Amanuensis

I remember the Scots composer
-a lapsed Calvinist-
who once told me that
'there is a deep and dazzling darkness to God'
to which I asked him
'whadadahelladya mean?'
to which he played me a tune
Amanuensis
as the raindrops adorned soft the pane
like liquid earrings the colour moon

Kastin's Cultural Cabinet

Things you hear on the radio;

"You know how it is, people talk a lot of shit. They can't help it. They're bound to when you've just got a record deal so lucrative that your black ass may as well be gilded gold. This is an inevitability of humanity, though the peeps pay their dues to Caesar there's always a little bitch like Brutus trying to claim the throne. I don't care what shit has been chatted about him, I once saw him perform a miracle bigger than turning the water into wine. It was one of those Make A Wish things. You know, kids that are ill, that sad kinda shit that I have to smoke a blunt when it gets into my head to stop my brain from hurting. This boy wanted to meet Fiddy for his wish. Fiddy took that shit to another level. He turned up at the little guy's homestead at at two in the morning with the hottest strippers in town, Sweet Gene on rolling duty, and all the Bacardi and coke a boy could dream of. That party was buzzing. The little guy was loving it, chillin with his icon. Fiddy even gave him a nickname, Shorty, it was like he was christening him after he'd been reborn. Cops eventually got called by his no account ho momma to shut the thing down. You know what white bitches be like. 'It's not even his birthday,' she said. Fiddy just laughed and told her, 'You know we don't give a fuck it's not his birthday,' and the night on to da clubs. In the Escalade on the way there Fiddy wrote his biggest hit. Ever seen that film Fantasia? It was like that. Magic, man, no other word for it. We tried to hit Shorty up to be in the video. Breaks your heart though cos.. shit.. shortly after Shorty died."


J-Kwon talking about Curtis James Jackson III on Radio Four's Great Lives.

POPPIES

Down on the Lingfield Trish does a cheap deal for the boys back from Afghanistan. You know, the ones like Prince Harry. Heroine for Heroes, she calls it. It's shit gear but every little bit helps, doesn't it, and you've gotta support the troops.

Introduction to Poems For Children

Introduction

Firstly, nothing in this booklet is to be taken seriously. Take that as seriously as you want.  ;)

Please accept my apologies for this long introduction.

The title of this booklet, Poems For Children, is just that, a title. Poems For Children are not just poems for children. It’s a name that has stuck, I think it sounds nice. It isn’t restrictive. Conversely I do not think Poems For Adults sounds nice. It is restrictive. It sounds dumb. It is also deceptive. We are all God’s children after all. Just think of Jesus Christ for a second, he wasn’t much over 30 years old when they nailed him to a cross, just a baby. He was a very naughty boy. He was a bum. So was Buddha. They never could have been rich without being so poor. Take a look at the universe for a second, it’s as old as time itself but it does not look a day over 0, still starry eyed. As Dorothy Parker once said, ‘Promise me I’ll never get old’. That was on the morning of her 70^th birthday. She was an old woman. Time is so impermanent. So is a river. There’s no time, there’s no river just a flow. Flowers. Life exists in minutes, days and hours as much as the universe exists in yards and meters. That’s not to say that it doesn’t. Everytime I quote Dorothy Parker I start with as Dorothy Parker once said. It is the start of an old song. Most of what I know, I’ve learned from old songs. They don’t write ‘em like they used. I don’t at least. Just one of those things.

That Poems For children are not poems for children does not mean they should not be read by children. That would be restrictive. Perhaps, here, I should warn parents that there are some bad words in this booklet which they may deem inappropriate for their child but I need all the readers I can get so I shan’t. It’s probably real easy to tell if a poem is inappropriate for children, if a poem is inappropriate, they won’t want to read it. Some of these poems may be inappropriate for children but not because of bad words.

Most people would have knocked these poems out in less than a week. Not me. It took a long time to write so little. In other words, ‘I’m walkin’ ere! I’m walkin ere!!’ An anchor helps you see the river move. There’s a story about Fats Domino, after his car broke down Fats Domino, who had his biggest hit in the charts at the time, was walking to the nearest service station when a fan, driving by, saw him and shouted, ‘Hey, look at Fats Domino, he’s walking!’, Fats then thought to himself, ‘Yeah, I’m walkin’’ and wrote his second biggest hit I’m Walkin’, in his head, as he carried on walking. He also wrote Walkin’ to New Orleans and I Want to Walk You Home and When I’m Walking, Let Me Walk. Everywhere is in walking distance if you give yourself enough time. Yes indeed.

