seen the trail of wet, muddy footprints and found the pile of soiled clothes.

‘Where on earth have you been? These are filthy.’

‘Out for a walk.’

The boy’s mother drops the clothes to the floor and hangs her arms helplessly. ‘Please don’t go out like that. Not now.’

‘Sorry.’

III

July 2006

It was a bad evening to start with. Sharon wasn’t there to open up, so I had to spend the first hour behind the bar serving an old man and his Jack Russell. When she finally arrived, her story went on so fast and so long that I just smiled tightly and disappeared upstairs.

Liz was slamming plates around and Helen was sitting facing the wall in a pose of self-absorption, all the while clearly furious with her mother. I counted to five and asked Liz what was wrong. ‘Ask your daughter.’ But I got nothing out of Helen. Dinner passed in a thick, angry silence and Helen got up to leave. ‘So when will you be back?’ asked Liz. ‘When I’m back’. The door slammed behind her. I decided the bar was the best bet and went downstairs.

Business was painfully slow. We’d hardly clear enough to pay the staff, and Sharon had managed to fill the pipes with dregs from the barrel. I smiled patiently at the bemused barmaid while I pumped a few more pints of my profit into a bucket. The night wore on, punctuated by tedious stories and unfunny jokes from the few regulars who’d come in that evening. I paced out my Pils bottles, carefully hiding the empties as usual behind the full ones, safe in the knowledge that I’d be bottling up the next morning and could get rid of the evidence. Once I’d closed the door on the last customer and had had a final drink with Sharon, I went back upstairs. Liz was off to bed long before, so I sat down to wait for Helen. I poured myself a glass of red wine and put the television on.

The door opened some time after one. My first instinct was to hug her and put her to bed; instead I glared. ‘What time do you call this? Why didn’t you phone?’ ‘What’s it to you?’ came out almost as if scripted. And the conversation that ensued was predictable. Until, that is, Helen came to within an inch of my face. It must have been so red, my eyes bloodshot and my mouth spitting and stinking of alcohol. She slapped me hard and spat at me. I gripped her arms, at first just to stop her repeating the slap. But my hands turned from restraints into instruments of torture. I gripped harder and harder, shaking her to the rhythm of my shouts.

When Helen finally ripped herself from my grasp, the marks on her arms cried out. There for Liz, the neighbours, friends, social services, the police to see were his red fingerprints, turning to purple. And Helen’s betrayed eyes were looking straight into mine. Her mouth was open but no sound came out. Instead only her eyes spoke. How could you have hurt me like this? Do you hate me so much that you want to kill me? What are you going to do next? I raised my hands to placate, to cradle her, to begin the slow process of saying sorry again, but she shuddered and shrank from me. I was a monster and she had to get away. ‘Don’t you dare!’ she finally shrieked and jumped away, then staggered off to her bedroom.

I sat for an age, staring at the wall, drinking the remains of my bottle of red wine. Then I screwed my face up into a silent cry and tore my shirt off. I reached for anything I could and I smashed it. And I went out.

I had drunk even more than usual and had difficulty finding the lock in the car door. Carelessly, I scraped at the paintwork in my efforts to turn the key, then pulled at the door so hard that it seemed I would pull the car round with it. I hit my knee on the steering wheel as I threw myself into the driving seat, then slammed the door shut. The force of slamming the door brought the plastic handle off in my hand and I swore as I threw it onto the passenger seat. Again, I struggled to put the key into the ignition and I banged my fist on the steering wheel in frustration. The horn’s single shout had one of our neighbours at her curtain. Once it was in, I turned the key again and again, making the engine grind and scream as it was forced to start and re-start. I stamped on the clutch, wrenched the gear into reverse and floored the accelerator. The car slammed forwards and hit the post in front of it. I pulled again at the gear stick, pressed my foot on the accelerator and the car lurched backwards into the street, hitting the opposite kerb. Another curtain opened in a nearby window, then was rapidly pulled shut.

I still hadn’t turned the car lights on, so the noise had no obvious source for the observer to see. Once more I pulled on the gear stick, as if I wanted to rip it from its socket, then the car shot forwards, taking the wing mirror off our neighbour’s car. Only when I was beyond the streetlights did I think to turn his headlamps on, just in time to avoid a parked van. Time and again the car scraped against the high hedgerows, or the wheels crunched into roadside stones and kerbs. I could hardly see to drive, as I screwed my eyes up to rid myself of my tears and the sight of my terrified daughter. After half an hour of winding lanes and the moor-top ‘A’ road, I reached the remote car park, by the cricket pitch at the centre of the valley. I pulled on the handbrake before I had fully stopped, and the car skidded to a mad angle at the centre of the tarmac. I threw open the door, kicking at it with my right foot, then staggered out.

There was a good moon that night, or I’d have found it hard to walk anywhere. Following the light up the slope, I zigzagged along. Every few steps, my foot found a hole or a hillock and my ankle twisted or I fell to my knees. And every time I quickly regained my balance, driven on and up to the brow of the hill. I must have looked like a tormented puppet, forced to its feet time and again by an unseen pair of hands. I kept my eyes on the ridge above, not caring where I was walking. And when I reached the ridge, I turned to the left, onto the path. I looked at the landscape, back and forwards at the promontories. I stopped and turned, then walked along the path in the other direction. A few minutes later, I stopped and looked down at a small, rocky ledge. I dropped to his knees and then onto my backside. I slid onto the outcrop, clutching at the grass all the time to slow my descent.

Once down, I rested against the cliff’s slope, breathing heavily and coughing after the effort. Slowly my breathing eased. My eyes were now fixed on the moon and its reflection on the mirror-calm sea. On another occasion, and to anyone else, this would have been a beautiful sight. I was blind to this. I was staring beyond the light and the dark. And then I began to shout. ‘Where are you? Sarah, where are you? I need to talk to you.’ There was no response. Only the hiss of the water on the rocks below and the slight breeze in the singing grass answered my cry. Again I shouted out to sea, until my voice grew hoarse. I began to plead. ‘Please help me. I can’t do this without you. I don’t know what to say. Everything I say is wrong. Everything I do just makes her hate me more. Please come back.’

The one-sided conversation went on until the moon was gone. I slumped and crouched for what seemed like an age. Finally, accepting that I wouldn’t get an answer, I turned to climb back up. And in doing so, I leant back. Too far, and I began to lose my balance. I tried to clutch at the grass on the slope but my fingers missed and my feet slipped and I fell.

IV

July 1974

It is warm. The children lie at angles to each other on the beach, dark with wet sand. Around them range the ditches and ramparts of a mighty fortress. They have decorated the walls with shells and have placed stiff seaweed stalks on the towers. All that remains to build is the tunnel entrance, long and deep. The boy is digging from within the stronghold, while the girl is burrowing from two arm’s lengths away, outside the walls. Work is in its early stages: each handful is carefully extracted and placed on a pile beside them. And all the time they dig, the children talk.

‘You need to dig deep.’

‘I know that. I am digging deep. But it’s cold and my fingers hurt.’

‘Stop being a baby. Ow. Something’s stuck under my fingernail.’

‘Baby.’

‘No, It really hurts. Look.’

The girl lifts her hand out and seems to rise and jump in one movement into the boy’s castle walls. She crouches next to the boy and shows him a piece of shell protruding from under the nail of her right forefinger. ‘See,’ she says, ‘It really hurts. Pull it out for me. I can’t.’ The boy, still extracting himself from between his piles of sand, looks over at her hand and pulls a face.

‘I don’t want to. It will hurt you.’

‘It hurts me now. Please pull it out.’

The boy crouches next to the girl, his side encrusted with drying sand. He bends his head over her hand, applying his smaller fingers to her longer ones. He brushes away the sand and quickly pulls. The fragment comes out, followed by a trickle of bright red blood. Before it can fall on the beach, the boy takes it into his mouth, sucking the finger. ‘There,’ he says, ‘Now you won’t die. I’ve sucked the poison out.’

The girl slowly pulls her finger back and stares very seriously at the boy. ‘Thank you,’ she says, ‘It doesn’t hurt any more. Thank you for saving my life.’ She goes back to her work, using her other hand until the right hand is better.

Slowly the piles of wet sand grow. Gradually the children’s arms disappear further into the dark, wet holes they have dug. Then the girl feels the sand give way in front of her fingers. She continues to grab at the sand and brings the handful out. Then she lies as flat as she can on the beach and thrusts her hand as far as possible towards the interior of the castle. Her invading hand meets the boy’s welcoming fingers and the two hands grip each other. The boy and the girl lie there for a few minutes until the girl says, ‘We’re kings now.’

‘What?’

‘Me and you. Kings in our castle.’

‘Don’t be silly. You can’t be king. You can be my queen.’

The girl tries to tear her hand out of the tunnel, but the boy holds onto it. ‘Alright,’ he says, ‘You can be what you want. But it sounds silly, King Sarah.’ ‘I will call myself something else, now I am a King’ says the girl. ‘I will be King Arthur and you will be King Mark.’ They laugh, loosening their grip, and begin to build the defences for their new tunnel.

A little way from this, a man and a woman lie side by side in the sun. Sometimes sleeping, sometimes laughing and talking. Their fingers stray across each other. The woman smiles and she clutches the man’s hand. ‘You know,’ she says, ‘We could be very happy here.’ ‘Yes,’ says the man, ‘I think you’re right.’

July 2006

[Mark.]

There was a voice in his head, and it was saying his name.

‘What?’

[Mark, it’s me. Sarah.]

‘No, you can’t be Sarah. You’re dead. Does that mean I’m dead? I fell.’

[No, you’re not dead and yes, this is me. Sarah.]

Then silence. Mark opened his eyes. He was in a warm, darkened room. Something hurt. He couldn’t move. His mouth was dry, his throat hurt and the words he had heard himself say sounded crusty. He closed his eyes again and slept.

‘Mr Dawson?’

‘Go away Sarah. That won’t work either.’

‘Sorry, Mr Dawson, I’m not Sarah. My name is Caroline. How are you feeling?’

‘So I’m not dead?’

‘No. You’re in hospital. In the recovery room. You’ve had a fall and we had to sort your leg out. You’ve also had a bit of a bang on your head, but we don’t think anything is broken. So how are you feeling?’

