Past Poems - updated 2008

LABELS AND LUGGAGE

Skinny Minnie “must be on crack”
(vomiting behind their backs).
“Stuck up” secretive, aloof,
Can’t tell anyone the truth:
I have to stop from getting fat
By being sick, and that is that!

“Radio Rental, loony, nutter,”
Cos his symptoms make him mutter;
“Scary”, “freaky”, weird and snappy
Even when he feels quite happy.

“Just a housewife”, someone’s mother -
The harmless words designed to smother
Everything that really matters -
The son who cares, the man who batters.

Teenage hoodie, surly yob,
“Why can’t he get himself a job?”
Behind the door he keeps his mother
Safe from the battering ex-lover.

“Get a grip” and get a life,
Find a hobby, find a wife,
Count your blessings, see the good side
And stop the silly talk of suicide.

‘Course it’s not at all self harm
To jag a sharp into my arm
It’s just the same as getting pissed
(Life makes me want to slash my wrist).

“Bossy boots” and control freak,
Moral guardian, god-squad geek,
“Knows it all”, has to be right,
And cries with loneliness each night.

[Alan 2008, for New Ideas]

ON LOVE

Love is us, not you or me
Love is a prison in which we are free.
Love is a beast which comes in the night
to seize you in its jaws:
it hunts you down and finds you out
behind your safe locker doors,
and rips you with its claws.

Love is a kiss so tender and soft
you hardly feel it there;
a vampire’s breath upon your breast
that strips your feelings bare
- but somehow you don’t care.
[one of several versions, updated 2008]

THE TASTE OF YOU
The butter-spreading sun
sleeks your sweet skin
with basting dew
and suddenly my tongue
feeds on deep sin.

MODEL GIRL

Superbody models in the magazines,
why can’t I look like them?
A stubby tub of butter
is what I’ve seen
each mirror-murder day
- I must get thinner!

“Yer acting like a nutter
- don’t make a scene.”
“Can’t eat? You fat? - No way!
Just eat your dinner.”

Superbody models in the magazines,
why can’t I be that thin?
[one version, 2008 for New Ideas]

UNAPPRECIATED LOVE NOTE
I love you
deeper than the deepest ocean
higher than the highest mountain
and wider than
Stockton High Street.
[true story - an unappreciated love note,
1990's]

RITUAL SALT

“Where is the salt?”
I need those brightsharp krystals
hot to my rugged-smoooth tongue
hot to my wounds
Pure
salt distilled from
Tears from blood sprinkled
by earthenware fingers
to sift through the skull
to form grey drifts
of grit amid the crenellations
and trelliswork
of non-specific sections
of the brain
To stain the lungs to sting the gut
to dry the blood and rot the bones.
I must atone I am alive
and well they’re not.
I have been told it’s not my fault
yet still I gorge myself on salt.
[originally a "concrete poem"
- The opening reflects something I read about salt crystals by a Jewish novelist]

REFLECTIONS
[A “nursery rhyme” song composed beside Albert Park lake, Middlesbrough,
for my daughter Georgia when she was a baby]

I see the sun shining down,
in the water, the water.
I see the sun shining down,
and the clouds in the sky,
in the water, the water.
I see the sun shining down,
and the clouds in the sky,
and the leaves on the trees,
in the water, the water.
I see the sun shining down,
and the clouds in the sky,
and the leaves on the trees,
and the ducks upside down….
- and the mountains …..
- and the roofs of the town,
- and the people that pass,
- and the flowers in bloom,
- and ideas & dreams,
- and a baby that cries,
- and my own happy face
... in the water, the water.

SKETCHES FROM LAST YEAR
[Nov 2008: needs reworking]

Looking for inspiration
for a poem, I dug out sketches
from last year. One
called “Merry Xmas”
(Mary ex-mass!) life through the bottom
of a glass: there is no life
on show, just part of a room devoid
of human touches.
And other drawings much
the same, with vodka bottle
on display.
- Deck your life with hollow jolly,
Tra-la la-la lah la-la la lah,
God I’d rather have a Stoli,
Tra-la la-la lah, la la la LAAAAGH!
“Middlesbrough
in Winter” - black,
black buildings, tarmac, sky,
in heavy bleak ballpoint.
“Letter to a Friend” - a drawing
With anointed words
scrawled, mauled, and overlaid &
overlaid
until the paper crowded
tight with sprawling sins,
frustrations, thanks & dreams
& sadness, madness, schemes,
Crawling desperation.
Attempted “Chinese Landscape”
- this the most depressing - black
ink pushed rudely with the
brush held wrongly in the
western way: proportions wrong, all
Wrong; clumpy cumulo-nimbus
clouds (top left) chase or clash with strato-
nimbus slashes (right); crude
mountain, haggard trees; black-inked
earth slapped on bereft
of style; grainy grey sky full of rain
Perhaps; cliff-top wrong height and
use of space, topped with
scratchy palm trees and
a skeletal structure looming
wonky like an old
ghost hut, immense yet not.
I wasn’t unhappy when I painted this - it’s simply bad!

A BRIEF AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MY HANDS

Hands out
too small to help
to stop dad’s fist
in mammy’s face.
Hands up to shield . My turn.
Hands out whack whack
the stinging cane
because my childish hand
smudges
instead of writing neatly
in infant school.
Hands over my nervous laugh.
Hand over my pathetic pocket money
to the junior bullies.
Hands clenched
in anger, fear,
then up to rub away
a tear.
Hands fidget, fumble,
oh my clumsy hands.
Hands in my pockets
Squeezed down out of sight
The way I want to be.
Hand down my trousers
To rub away the bleakness.
[originally laid out differently,
written for a creative writing course years ago]