Not all these poems rhyme. Poems shouldn’t have to rhyme all the time.

It’s strange, there is a pleasant cohesion to the work in this booklet. This was beyond my control, too big for me, the cosmos of ideas. Think of the strange cohesion of the cosmos of which we are part; scattershot stars, wand’ring stars, comets, pigeons, Hailey’s Comet, Bill Hailey, Kosmo Kramer, Michael Richards, Armitage Shanks, icicles on mars, icicles in hell, the strings of a harp and string theory and coffee stains; your good self; there’s a cohesion. They are all in the same cosmos, afterall. It’s not like they are from another galaxy. All in the gutter, afterall.

Anyhow, I do not believe in bad words. Only words. They are all I have to give. Tread softly. After all, we’re in nor rush. The alternative title for this booklet is Play It Again…

As time goes by.

Sam

That We Are In Fact It

As If Sixteen Years Ago

I'm trying to say this as softly as I can

So that it disappears when you're not looking

Like light on a soap bubble soon to pop

Popping as you turn around

If that makes any sense

An almost ode

To the concerto you heard

Where the maestro struck a bum note

Or two

And what you heard at the last apologists for the half arsed effort meeting

That Hey, I kinda liked Rocky Five

.. Just sayin‘
And the carnival girls taking a five minute fag break 

Global tragedies eventually form a backdrop to our mundanities

Adding shade to our little potterings about

For instance

I was washing the dishes when the first tower was hit

Just think about the myriad unsexy little tasks

Such as a shopper allowing the person behind them with lesser items in front of them in the queue

Or

A boy walking out of his way to retrieve a friend’s lost property

Being performed in Hiroshima just before they dropped the bomb

And now consider how passing a child on a swing

Calling higher, higher

Can bring back all that tender trauma of childhood

Realising that we don't leave the past behind

But that it leaves us

One cannot look at smouldering ruins without thinking of one's history

Those things you did

Those things you didn't

Things you said you didn't mean

Things you didn't say that you did

And how looking at a shipwreck

The shipwrecks in old paintings

Bring a word to mind

  The word family

Often with the prefix my

We're all so Goddamn fucking flawed

That should make us love one another

But .. shit .. the ego ain’t cool with that

Memories play in the mind's eye

Old movies make for Monday Matinees

In black and white

Men and women preserved in Kodak

Captured in sepia

As old and gold as nicotine stains

Like bugs in amber

Maybe life is just a series of mistakes one was willing at one point to make

Anything beyond death being gravy

   Or lemonade

From all those lemons God handed to us

I'm thinking about those Rothkoesque patterns

That form on the back of your eyelids

-Though front to yourself-

When morning sun falls upon them

That momentarily displaces the gloom and guilt your mind pinned there the night before

And a time  in the park

When approaching the dramatic conclusion of The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter

A bluebottle fly landed upon the page

Midsentence

And those days when we'd watch one another

And then we'd watch the water

As if it crept out of the river

The sink filling up

Brimming with fairy liquid

Warm

Wombish

Catching the day shining through the window

As I start to wash the dishes

Before I get distracted

By the announcement of breaking news on the television
   And wonder what comes first
                                        Is it the hurt
                                               Or knowing that it hurts?

Wave To The Ocean, Wave To The Sea

We were discussing clarity within the hall of mirrors
The one next to the museum of water
The the museum that keeps a little collection of tsunamis
Hidden in the basement
Covered in droplets

    The antithesis of dust

A burned out car waits outside
 or rather, it doesn't
Strange
But not hurting anyone
As if expressing something profound about something small
Something so small we hadn't thought about thinking about it yet
And looking at the rust you get a feel for all those who traveled in it
Offered lifts
With plans for their destination
Places worth more than their distance

   The clouds close by

My companion opens her infant hand
Something is melting in its palm
An ice cube?
  I ask
A diamond
  She answers

Secondhand Smoke

Young Ophelia

Hamlet’s old flame

Flameless

Out in the water

Amidst the reeds, amidst the rushes

Smoke in the distance

Wood

Or whatever that is burning

Leaving wood

As a ghost does a man