‘Sorry. I’m so sorry.’

Mark began to cry, a soft moaning that hurt his raw throat. The nurse put her hand on his shoulder.

‘Don’t you worry now. You’re alright.’

‘I thought my sister was here. She keeps talking to me, but she’s dead.’

‘There’s no one in here except you and me.’

‘So I must be mad. Or I am dead.’

‘No. You’re alive, but you’ve bashed your head. Maybe that’s why you’re hearing things. Or maybe it was a dream.’

‘Yes, a dream.’

Mark slipped back into sleep.

[For God’s sake, Mark, wake up.]

‘Go away. You’re a dream. I’ve hurt my head.’

[OK, so I’m a voice in your head. But I’m talking to you now and I’m not going to stop.]

To the lady on the train

2008-07-24T21:01:00.005+01:00

Superscript: she did get in touch. I then told her a little too much about myself and she had second thoughts. That's a shame: I can't regret saying as much, because that's the whole, odd package, but I do feel sad that I'm mssing out on knowing more about a very interesting person.

Tonight I saw the most beautiful illustration, writhing down the back of a young woman who walked slightly ahead of me to the train. And, being impertinent, I told her how good it looked. She was very gracious and explained that she'd been under the needle for four hours, and that her back ached.

It got me thinking about performance and deocoration. There is so little opportunity to decorate ourselves and perform through our appearance in this drab, commuting capital - especially for men. It made me think of the seminar on Monday - about Leigh Bowery and the wonderful, outrageous stories he told with his body and his dress.

I wrote this poem an age ago - two summers, I think - when I'd had my arms adorned with henna (http://metro-poetry.blogspot.com/2007/02/hangin-on.html). And I had the same done this year at Glastonbury. It's as temporary as my tastes and nothing like as gorgeous as this woman's back. I envy her the decisiveness and taste.

I will write about her, when I know more about her.

Field Mushrooms

2008-07-24T21:00:00.001+01:00

Mushrooms in the verge,
sprouting unexpectedly:
fruit from buried fields.

At a table in the restaurant

2008-07-07T14:20:00.003+01:00

At the side of my eye there’s a man who is watching me
waiting to write. So I will, though there’s nothing to say.
And then out the words come, and they’re good.

Just out of sight I can feel his attention, sense what he wants.
So I burrow my head and I furrow my brow, I squint down
and stare up as if charting the universe here in my notebook.

And yes, if he asks, I will slip him a sonnet, signed with a word
for his son or his wife. And then no. When I look, I can see
him stare past at the tables and chairs packed with poets like me.

For Pippa

2008-07-04T12:44:00.001+01:00

A pair of chopsticks:
one is moving, one is still.
Together they work.

Minding Sheep

2008-06-24T14:50:00.003+01:00

Hard graft, harder than I’d ever known, and long hours.
Often five till midnight. And the never-ending rain;
and the cold, carving claws from my fingers; and
mud and sheep shit: sticky, green-brown, everywhere.

But out on the hillside, watching the lambs hammering
at their mothers, seeing myself reflected in their alien eyes,
counting out the day to their ageless grind, grind, grind,

out on the hillside, when the sun wraps her arms around
my shoulders, and the grass makes a bedspread, and the wind,
sometimes whispering, sometimes shouting, strokes my hair,
life could be worse than minding other people’s business.

Bin Round

2008-06-24T09:12:00.005+01:00

It was best this time of year: long days, dry days, mostly.
Green mornings, loud with starling chatter
and the clatter of lids and the rustle of plastic
on our legs as we waddled through the gardens
like ruffled blackbirds, winged with binbags,
three or four on each tight-muscled, hard-handed,
flapping arm.

And our magpie eyes were always hopping round,
hoping for a trophy.

Black bags built our bodies, clothed us in the rain,
punctuated every morning:

dark dots and dashes in roadside piles.

Circle Line

2008-06-19T17:57:00.001+01:00

Westminster

Caught between the surge and riptide, I look down
and lose my grip, slide sideways, feel her small hand
slip from mine and disappear into a navy-suited sea.
Somewhere in the blue-grey waves she’s swept aboard,
kept hidden from my maddened eyes – and then she’s gone.
My shouts bounce noiselessly against the closing door.

Circle Line

My lips are wet, my throat is cold. I move, but cannot feel
my limbs: I think I must have died in sleep, and am a ghost,
and hear a wind, which shakes the rails, and roars more loud.
The rail sighs, the crowd pours in like one black cloud across
the edge. The train moves on, then stops. The dead men groan,
they stir, but do not speak or move their eyes. I rise and leave.

Embankment

Through the fog I see a gate and through it see the river,
great brown giver-back of bobbing, floating, bloated bodies.
There, between the stone and water lies my only hope
of finding her. A woman wrapped in words and pictures:
countless stories about snatching, searching, finding children.
As she whispers to herself, to me, to anyone, I crouch and listen.

Growing Up

2008-06-13T11:53:00.003+01:00

We watch the water, dark and silent,
touch it, see it turn into a torrent, briefly
channel it, but never dam its current.

to Michael Field

2008-04-30T10:46:00.004+01:00

I have built a wall of black bricks, alternating rows
of headers and stretchers, English Bonded. Some are plain,
others highly ornamented. All that shows are black blocks,
laid on lime cement. On the other side I’ve painted pictures.
Strange: every time I try to knock it down, I end up
laying yet another line. Stand close and listen through

this crack.

THIS IS NOT WHAT I WANT TO SAY AT ALL: MY

POLYMORPHOUS, EVANESCENT IMAGINATION

LACKS A VOICE, SO I MUST BUILD A WALL TO

REPRESENT UNSPEAKABLE, UNREQUITABLE

THINGS: SIGNS, DREAMS, WANTS, MOODS, NEEDS.

Let me explain.

There is no Katherine, no Edith here. No one’s singing.
No one sits on Lethe’s shore, nor stares right back at censure.
Let me explain again. Two oceans, ten thousand miles,
one continent (counting north and south as one) separate
two circles moving us from bed to breakfast, home to work,
wakefulness to sleep. No intersection, only black blocks.

Listen through this crack. Let me explain.

Lesson One: Simple Greetings

2008-04-20T14:23:00.009+01:00

Halò a Chaluim, ciamar a tha thu fhèin?
Tha mi gu math, tapadh leat, an-dràsta.

Now you’ve paused: I trace a line,
let my tongue tip linger, whet my lip
and speak.

..............And then your alien tongue slips in
to tease my teeth, ease my stiffened lips apart,
mouthing words I cannot understand.

Long forgotten foreign sounds, distant cousins,
burnt out, whipped out, language left without
a forwarding address. Adrift.

Hello Malcolm, how are you yourself?
– I am fine just now, Catriona.

I read an article about a poet called Marlene Nourbese Philip "discourse on the logic of language". She talks about a mother's tongue on a baby: a black mother wiping the creamy white vernix from a baby. She also talks about the disconnection of slaves from their mother tongue - a deliberate policy of splitting up slaves from linguistic groups so that they would have to learn a new language.

I have a love of language: the feel of it in my mouth, especially. And as an antidote to this interminable degree (from which I am escaping even now by writing this blog instead of concentrating on my essay) I started doing a 'teach yourself Scottish Gaelic' course on the train at http://www.bbc.co.uk/scotland/alba/foghlam/beag_air_bheag/flash/index.shtml. I like the sounds and the alien feeling in my mouth. It's quite sensual. And the weird thing is that the male speaker in the audio clips is called Malcolm. I find myself addressed by Catriona as 'a Chaluim', my own name translated.

When Ellie and I walked the Great Glen Way last summer, we stopped off at the Clan Cameron museum: I was at first repelled by the hordes of Americans seeking out some sort of connection in a seedy, run-down estate, and by the tartan curios on sale. But the stories of clearances and wars are very romantic and sad - much more, I think, than English history. So it seemed like a lucrative imaginative vein to mine. I can't imagine that anyone in our family has spoken Gaelic in recent history, and suspect that no one did in the deeper past. I also dislike the bonkers Celtic/Lunatic Fringe idea of separatism.

I like the idea of this odd, old language as a way of gaining an imagined connection with a country and a nationality that has little to do with me. I'd like to use it to resist being pigeonholed as purely English and to play around with what being partly Scottish might be about. Yesterday's 'Excess Baggage' (http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/excessbaggage/) was about Celtic identities. One of the speakers, Manchan Magan, set out to walk around Ireland speaking only Gaelic. He comes from a family of English speakers who, at the beginning of the twentieth century, decided to speak Irish as an act of resistance to the English, and to identify themselves as Irish nationalists. Manchan himself, when he discovered that his grandmother wanted to recruit him as part of the next generation of linguistic revolutionaries, decided to speak only English. After all, he said, he loves the English. And he said that the Irish government's efforts to make Irish compulsory in schools appealed the the naturally disobedient Irish spirit: kids actively resisted learning their 'natural' Irish language and stuck to English.

So I'd like to develop a challenging, questioning approach to Scotland, its languages and possible identities. I'm suspicious of tartan, clans and kilts because so much of it was re-invented by the Victorians and it probably has little to do with lowland or East-coast Scots. I quite like some of Runrig's music, but feel a little queasy at the Scots victim cult that seems to surround the group. I'd like to see where a twenty-first century, post-modern, post-industrial, bastard Scottish identity can take one. Scotland is not immune from immigration though, as Jackie Kay brilliantly describes, to be of mixed race in Sixties and Seventies Scotland was to be an oddity. To associate with any Scottish identity, do I have to eschew all things English, or can I have a great 'pick and mix' sense of myself? Can I have it all, and even make it up as I go along?

I am also fascinated by the Anglo-Saxon side of things. My poem 'Dancing Dog' is a deliberate attempt to write to an Old English tradition: clouty language and lines that split into two. And look at who has written the most fantastic translation of Beowulf: Seamus Heaney. The first sentence of his translation was, "So." This, he said, came straight from the language patterns of his elders when he was growing up in Northern Ireland.

I went to hear Jeanette Winterson, Ali Smith and Jackie Kay speak and read on International Women's Day. There was a singer there too, Karine Polwart. Fantastic, I thought. She's lowland Scots and sings songs, I think, that could come from either side of the border. One of them I really liked: 'The Dowie Dens of Yarrow'. Reminded me of my Grandad's tours around Selkirk - always pointing out Yarrow Ford, where my great-great-etc Grandfather had been the blacksmith. She's a great folk singer who also writes about modern things: another example of not getting stuck in one rut.

And Erica Wagner (http://www.ericawagner.co.uk/), who read when I did, at that first 'Writ Loud', sang an unaccompanied Northumbrian song and uses local stories and settings for her novel, Seizure (which I read - splendid). She's American, from New York, but finished her schooling at St Paul's Girls School, Cambridge and then the Creative Writing programme at the University of East Anglia (which produces many good writers, one or two of whom worked with me at OGC). I like the 'borderland' aspect of this association.

Anyway, this poem: when I read it out in class, it was described as sexual and disturbing. Firstly, a bit of tonguing doesn't sound too sexy - leastways I didn't think so. Secondly, when someone said it was disturbing I inadvertently said, "Good" because that's what I want my poems to do: to disturb and disrupt what is complacent, easy and normal. I bloody well hope it just gets even more disturbing! I must thank the class, though, for helping me with the sloppier aspects of my first draft: this is re-worded, re-ordered and, I hope, more unified in its content, form, sound and tone.

What's this all about? Everything being connected, and everything needing a good, sceptical shaking.

Love Song

2008-03-10T08:41:00.005Z

Walk with me on the ghosts of pavements,
barefoot, backwards, sideways, down.
Slide through stone till toes meet silt,
burrowing mole-blind into the mud.

And we’ll plaster our skins with shiny darkness,
leave our legs to meander from delta to delta,
make a bed for the night in the folds of the river,
fall asleep to the world and deaf to the stars.

And we’ll wake to the sun’s shout, hide under shadows
thrown down by clouds as they run off to sea,
break from the hold of our hard-baked bedclothes,
bathing our bodies in blue-green sky.

Then we’ll find what was wanting and want what we find:
I, you in your eyes and you, me in mine.

Ghost Shroud

2008-03-07T09:56:00.007Z

Rubber, torn on the tarmac,
just a spoonful, emptied into,
inner tube outside.

Life cycle, latex O,
omega but never alpha:
round full-stop to all of that.

Empty windsock, party-pooped balloon.
Skin thin insulation: surgical protection,
single-fingered glove.

Life saver, life-retaining second skin,
rubber raft for drowning sea-men,
saving some for later.

Diving suit for when you're overwhelmed, engulfed.
Beached jellyfish, deep sea life-form, formless,
filled with life in salty darkness.

Bedding ring worn lovingly,
ending with an oh, oh, oh my god
and a great big yawn.

Sausage skin: fill it, give it
one quick twist and a snip.

The o in no, not this time.

Lantern Show

2008-02-18T08:28:00.001Z

It’s a hard frost today: ear-stinging cold and hoar-crust crunching underfoot. And the strings of Spring lights stutter down the street, beckon me towards the lantern show. There, bare branches spread their ungloved hands, lift famished fingers, supplicant: purse, point up, stroke the sky, touch rooftops. I stand for a moment, hands poised to applaud. Then the morning moves me on.

Rosebuds

2008-02-15T08:41:00.004Z

Torn apart in an underpass
beside a beer can. Empty petals,
remnants of an argument,
playful love-me, love-me knots,
meaningless expressions or
maybe work well done as
hot mouths meet.

Along The Mall

2008-02-15T08:40:00.000Z

Mighty Queen, astride her Loyal Peoples,
Indian Empress, Lord of all She sees:
Model for the modern world.

Proud lips plumped out with
colonial collagen, chest made
massive slavishly, implanted.

Once mean mouth
and modest breasts,
all swollen, stolen.

Tractors

2008-02-13T20:20:00.003Z

Big blue prairie, crossed

by sky-tractors, sowing

rows of our destruction.

Bastard Baby

2008-02-12T08:46:00.001Z

For you, my sister, who has so many hopes made human.

There’s an icy fog this morning
and I’m listening to the frosty whispers,
sussurating breath against the brittle reeds,
and working through a simple problem:
if we have nothing, and you can’t, and she can,
what more is there to say?
And the same sum, simplified:
two minus n (bracketed for years)
plus another one
equals two (without the brackets)
divided by the one who now has n.
Where n is my beloved, longed-for,
hope-made-human, bastard baby.
So sing, you brittle reeds:
I have another mouth to feed.

Thank you for the first thought.

Tonight

2008-02-05T13:39:00.000Z

Tonight we walk on the ghosts of pavements,
barefoot, backwards, sideways, down,
slide through the stone till our toes meet the silt,
burrowing mole-blind into the mud,
coating our skins with the wet, shiny darkness,
plastering, fingering, sculpting ourselves,
weaving arm around arm and finger in finger,
leaving legs to meander from delta to delta,
make a bed for the night in the folds of the river,
in lustrous cloacae, on shell-crusted silk.

Tonight we sleep a dreamless half-life,
dead to the world and deaf to the stars,
wake to the shout of the sun and the shadows
thrown by the clouds as they run off to sea,
break from the hold of our hard-baked bedclothes,
bathing our bodies in blue-green sky,
shedding our shells in the wind-whipped water,
seeking our selves in the eyes of the other,
find what was wanting and want what we find:
I, you in your eyes and you, me in mine.

Sidewalk

2008-01-31T08:49:00.000Z

I dreamt that I walked on the ghosts of pavements,
barefoot, sideways, backwards, down. Slipped through
the solid seeming earth, curled my toes around silt and sand.
Felt the moss moisten, stone bruise my unaccustomed heel.
Heard the loud birds. Saw my city's morning nakedness.

Wasting time

2008-01-22T10:03:00.001Z

Please tell me why you've visited this poem. More of you visit this one than any other, and I'm intrigued. You can comment here or email me at malcolmwilson01@hotmail.com.

Like Petrarch, I could write about a deer
encountered, loved and lost again,
whine like Wyatt or, like Shakespeare
build a clever argument, complain
of love’s unfairness, remain uncertain,
end with a coupled question mark in rhyme.
But how can fourteen lines contain
my anger, or explain my cliff-top climb
in search of you, describe the time
we kissed and clung together
twenty years ago, and how I’m
always looking out for you, forever
raking over everything we did and said?
A waste of time: we loved; you’re dead.

Row K

2008-01-15T12:06:00.000Z

While the poet reads,

I occupy myself with you,
a head in front of me:
watch your artlessly parted careless hair,
and the nape that my eyes
have stroked a hundred times,
and the curls that my hundred hands
have run their fingers through.
And yes, one hundred conversations
I have dreamt and crumple up,

now the show is over.

at the awards

2008-01-13T23:20:00.002Z

I saw Peter Porter piss tonight. No, I almost did. Held the door
to let his parting thankyou out while other Published Poets,
(marked with backstage passes) eased their arses, steadied legs,
looked up, performed. I waited, watching their backs.

One day I'll be the same. Take my turn, walk forward,
rock from heel to toe, relax my frightened arse, arrange myself.
Publicly perform my private act. Spotlit, facing all of you.
A woman's faltering, stuttering trickle.

Afterwards

2008-01-09T15:13:00.000Z

Nothing prepares you for the cold stone
contours, crags, gashes, gullies, gouges
of a broken body. Empty sepulchre,

my son.

I lift him, drag him backwards,
wrap round him, make believe
my blood is running through him,
feel him come to life inside me.

Taste the bitterness of knowing.

Smell dead sweat.
Start to wash him.

Quilt

2007-12-24T19:50:00.000Z

Tenderly,
we turn the patient,
watch its torn skin
seeping softness,
change its dressing,
keep it living
one more winter.

One Night

2007-12-13T11:21:00.001Z

One night: two lorries.
Beasts asleep beneath
a sheltering bridge.

On my daughter's coming of age

2007-12-13T11:19:00.002Z

We walked like lambs, blind to the wolves
that gathered at the mountain's shoulders;
trailed off, grew tired, turned silent;
climbed icy black boot-polished steps;
clawed for certainty with frightened fingers.

You asked me where to go: I didn't know,
and something changed. Granite gave way.
An inch, no more, but now you're leading.

Oradour

2007-11-23T09:03:00.001Z

....

A quick question: who is it that keeps visiting this poem at Leeds University? I've had quite a few hits from the same place. And what is that interests you? The history, or the writing?

....

Stilled life. Vacant, silent streets,
houses, holes in walls, in doors,
spaces where there shouldn’t be.

The church is cold, empty but
for us, broken windows, words
on the walls, melted pushchairs.

And on the hill a graveyard,
corpse-crowded, watches us
walk around their empty town.

Outside, out of place, a Sinto,
sepia-skinned, is running with
his horse, his caravan, his home.

Souviens-toi. Remember.
Ruins, wreckage on the shore.
Not what I thought; what I saw.

This is about a place that haunts me. It's a few miles from where my parents live and it stands, I think, as a monument to our always-lurking inhumanity. Like the poem says, this is what I saw when I visited the place (though I see the ghosts only in my recollection of the place). The Sinto - Rom, Gipsy, whatever - was running beside his wooden, horse-drawn caravan as I came out of Oradour. He seemed so ancient. As the Roma people suffered their own holocaust, it seemed strangely apt to see someone like him so alive, running, running.

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Here is the first chapter of Sarah Farmer's book, Martyred Village- Commemorating the 1944 Massacre at Oradour-sur-Glane (University of California Press) taken from the New York Times, site, at http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/f/farmer-village.html?_r=2&oref=slogin. You can obtain Sarah's book at http://www.amazon.co.uk/Martyred-Village-Commemorating-Massacre-OradoursurGlane/dp/0520224833/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1195824539&sr=8-1

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The ruins of the town of Oradour-sur-Glane lie twenty-two kilometers northwest of Limoges in the Limousin region of west central France. Made up of the departments of the Creuse, the Corrèze, and the Haute-Vienne, the Limousin is, for the most part, rural, poor, and sparsely populated. The upland country of the Limousin is, for many of the French, a backward area one passes through on the way between the Paris region and the south. The region has never been prosperous and has produced few of the cultural riches that attract outsiders. The appeal of the Limousin is in its verdant fields, rolling landscape, and a way of life that is slow to change.
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Before its destruction, Oradour was a bourg: a compact market town, set between the wild hills of the Monts de Blond and the valley of the Vienne, that served a large surrounding agricultural community. The census of 1936, the last taken before the war, indicates that 330 people lived in the town proper--most of them artisans and shopkeepers. The local notables (a notary, two doctors, a pharmacist, a postal receiver, and a priest) also resided in the bourg. The rest of the commune's 1,574 residents were spread out in the fifty-three hamlets and small farms that lay clustered around the town.
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Greater social contrasts existed within the bourg than in the countryside. In town there were a few bourgeois families that, over generations, had accumulated power and material security. The Desourteaux family, for example, had family members in the professions and commerce. Dr. Paul Desourteaux ran a medical practice with his son Jacques and lived in an imposing stone house on the main street--the rue Emile Desourteaux, named after his grandfather who had been mayor from 1892 to 1906. His three other sons, Hubert, Paul, Etienne, were, respectively, proprietor of a garage, a grocer, and the secretary in the mayor's office.
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In the interwar period, Oradour was also a lively center of sociability. There were numerous cafes, three musical clubs, a soccer team, and two veterans' associations from the Great War. On Sundays, clubs from Limoges would come by tram to spend the day on the banks of the Glane, where they organized fishing contests. Commercial and social connections created a tightly knit extended community. Local farmers came into Oradour to conduct all manner of business. Their wives ventured into town less frequently but could be seen on the semimonthly market days going to the local grocer, or sometimes stopping at the fabric shop of Monsieur Dupic in the main street. The commune's elementary schools were in town, so many children from outlying hamlets walked into Oradour to go to school. In 1944, 64 boys and 106 girls from the commune were enrolled in Oradour's schools. The smallest children attended the nursery school.
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In the early summer of 1944, Oradour-sur-Glane was a prosperous, tranquil haven, largely protected from the deprivations of war. The biggest disturbance to family life was the absence of men who had been drafted to work in Germany or were still prisoners of war after being captured during the short campaign of 1939-1940. All in all, people lived well here; there was no shortage of food and the German occupation of Limoges seemed far away. When asked in 1988 if in Oradour one had had the feeling of being at war, a survivor of the massacre, Marcel Darthout, responded: "Not that much. Yes and no, but in general not that much. One eats well in the country. One finds what one wants. One finds poultry. Then bread, that's a big problem. We got bread that wasn't very good, but one managed to find white flour. It wasn't bad. It was a very agreeable life." The Germans occupied the southern part of France starting in November 1942. Their presence was less obtrusive there than in Paris and the cities of the north. Today, people of Oradour claim that until the massacre no German, at least none in uniform, had been seen in wartime Oradour.
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During the war, banking on the relative isolation of the spot, many well-to-do residents of Limoges stored their cars in barns in Oradour to hide them from the Germans. One resident of Oradour, recalling his family's perceptions at the time, captured the prevailing mood: "Really, we sort of thought that we were--that we weren't part of the war. We thought that we wouldn't be concerned by the war--anyway, not a lot...."
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The apparent safety and obvious comfort of Oradour had already attracted refugees. In 1939, twenty-six Spanish loyalists fleeing the civil war settled in Oradour. The Second World War brought more outsiders: in September 1939, the French government evacuated 380,000 residents--for the most part women, children, and young people--from the department of the Bas-Rhin in Alsace and sent them to the Limousin, Dordogne, Perigord, and the Charente. Oradour was designated to host residents of the town of Schiltigheim, an industrial suburb of Strasbourg.
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For the Alsatians, as well as residents of "the interior," this encounter proved difficult. Eighty percent of the Alsatians did not speak French. They were often viewed with suspicion and disdain by their hosts, who, imitating the Alsatian word for "yes," referred to them as les ya-ya. In addition, Alsace was a devoutly Catholic region in which, alone among the regions of France, religious instruction was offered in school. (When Alsace rejoined France in 1918, after having been annexed by Germany in 1871, it was allowed to keep the religious instruction in schools that the French parliament had abolished in 1905.) When Alsatian refugees sought religious instruction for their children, it did not sit well in the radical, secular, leftist regions of the Limousin and Perigord.
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Fleeing the German advance in May 1940, millions of French and Belgians poured into southern France. The Haute-Vienne received the fourth largest number of refugees of any department. One month later, eighty-four expellees came to Oradour from the Lorraine towns of Charly and Montois-Flauville near Metz. By 1943, approximately one hundred refugees from the different areas of France had settled in the community. In addition to the Lorrains, women and children from the Paris region, Montpellier, and Avignon boarded with local families or rented rooms in Oradour's hotels and inns. Some of these refugees had been born in eastern Europe and were probably Jewish. It is difficult to know exactly how many people resided in the town of Oradour on the eve of the massacre. The commune as a whole counted at least 1,664 residents.
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Oradour also received local visitors. Five trams a day ran in each direction from Limoges to St-Junien, with a stop in Oradour. The trip from Limoges to Oradour took a little over an hour. On Saturdays during the war years, residents of Limoges came by tram to provision themselves with meat and other items that were in short supply in the city. The Limogeauds often made the trip into a day's outing, spending the morning shopping and then taking the afternoon to picnic or fish on the banks of Glane, which passed under a bridge at the southern entrance to the town.
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Arriving at Oradour from Limoges, the tram stopped before the bridge at the edge of town. This was the stop for the hamlets of Les Bordes, Le Mas du Puy, and Laplaud. The tram then continued across the bridge and up the main road, passing, on the left, the impressive village church with its twelfth-century romanesque vaulted chancel and fifteenth-century nave and side chapels. The Church had progressively lost ground in the region since the French Revolution, but Oradour once was an important local religious center; the name is believed to derive from the Limousin word ouradour, which comes from the Latin oratorium, or place of prayer. Ouradours were generally rudimentary square chapels at the intersection of important roads.
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A small marketplace and the Café/Hôtel Milord faced the church. A few yards up, the road to the hamlet of Les Bordes branched off to the right. On its journey up the main road, the tram passed shops, barns, a garage, workshops, private dwellings, the girls' school, and the entrance to the large marketplace. Across the street from this marketplace stood the house of Dr. Paul Desourteaux, the wartime mayor of Oradour. As the tram approached the north end of town, it stopped at the little station next to the post office and across from the town hall before continuing out of Oradour toward Javerdat and the small city of St-Junien, thirteen kilometers to the southwest.

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10 June 1944

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Saturdays were often busy in Oradour and this one--four days after the Allied invasion of Normandy--was no exception. Saturday afternoon was a time for running errands, getting a haircut at the Café Duchêne, or chatting with neighbors. For the young men who often took a few hours to socialize in town on Saturday, there was the added attraction of the afternoon distribution of the tobacco ration. On this Saturday, school attendance was good because a medical check was scheduled for the afternoon.
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At approximately two o'clock the midday calm was shattered by the appearance of German troops at the southeastern entrance to the village. The soldiers quickly blocked the entrances to Oradour. Sentinels fanned out and encircled the town and some of the neighboring farms. These 120 soldiers were members of the Der Führer regiment of the Waffen SS tank division Das Reich, which had been sent toward Limoges a few days before to fight the Resistance. As soldiers went from house to house, the Germans sent the town crier through the streets to call the population to assemble in the central marketplace. Meanwhile, soldiers in armored cars rounded up men working in nearby farms and fields.
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According to survivors' accounts, most of Oradour's inhabitants obeyed the orders, believing they had nothing more to fear than a routine check of identity papers. Some, mostly men who feared being deported to Germany, concealed themselves in barns, attics, and basements. Martial Brissaud, for example, a nineteen-year-old whose family lived at the western edge of town, hid in the attic while the Germans searched the house. Later he sneaked into the garden, where he lay flat on the ground until he could escape to the woods beyond town.
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The SS soldiers moved quickly through town, hunting people out of their houses and driving them toward the market square. When soldiers came to the makeshift school for refugee children from the Lorraine, eight-year-old Roger Godfrin fled out the back door of the school building. He hid for a while in a field of tall grass and then ran on toward the Glane. Though shot at by German soldiers, he made it across the river to safety. He was the only schoolchild in Oradour to survive. One other little boy survived, André Pinède, who was not attending school.
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Within an hour the Germans had gathered the townspeople in the marketplace. Dr. Jacques Desourteaux, who had been out on a house call in a neighboring hamlet, was stopped as he drove back into town and ordered to join the crowd. At about three o'clock, the soldiers separated the women and children from the crowd, herded them to the church, and shut them in. Speaking through an interpreter, an officer addressed the 200 to 250 men remaining in the square. He announced that the SS knew of a cache of arms and munitions at Oradour and demanded that all those who possessed guns step forward. When nothing came of this, the officer turned to the mayor, Paul Desourteaux, and instructed him to designate hostages from among the townspeople. The mayor refused, offering himself and his sons instead. After taking Desourteaux back to the town hall for discussion, the Germans apparently changed their minds about singling out captives. Mayor Desourteaux returned to the crowd, and the officer announced that his men were going to search the town.
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Following a signal from the commander, the SS soldiers then divided the men into groups and hustled them off to various barns and garages around the marketplace. The only ones to survive what was about to happen were six young men from the group of sixty-two shut into the Laudy barn. While the men stood in the barn, talking nervously among themselves, an SS solider set up a machine gun on a tripod. Other soldiers stood guard. They waited. Then, from outside, came the sound of a detonation: the signal to fire. Someone shouted a command, and bullets mowed down the Frenchmen. Soldiers came forward to give a coup de grâce to those who might still be alive. The Germans then covered the bodies with straw, kindling, and phosphorous and set fire to the building. The six who survived had been standing near the front of the group; they were protected by the bodies that fell on them. One, Marcel Darthout, described the moment: "We felt the bullets, which brought me down. I dove ... everyone was on top of me. And they were still firing. And there was shouting. And crying. I had a friend who was lying on top of me and who was moaning. And then it was over. No more shots. And they came at us, stepping on us. And with a rifle they finished us off. They finished off the buddy who was on top of me. I felt it when he died."
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As smoke filled the barn, the survivors groped their way through a small door that led into another barn. Three of them hid in the loft, the others behind a woodpile. When that refuge was set on fire, they crawled outdoors and surreptitiously worked their way over walls and gardens toward the edge of town. Only five made it: Pierre-Henri Poutaraud was killed on the way by a sentinel. By seven in the evening the others had reached safety. Behind them, Oradour burned. In the late afternoon the SS soldiers had gone through the streets pillaging houses and shops, systematically setting Oradour on fire and shooting people forced out of hiding by the flames.
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While the Germans were killing the men of Oradour, the women had been locked in the church. At approximately five o'clock, two soldiers came in and placed a large chest on the altar. They retreated, laying out a long fuse, which they lit before shutting the door. Moments later the chest exploded, releasing clouds of suffocating smoke and blowing out some of the church windows. In the ensuing chaos, the soldiers opened the door and sprayed the group with gunfire. They piled flammable material on some of the bodies, set a bonfire with the church pews, and abandoned the building.
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Only one person managed to save herself from the conflagration. Marguerite Rouffanche, a forty-seven-year-old woman, had been part of a group that pushed back into the sacristy in search of fresh air. As the church burned, she crawled behind the altar and found a stool used for lighting candles. She managed to climb up and out the window. She dropped three meters to the ground below. Looking up, Madame Rouffanche saw that she had been followed by a young woman with a baby. The young woman handed down her baby before jumping, but all three were caught in a hail of machine-gun fire. Mother and child were killed; wounded, Madame Rouffanche was able to crawl into the garden of the presbytery, where she hid among rows of peas.
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In the early evening of 10 June, the Germans stopped the last tram from Limoges as it approached Oradour. SS soldiers forced twenty-two residents of the commune of Oradour to step off the tram before sending it back to Limoges. The passengers were held for two hours and then released with no explanation. Terrified, they took refuge in nearby hamlets or spent the night in the woods.
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On the morning of 11 June, all that remained of Oradour was a smoldering mass of burnt farms, shops, and houses. Six hundred forty-two people had died. The losses included 393 people living in Oradour (longtime residents and 84 refugees), 167 people from the villages and hamlets of the commune, 33 people from Limoges, and 25 others from different parts of the Haute-Vienne. Roughly 80 residents of Oradour survived in one way or another: the men from the Laudy barn, Roger Godfrin, Marguerite Rouffanche, 28 who hid from the roundup and managed to escape the encircled town, and approximately 36 others who happened to be away for the day, like the butcher Desvignes, who had gone to the market in St-Victurnien, and the postman, Gabriel Senon, who had been out on his rounds. Twelve other men were away as prisoners of war, working in Germany as part of Vichy's compulsory labor service, the Service du Travail Obligatoire (STO); or enrolled in the chantiers de jeunesse, Vichy's youth camps.
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The massacre blighted outlying areas as well. The hamlets remained physically intact, but they lost their young children who had been in the school at Oradour. The village of Le Mas du Puy is typical. Of the forty-four people recorded in the census of 1936 as living in this settlement, fourteen died in Oradour, among them four mothers and eight children between the ages of five and ten. The mothers, concerned that their children had not come home from school, had gone to town looking for them. They died with them in the church.
.
News of a disaster in Oradour spread quickly in the immediate vicinity. Albert Valade, a fourteen-year-old boy at the time, had been tending his uncle's cows outside of town on the afternoon of 10 June. As he stood in a small green field cut by the Glane in the late afternoon, something dark floated to the ground and caught his eye. It was a burned page of paper on which he could read the words of the catechism.
.
André Desourteaux, the twenty-year-old grandson of the mayor, worked for the postal service in Limoges during the week. On the weekends he would return home to Oradour, where his parents ran a grocery store in the rue Emile Desourteaux. On Sunday morning, 11 June, Desourteaux took his bicycle on the train as far as St-Victurnien and then rode toward Oradour. As he entered the town, he encountered his friend Martial Brissaud, who told him that everyone was dead. Desourteaux had lost his parents, two sisters, three uncles, and both grandfathers.
.
That day, survivors of the massacre and peasants from outlying villages came into Oradour, on foot and by bicycle, to search the burning village for relatives and friends. Madame Rouffanche was discovered, wounded but alive, lying behind the church. Smoke from the burning town could be seen as far away as St-Victurnien, Limoges, and Bellac.
.

The terror was not yet over. In the early hours of Monday a group of German soldiers, possibly sent from Limoges, entered the ruined village and set about burying bodies. They hastily dug shallow graves behind barns, next to the church, and in various gardens throughout the village. They removed some half-burned corpses from the church. They piled bodies in the basement and covered them with debris and the twisted remains of baby carriages. After a few hours, unable to dispose completely of the mass of bodies, they withdrew from Oradour--now a city of the dead.

.
Today

.
Some three hundred thousand people a year turn off the main highway and make their way along smaller country roads of the Haute-Vienne to reach the crumbling vestiges of the village martyr. Almost all (89 percent) of the visitors are French, usually stopping off on their way to or from vacation. Of the foreigners, 53 percent are English and 40 percent Dutch, many of whom continue south to vacation in the Dordogne. A third of the yearly visitors come in August.
.
On the warm days of August, throngs of families with young children, groups of friends, and couples stroll down the main street, peering into the gutted houses and filing in and out of the church where the women and children of Oradour were closed in and burned to death. The rusted tramlines running through the town, the handsome carved stone lettering on the facade of the old post office, the gaping shopfronts, and the plaques that list the names and professions of the people who once lived here conjure up a vitality of rural life that has vanished from the France of today, a time when the streets of Oradour were full of activity.

15 November 2007

2007-11-15T09:03:00.000Z

What beauty.

Blue Earth floating over

dusty, pockmarked hills,

held in hundreds of hands,

a hundred thousand eyes, millions

of minds, then thrown away.

One image in a morning paper,

caught in the clattering stair teeth,

endlessly moving.

2007-11-14T21:54:00.000Z

Peripheral Vision

Body..............................Funny.............................slumped
behind............................thing,.....................the half-closed
door............................peripheral........................of a public
toilet,............................vision...............................furtive
mugger............................Ever..............................walking
just beside.......................tried...................................me,
friend.............................to see................................who's
trying.............................what's.............................to catch
my eye............................there?.............................My eye.
Faulty.............................Out of.............................window,
wanting............................sight,.............................to show
me the............................out of............................darkness
at its..............................my tiny ............................edges,
where .............................mind..............................images

wait.

Midnight

2007-11-13T09:47:00.001Z

The spilt, smeared, white
reflective paint marks out
.......a roadkilled dog.
The whispering leaves
.......a running fox
.......on yellow snow.
Brown bins stand at gates,
.......silent house-guards.
High, haloed tigers’ eyes
.......light me home,
make my midnight footpad,
.......dark companion,
.......mark my pace
behind, beside, before me.

Because

2007-11-08T21:33:00.000Z

How can you, with all that supposed straight talk,
use such stupid lies on him? How can you stay?
How can I, without one good reason to be
here, assume that you’re not just lying to me?

Where can I, inside this empty, angry space,
be as close as I once was, lying by you?
Where inside this soulless shell, our flat, might I
find any scrap or shred of our love, our life?

Why – despite the nights unslept, notes sent, tears cried,
all that time spent waiting on signs that might show
you loved me still – why, given all that I’ve tried –
why must I still keep this love aching for you?

I can see it now: because I loved my dream
more than your flesh. More than the truth, the real you.

The sonnet has three questioning quatrains and a concluding couplet. Lines are Sapphic. This means that each line has eleven syllables (rather than stresses), following the Sapphic metrical structure: Long-short Long-short Long-short-short Long-short Long-Long.

I set myself the challenge this morning as I’m always struggling to escape from my own experience and write with other voices, about other things. The villanelle earlier this week helped immensely. I started reading about sonnets, but was dissatisfied with ‘straight’ Petrarchan or Shakespearian forms.

So I thought, why not try to create a queer sonnet? I picked a metre that doesn’t fit easily with English (which favours stressed patterns rather than syllabic ones). I decided to dispense with deliberate (though not accidental) rhyme patterns as I don’t like them and thought it would be too difficult to sustain abba, abba, cdecde with such a rigid metrical pattern. And as I’m British, I thought we should go for the four, four, four, two formation rather than the continental line-up of four, four, six. (Sounding a bit too much like football for my liking.)

I’m also – quite accidentally – following the approach of Sappho’s ‘Phainetai Moi’, which has a “you”, an “I” and a “he”. And that’s the point: as I have struggled with almost random words to fit the form, an intense story emerged. I didn’t know where it was going, and it was exciting to see the story appear.

Love, do not leave me

2007-11-05T20:50:00.000Z

This is my attempt at a villanelle. Very difficult.

Love, do not leave me while I am still here:
I haven’t the strength to be lonely and old.
Hold, hold me hard now the ending is near.

I haven’t the time to make up for the years
of angry words shouted and love left untold.
Love, please don’t leave me while I am still here.

I hadn’t the sense when the first signs appeared:
we just kept on rocking and on the years rolled.
Hold, hold me hard now the ending is near.

I haven’t the language to tell you how dear
was the feel of your body, each wrinkle and fold:
love, please stay with me while I am still here.

I haven’t the courage to live with my fear
of dying alone in the dark and the cold:
hold, hold me hard now the ending is near.

I have only a moment: it’s too late for tears.
I cannot buy time now with flowers or gold.
For God’s sake don’t leave me, let me know that you’re near
and I’ll hold, hold you hard now the ending is here.

L'Indole

2007-11-04T15:13:00.000Z

This is a poem in response to Baudelaire's petit poeme en prose, 'Le Chien et le flacon'.

"Let me show you shit in London's heart. Behind the berry sweetness of the alleyways where someone, some time not so long ago, bent to nature's need and filled an empty place with something quite familiar. Not the fruity mask; the musk beneath, the scent of baby's filthy bed. The secret in the warmth of every perfume in the shop fronts yards away from where we stand."

"This smell, whose hint compels, excess repels, is ours in essence. And, without a human reek, what would any story of this city be, but empty alleys?"

Baudelaire's words are:

"- Mon beau chien, mon bon chien, mon cher toutou, approchez et venez respirer un excellent parfum acheté chez le meilleur parfumeur de la ville." Et le chien, en frétillant de la queue, ce qui est, je crois, chez ces pauvres êtres, le signe correspondant du rire et du sourire, s'approche et pose curieusement son nez humide sur le flacon débouché; puis, reculant soudainement avec effroi, il aboie contre moi, en manière de reproche.

"- Ah! misérable chien, si je vous avais offert un paquet d'excréments, vous l'auriez flairé avec délices et peut-être dévoré. Ainsi, vous-même, indigne compagnon de ma triste vie, vous ressemblez au public, à qui il ne faut jamais présenter des parfums délicats qui l'exaspèrent, mais des ordures soigneusement choisies."

Dog, Dancing

2007-10-17T09:05:00.000+01:00

This is a long thought-about poem. I've been trying to find a way of expressing the pointless anger and emptiness of a bad day - and to articulate Monty Don's ideas about gardening and its therapeutic effects on depression. This is not intended to be autobiographical - I tend to walk into the garden full of happy anticipation. But perhaps when I am in a black mood, it'll be me...

It's meant to emulate Anglo-Saxon verse. Two stresses in each half line and alliteration in each line. It doesn't always, but I don't altogether care. In fact, in one or two places, I depart from it for effect. Does it work?

I scratch at my back with broken nails,
fingers filthy from daggered earth,
set about the dark, damp soil,
driven, dogged by blackening day.

Blisters burst: red, raw skin
my empty anger’s battleground.
Fork-hit flint flies, shatters
silence, scatters shrapnel.

I claw at the crumbling crust,
heavy-handed, clutch stems,
rip roots, drag them out,
throw them at my dancing dog.

My dog. Half-bred friend
who sees my mood, cowers,
comes back, sniffs out
my company, betters me.

I bow and dig, back bent,
head low, heaviness lightening.
Hacking at the hurting earth
but breathing easier, slower.

Breathing cold, whispering soft,
holding hard words in my head.

If this is a man

2007-10-07T15:34:00.001+01:00

This is a collage of Genesis, Paradise Lost, The Tempest, The Well of Loneliness and, of course, Primo Levi's writing. The object and subject become horribly blurred.

Though I see you everywhere,
I no more know you now than
when I first looked up. You
made me, male and female

in your image: loved my valour,
contemplation, softness, sweet
attractive grace. But I am dust
now, curst who loved you first.

Too maimed to love, this thing
I am is sin against the image
I have dared resemble. You
created, killed, demolished me:

Cain, Caliban, a living corpse
that lies with corpses. No more
in man’s eyes than a thing, my
language lacks the words for

your offence. You made me:
now you need do nothing else.
And me? I’m all potential.
But without performance

I am nothing more.

After so many iterations, I have discovered the story behind this poem.

A parent creates a child. Genetically, that child is no more and no less than its parents. The act of making is theirs alone. In some cases, though not in every case, that act is also one of narcissism: “in my image”. And the child, out of its nature, looks up and loves the face it sees: coincidentally most often its creator.

Making this story Biblical and Edenic, God’s act of creation could be seen as narcissism. Here he was in this great void, creating this and creating that – but with no satisfaction, because light, dark, earth, water, trees and animals don’t answer back, don’t express their love for their creator. So he made man, who mirrored him. And in a further mirroring – so aptly put by Satan in Paradise Lost – God created Eve out of Adam. Adam “for God”, and Eve “for God in Man”.

So far, so egotistical. But Adam and Eve screwed up: they disobeyed their parent and exercised free will. Turning the story back to parenting: early on and in general your child conforms to your will and to the perpetuation of your image. Then the little bugger takes a different tack – that’s what teens are about. You go ape: how can this child throw everything that you’ve done, turn away from the path you’ve dreamt out? That path might not look explicitly like your own image, but it’s formed out of your likes and dislikes about yourself and your own upbringing.

Thought of in this way, it’s not a bad thing: you want the best for the child and have a duty to help it grow up. And you only have your own subjectivity to guide your approach: even in reading others’ advice, you can escape from that subjectivity. At some stage it is healthy for the child to escape from your subjectivity.

So back to the ape: you lose it and say, “That’s it! You can do what you want but you’re getting no more help from me!” Or you could become even more controlling.

The Old Testament is the story of an angry, controlling parent. Perhaps, just perhaps, the New Testament is that parent realising that it has to loosen its grip once and for all. The act of sacrifice is the loosening of control and the affirmation of a parent’s proper place. It’s a pretty crude way of doing it: I don’t intend to be tortured to death as a way of saying to Ellie that perhaps she can have her own way from time to time. But it’s a reassuring twist in the fable: angry Dad letting go but saying he’ll always be there for junior/s. As Matthew’s Gospel says, “And remember, I am with you always, day by day, until the Close of the Age.” It may all be a fairytale, but it tells us about our own nature because it was written by people sharing our own nature.

Back to this poem: it starts out with an act of creation, followed by the love of the created one and the satisfaction of the creator in what he say of his own image in the created. Then there is rejection – and more importantly, the sense of rejection from the created one, a sense of being a maimed version of what should have been. After that, it goes to extremes - in the quotation from Primo Levi. These are the consequences of fucked up creator/created relationships. But they are no more extreme than their Biblical or even contemporary parallels.

The conclusion, for the created, is that the creator’s initial act of creation is enough. Back off now. For the created, there is the possibility of remaining a maimed image, or of drawing a line under that and recognising its own potential. That would be a positive outcome. But, as the poem concludes, if the created doesn’t perform, doesn’t live adventurously, it is potential and nothing else.

Hopefulness

2007-10-05T18:25:00.000+01:00

This is yet another piece of homework, and unashamedly doggerel. We had to 'do' a poem that defined an abstract word. I took the last word of the last poem and worked on it...

It's hurrying to the barrier
when the platform's all but empty,

it's not worrying about the Sunday roast
because Tesco always has plenty.

It's smiling at a stranger
and expecting a reply,

it's planting a row of tomatoes
and assuming they won't die.

It's talking to a five year-old
and asking, "Is that clear?"

But most of all it's opening this book
and waiting for words to appear.

Water Colour

2007-10-04T08:20:00.000+01:00

Another piece of homework. "Use five words from THIS list (I'm using water, cloud, oil, mist and ink) and at least one word from THIS list (I'm using jaundiced and molecule)". It has taken fourteen iterations (no, make that fifteen now) to get to this stage.

Way above the diesel puddles,
where its poor relations play
with oil and water, shines an
arc, a multi-million molecule
mist of many-coloured inks,
washing the jaundiced clouds
with hopefulness.

The weariness of trains

2007-10-02T06:55:00.000+01:00

Day after day I dream the weariness of trains
rattling on their way to tired, greying termini
with rows of nodding heads on crowded shoulders,
faces masking irritation at the endless stops
and starts, the coughs and farts, the seething heat
beneath the seats, the shuffling feet in secret
wars for other spaces; and all the time for
everyone to see and none to notice, lovers laughing.

Day after day I climb the clattering stairs to light,
cold air and open, busy spaces, men with cases
marching fast, suited women pushing past
- and all oblivious to the lovers locked
in one last kiss beside the blue-green river.

This was my homework for the week: write a poem using loads of objects. It had to have thirteen lines containing a sentence of eight lines and one of five. Each line had to be at least ten beats. At least two lines had to contain alliteration and there had to be lots of feeling. Fancy marking my homework?

Sweet Jesus

2007-10-01T14:19:00.000+01:00

Sweet Jesus Christ

words worn to threads by men
who never knew his smell his taste
the touch of his hands the look
in his eyes the power of his arms
arms strong from aching
day in day out work

Oh Jesus wept

so he did
for me for stupid Peter
poor old Judas every
godforsaken one of us

Holy Mother

the press of his chest
the weight of him
his whipchord hardness
braced against my

God

I can't believe
he's gone for good

Here's the second voice, Mary Magdalene's, best spoken in my head with a Northern Irish accent. It'll either earn me the Christian equivalent of a fatwah or the Dan Brown award for the idiotically implausible, but I'd like to imagine that Jesus was human enough to have loved a woman. And in return, I'd like to imagine Mary loved him and treasured his physical memory. Why shouldn't he have loved? He was, after all, entirely human as well as anything else he might have been.

I have left out all punctuation because her words shouldn't be limited by it - and can be turned, stopped and twisted to suit a reader's wishes, just as Mary's own life was.

Last Words

2007-09-29T09:50:00.000+01:00

High up here, with the wind’s whisper willing to me to fly
and no attendant angels there to catch me.
No hope of Heaven now with him,
whom they will say I simply sold for silver.

“One of you,” he said. I stood. Send me, I thought,
instead of him, the heavy-handed hot-head; instead of her,
who loves you most, who’s closest to your blood and body.
Let me be nearest to you at the end.

My end is here, hopeless, roped onto a shaking gallows tree.
I fail to see. I fall. I feel the branches break my. I –

Now there are going to be some (well there would be if anyone actually read this) who will think me morbid and excessively God-bothering. Perhaps, but this is one of my favourite stories and is the first of a three-part attempt to write the other voices around the crucifiction. Those of Mary Magdalene, hot-headed idiot Peter and poor, despairing Judas. You don't have to believe: it's just a cracking story. The poem's written in response to Carol Ann Duffy's 'Queen Herod', which is far better than I could ever be.

Love Song

2007-09-27T14:39:00.000+01:00

Thank God you're back,
between the grubby sheets,
beneath the creased black covers.

Back on crowded mornings, whispering
in my empty ears, scribbling
secret notes across my thoughts.

Back beside me in the café window
watching London walk to work,
thick-thieved in conversation.

Back because I need you;
but when Summer stuffs my days
with doing, you'll fall silent.

Irregular Rhythm

2007-06-21T12:43:00.001+01:00

For my father, on the day after the rhythm of his heart was corrected

Fifty beats to tell you how I feel, to
shape emotions out of language, find ways
to show my love in five reluctant lines,
and end a manly silence that spans years:
forty faltering words that say I need you.

Person from Porlock Moment

2007-06-20T09:14:00.000+01:00

Now I'm sure you're all aware of the slightly dubious excuse given by Coleridge for turning out such a truncated version of his mighty, imagined 'Kubla Khan':

"The Author continued for about three hours in a profound sleep, at least of the external senses, during which time he has the most vivid confidence, that he could not have composed less than from two to three hundred lines; if that indeed can be called composition in which all the images rose up before him as things, with a parallel production of the correspondent expressions, without any sensation or consciousness of effort. On awakening he appeared to himself to have a distinct recollection of the whole, and taking his pen, ink, and paper, instantly and eagerly wrote down the lines that are here preserved. At this moment he was unfortunately called out by a person on business from Porlock, and detained by him above an hour, and on his return to his room, found, to his no small surprise and mortification, that though he still retained some vague and dim recollection of the general purport of the vision, yet, with the exception of some eight or ten scattered lines and images, all the rest had passed away like the images on the surface of a stream into which a stone has been cast, but, alas! without the after restoration of the latter!"

Now what has all this verbiage got to do with this Wednesday morning in London?

Well, I was reading Derek Walcott's poem, 'Forest of Europe', on the tube. I hadn't slept much last night and this poem, with its profound sweep from "the lemon Neva" to Archangel and on to Los Angeles, Oklahoma and beyond, got me thinking. And then feeling. So when I stepped out of Starbucks with my soya chai latte (no water, thanks) I became overwhelmed with my own feelings and thoughts. A sort of flood of political, geophysical and emotional imagery and feeling, both global and intensely personal. It was so strong that I had to stop. The light and motion in the street was a distraction, so I closed my eyes. I was rocked by the feelings, so I had to find a wall - just to touch, to maintain my presence in the present. I stood and let it flow over and through me, waiting for it to emerge as words.

And then this voice said, "Are you alright?" End of visionary moment. I snapped awake and looked at the lady who'd crossed the road to my rescue. "It's just that you looked as if you were ill."

I had to laugh. "This is going to sound so pretentious. I've just been reading a poem and I had to think about it." She laughed. We parted.

All I have left is the feeling of it, eddies, aftershocks, echoes. But my God it was a great moment.

No place for poetry

2007-04-20T09:40:00.000+01:00

I have just been reading an excerpt from the second amendment to the American constitution:

“A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”

I found it on a website called fee.org, relating to a publication called The Freeman. The author says,

"Is this sentence so hard to understand? Apparently so. Even some of its defenders don’t like how it is worded because it allegedly breeds misunderstanding. But the Second Amendment of the Bill of Rights is indeed a well-crafted sentence. By that I mean that its syntax permits only one reasonable interpretation of the authors’ meaning, namely, that the people’s individual right to be armed ought to be respected and that the resulting armed populace will be secure against tyranny, invasion, and crime. Someone completely ignorant of the eighteenth-century American political debates but familiar with the English language should be able to make out the meaning easily. "

The author makes a decent fist of a close reading of the sentence. But he misses one thing: the drafters of the constitution and its amendments ARE LONG DEAD. It's the same sort of argument that says that every word in the bible is absolutely 'true', without any attempt to understand its context.

At the time of the second amendment, there was a real danger of a colonial power using force to take back power. And there was no standing army, nor was there yet a strong tradition of such a thing. So you're an eighteenth century American, facing a real threat from the British, perhaps the French or the Spanish. You have no means of defending yourself except to reach for the gun under your bed. The second amendment makes sense in its historical context: today it doesn't.

I have fired a fair few weapons, from 9mm to 84mm, from pistols to belt-fed machine guns and anti-tank weapons. They feel good. They feel powerful and they made me feel powerful. But I did so in a military context, as part of a standing army (albeit just at the weekends!). And as a civilian, I would be terrified to think of other civilians walking around with concealed weaponry.

Here are four stories:

I have a friend who served in Bosnia, in a military/civilian liaison role. She took great pains not to appear threatening: she wore a beret, used open hand gestures and only carried a holstered pistol. She said that the Americans serving with her - by and large national guardsmen (and therefore perhaps the descendants of the militia mentioned in the second amendment) - strode around in their flack jackets, helmeted and brandishing their automatic weaponry. She said that their posture provoked rather than reduced aggression.

Years ago, I heard from the man who commanded our contingent in Beirut in the eighties. The British troops kept their heads down and didn't return fire. They were only once fired on - and that was by accident. By contrast, the US marines fired ten rounds back for every round that was fired at them. And they suffered the consequences.

A third example: British troops, when serving in Northern Ireland, were governed by a code that stipulated that if they were found to have fired on a civilian without clear warning and good cause, they would be tried for murder. As a student, I helped train troops preparing to go out to Northern Ireland by acting as a Northern Irish civilian and trying to provoke them into firing on me. If they did so, they received the bollocking of their lives. "You do this in Northern Ireland and you will go down for life!" the directing staff shouted. We have all heard about cases of shoot to kill and official collusion to murder in the Province - but there was this code, written on a yellow card carried by every soldier. And I have known members of the Metropolitan Police's SO19 armed response unit who live with a similar threat of prosecution.

Contrast this with the FBI officer in the basement of the FBI building in Washington DC. As a visiting tourist to the astonishingly open headquarters, I watched him blast targets to pieces with his small arms. I asked him if the FBI had any code similar to the 'yellow card'. "No. We don't have time to shout. We shoot." I can understand why. Living in a society that embraces weaponry in so many aspects of its culture and, in its official attitude to defence and law enforcement, believes in a posturing, "shoot-first-ask-questions-later "approach, I'd be a bit trigger-happy.

But it's too late to change anything, I suspect. America loves its guns to death, and this venereal disease - not so much the massacres as the routine gun crime - is the consequence it has to live with. Sadly, we're incubating the same disease here in Britain. I am now really scared.

It's not really a logic thing: it's a heart-felt thing. I think that widespread gun ownership is stupid and I think that a nation that considers it to be a part of their constitutional right to carry weapons is, corporately, stupid. And for the most powerful nation on earth not to grasp this simple concept is very scary. A sick joke.

Let's be clear: I am referring to America as a corporate whole. Of course this conflates a kaleidoscopic miscellany of peoples. There are sensible, mature, emotionally intelligent people everywhere and it is grossly insulting to talk about "you US". Even to refer to the US as a homogenous whole is to lose the sense of variety in the country's people. And to be clearly clear: by 'corporate America' I mean the US as a body politic - not America as represented by big companies. When I talk about America, I address those citizens of the United States of America who - collectively - like guns and shooting.

Is this just a question of language? No it really IS important. Because lost in the "you" of US is the individual: every beautiful, varied soul - some of whom become ill-informed, sick or ultimately just depraved. It is vital to remember the second persons singular that make up humanity - just as I remember my girlfriend who died, my friend at work, my friend's son and so on.

But as for mourning: why should I, who know no more about these people than the other millions who die needlessly and because of human intervention - war, terrorism, state-sponsored famine and poverty, lethal working conditions and, yes, gun crime, to name a few, mourn them any more? If we mourned the millions as they deserved, our hearts would give in, our minds break down and our lives become a living wake.

I am unduly affected by the suffering of others close to me because I feel I ought to be able to do something about it. My mourning a few who have been highlighted by the media would mock the other millions. This does not mean any of these deaths is any less tragic, but my mourning is meaningless and I am powerless. Corporate America is not going to hear my chatter and my tears will lift none of these people from death.

My response to this situation is to try to be as clear thinking as possible: hollow grief for people I didn't know does nothing. But considering this shooting is something that I've said should be put into the perspective of all the other deaths, I am finding it difficult to think of much else.

By a macabre coincidence, I was at the Royal Ballet's production of Mayerling last night. To cut to the point: Crown Prince Rudolf of Austria-Hungary is obsessed with guns and death, scares the wits out his wife with a gun, then shoots someone at a hunting party, then shoots his lover then shoots himself. The sexual, insane and lethal violence of the dance was chilling.

I was also reminded of when I took my daughter to Orador-sur-Glane, near to where my parents live, in the Limousin. In 1944, members of the Waffen-SS - many of whom were hardened by their experiences on the Eastern Front - were attacked by partisans. They responded in their typical way, by surrounding a town, slowly gathering all the people in the centre and then slaughtering them. The town was partly demolished by the SS as they left, and a new Orador was built nearby. But the ruins remain and Orador is now a national memorial. You can walk around the barns and place your fingers in the bullet holes where the men were killed. You can stand in the church where the women and children were killed with grenades and fire. You can see the partly melted pram in there, and the doctor's car in the square where he died.

When I visited this site alone, some years before, I tried to mourn for each man, woman and child and found it unbearable. It makes any writing about it seem so inadequate, any emotion that I can express so futile. It's a toughie: it's probably well known that Theodor Adorno, who wrote that "After Auschwitz writing poetry is barbaric," subsequently admitted that "perennial suffering has as much right to expression as a tortured man has to scream." So I said to my daughter, as we walked around Orador on my second visit, "This is not about some crazed fanatics. This is not about evil Germans. This is our failure to remember to love and respect each other."

The friend of ours who served in Bosnia has also served in Kosovo and Basra, in a similar role, in similar ruins. And every time, it's our failure to treat our fellow men and women as sharing our divine humanity. I say divine with a small "d" as it needs no external, supernatural validation.

Which gets me back to the language. Yes, if it helps, look each of these victims in Virginia in their photographed eyes and imagine them, mourn for them. And the media have allowed us the opportunity to engage in that way - unlike the millions who go unmourned elsewhere.

The singular "you" is important; the conflated "we", "You" or "they" is potentially lethal.

So what? Number one: don't demonise the killer. It avoids confronting the potential evil in any of us or our loved ones. And number two: just live a good life and love where hate would be an easier option.

A big challenge that I try to live up to and almost always fail to achieve.

Interrupted Stories

2007-03-13T10:55:00.000Z

Sam is lying there
among the early graves
of other people’s children,
smiling bravely, I suppose,
because to picture him
in anger at his unexpected
ending would be senseless.

Death is pointless: that’s the point.
It’s up to us to make some sense of Sam
and every other interrupted story.

Eye to Eye

2007-03-06T10:01:00.000Z

There was so much
fuck and shit that night.

Two uni boys beside me,
telling ghetto voce stories,
laying out their manhood
on their widespread legs.

Two boys aboard a train:
one black, one white and I,
across a double decade
gulf, could only listen.

and then one says your people
man and then the other says
my people what you mean
you know one says your Indian

brothers. Then the other,
second generation
London stock with roots in
Pakistan, stared straight at me.

And I, looking past his
clothes and swagger, reached
across the gulf and met him,
understanding, eye to eye.

A break from poetry

2007-02-22T15:35:00.000Z

Here's a thousand words dreamt on the train and then written in Starbucks:

Betrayal

He had seemed like a god to us when we had started work there, or so we had joked when we had come to know the man better. A brilliant mind and a supreme knowledge of human strengths and frailties, wrapped up in someone who seemed only to speak when he had something important to say.

That was twenty years before, and now he couldn’t stop talking. I had heard from one of our group that he has dangerously ill, confined to a side ward in the city’s hospital. Naturally I went to him. I hadn’t seen him for fifteen years, not since he had left for Britain ahead of the bloody tidal wave that had washed over our country.

A silent nurse ushered me through to his room, which seemed full of sound. His voice, rich and strong as it had ever been, was telling a story. There, motionless except for the movement of his lips, the gentle rise and fall of his chest and – almost imperceptibly – the feverish fluttering of his eyelids and lips, were the ruins of my beloved friend. I was shocked by his lips. They were dry, cracked and seeping blood that trickled into his constantly moving mouth. I turned to look at the nurse, who now broke her silence. “I know, but he begged us to leave them be.”

She left me to sit with him. And as I listened to the almost impossibly fast speech emanating from my friend, I realised that he was telling his own life. The nurse explained afterwards that it had begun as his other faculties had started to fail him. The doctors had been baffled by his sudden deterioration, but tissue samples had shown that he was dying. In the land to which he’d fled for safety, my friend had contracted a further variant of the variant of the disease that they’d fed to their own livestock. And now his brain was rapidly erasing itself. First his motor functions had gone – all but those that sustained life and allowed him to talk. And talk is all he had done for a fortnight. A full voice when awake, a quiet whisper even when he briefly slept.

They’d moved him to this side room to give his fellow patients respite from his endlessly detailed autobiography. Now the staff were simply waiting for the disease to suffocate him. But it would not, it seemed, until he had finished. And that was why I came, day after day, to sit by his bed and listen to his words. Because at some point I knew that the story would turn to us. Words that were better left unsaid would undo the lives that we’d built. I couldn’t let that happen.

The facts are known: there is no need to repeat them here. Fifteen years before, in the crackle of radios, on the corners of streets and in houses next to our own, a hatred had grown and erupted into a killing time. I and my friends found ourselves, unwillingly, on the side of the killers, marked out by our blood. He, alone in our group, was on the side of the victims. The friends and family whose lives he was now re-telling alongside his own in that quiet room had been swept into unmarked graves. Their identities had been erased by a nation’s single act of forgetfulness: we had forgotten for a terrible moment that we were brothers and sisters. We, this small group of his friends, had realised the threat, and had hidden him in our houses, moving him whenever the bloody wave threatened to catch up with him.

He had spoken to us decisively. This was a forest fire, he said, that would not end until it had spent all the human fuel it could find. We would have to fight fire with something even more powerful. Just as you create breaks by razing belts of trees around a fire, he told us, so we should act speedily and brutally to remove those who were stoking this violence. So we who were numbered among the killers now plotted to kill a number of them. One by one, through car bombs, side-street executions and domestic shootings, we severed the heads of this insanity. Slowly the flames subsided. We rebuilt our lives and hid any signs of our complicity in these necessary killings. And we smuggled our friend to safety and exile in Britain.

Now, more than a decade later, he was nearing the point at which he would betray us. If he did so in his whispered sleep, or alone and unnoticed, we might be safe. If, however, a nurse, a doctor or an orderly overheard our names and our actions, we would become known. This was no police state and the police were far from all-seeing. But the press was hungry and paid well, far better than the hospital wages or doctors’ salaries. Truth and reconciliation had their limits and on those borders waited the angry families of those we’d killed. They would have their revenge and, worst of all, might re-ignite the still warm remains of conflict.

“Help me.” For a moment I missed the message. “Help me,” he said again, hardly pausing from his story. His eyes momentarily caught mine and told me all I needed to know. “Help me,” he said a third and final time. I stayed until the nurse came to see me and then I went home to plan.

The next morning his story had reached the outskirts of our conspiracy and I knew that I had to act quickly. Alone with him, I leant over his face and kissed his swollen, sore and bleeding lips. In my attempts to soothe their pain with my wet mouth, his blood mingled with my saliva. My lips lingered at his and then I moved to rest my head on his forehead. Slipping my hand under his frail neck, I paused for a moment. His beautiful, midnight-black skin was soft against mine. His words were now no more than a background murmur in his sleep. I loved him now as much as I had loved the tall, strong man who had led us fifteen years before. And with a sharp movement with my hand, I snapped his neck. His memories were at once silenced. “Forgive me,” one of us said, then all was quiet.

Box Girder Bridge

2007-02-15T08:52:00.000Z

The sudden, silent movement of trees
silhouetted on a silver nitrate sky:
celluloid flashes through an iron frame.

Grown Up Love

2007-02-13T09:51:00.000Z

For Pippa

You’re the secret smile
I wear to work, when we
have lain and laughed in
sleep-warmed bedclothes.

You’re the line that pulls
me home, however hard
I work or walk, that reels
me in to rest beside you.

You’re the walls that
hold me up, the roof that
keeps me safe, the home
that shelters all my dreams.

You’re in here – my heart
– an anchor in my self
made storms, my missing
link, my grown-up love.

My Tinker-Tailor Life

2007-02-13T09:40:00.000Z

If I could be a soldier
I’d command my selves
to wear their battledress
and camouflage my doubts.

If I could be a diplomat
I’d tell my heart to hold
its tongue and smile while
I embargoed my emotions.

If I could be a down-and-out
I’d sit right here and laugh
and tell you, if you’ll listen,
how I’ve run away from me.

Instead I’ll play myself
and live at home with all
my different sides and
love my tinker-tailor life.

White

2007-02-08T12:44:00.000Z

This is for Lulu, who won't see much snow where she is...

The sludge-grey dawn
is cleanly covered over.
Its brightness blizzards out
my senses, starved of colour.

This morning makes a child
of me, hoping for a white-out,
snowed-in, stay-home day.
Instead I walk to work.

Monochrome commuters,
muffled in their muted greys,
march past crawling cars,
caught in wheel spin skid rows.

Trainbound, I look out
through smeary windows,
like bleary eyes that
slowly stir from sleep.

Being You

2007-02-06T12:09:00.004Z

Let me wear your hands and hair,
ease myself into your legs and
slip your arms and shoulders on,
button up your chest and pull your face.

Let me use your eyes to check
that everything's in place, flex
your muscles, flick your tongue
across your teeth and speak.

For then - and only then -
can I begin to understand
what being you is really like.

Metropolitan Lines

2007-02-06T12:09:00.001Z

Mondrian,
so my teacher told me,
started painting trees
and then,
when his eye
came to lie
on the spaces
between the branches,
he painted them
instead.

So look beyond
the lines you draw
from home to work.
Look away
from the black-ruled
broadsheet in your lap.

And look
into the speeding houses,
at the flying bridges,
along the running roads,
between the branch lines
flashing past your window.

Picture something else.

Rush Hour

2007-02-06T12:08:00.004Z

You choose:

you can march to your desk
with your chin on your chest
and your eyes on the street
while your arms swing in time
to the metronome beat
of a million feet.

Or stop,

look up at the ragged sky-play
of the grey-cloud children
chasing one another, all unschooled.
Turn truant, run for places where
the rain refreshes, where the grass is
greened and landscapes watercoloured.

Go home.

1973, Aged 10

2007-02-06T12:08:00.003Z

One November night
and we had lost our selves,
thick black blanketed
in foggy darkness.

No sound, no sight, no sense
of being beech-hedged into
fifty acres. Just ourselves,
three boy friended closeness.

Silence

2007-02-06T12:08:00.001Z

Our silence is leaden.
Now I’ve dug myself
a grave mistake
and wish the hole
would eat me up,
would swallow words,
would lick the wound
I’ve opened up
in conversation.

Birches

2007-02-06T12:07:00.004Z

This artist’s easiest tree,
a white-lead lightning streak
with feathered dry-brush branches,
leaps from galleried frames
and stands in crowded rows
at Bankside.

This pock-marked white
suburban kid hangs round
on wasteland, lining railways,
lurks self-consciously in
gardens, spitting surreptitious
sap on tidy driveways.

This refugee from wintry forests
stood, a powerless watcher
flanked by sombre-coated firs,
and saw four thousand men
cut down and planted.

For Franca

2007-02-06T12:07:00.003Z

The piccie is from her website, francatorrano.com. Go buy.

Be my sometime friend
and frequent critic.
Laugh with me but
scold me when I moan.
Dine with me and gently sway
to music played by women
young enough to be our kids.
Grow old in steady friendship;
be wild whenever we meet.

Chris

2007-02-06T12:07:00.001Z

Chris, a measured man,
weighs, chews and chooses
words for poised effect.

Picks his tools for turning
arguments with craftsmen's eyes.
Shapes his sentences
with obvious satisfaction.

A once unlettered engineer's apprentice
now works language on his lathe,
fashioning fine, considered sentiments
that leave mine in the shade.

child's play

2007-02-06T12:06:00.003Z

All potential,
tiny fists, full
to bursting, clench
against the April
frost, preparing
their magician’s
sleight of hand.
Then wind-waved
wands explode into
a riot of variety.

Every one a different
green, their numbers
overwhelm. A million
leaves can shift a
landscape’s shape,
throw up walls and
cast down curtains
to create a cool
cathedral walk,
a timeless place.