Origins are not the only fruit

Here's the first-ish version of a poem that came out of Apples & Snakes/Adam Kammerling's fine Origins poetry workshop as part of Fareham Arts Festival. It'll probably get edited n times before I'm happy with it, or maybe not - who knows - and may even end up as part of the long 'Stingboy' piece I'm (still) writing - but it came from an exercise looking at listing places we've lived, things we've said, music that was formative and so on, with the aim of incorporating them into a poem. Hope you like it.

Untitled

I was born into a house of golliwogs,
spike-eyed toys,
soaps and sitcoms,
of throwaway laughs at 'Pakis', 'Micks' and 'nig-nogs',
of being dangled by one bony wrist,
a skinny meat piñata
hearing the repeated line
“if you won’t respect me,
at least you’ll fear me”,
a self-fulfilling prophecy,
all an inadequate man could offer me
bar processed pap
and welder’s-callus slaps,
driving home the message that
I wouldn’t like that foreign crap,
those raucous songs,
and anything beyond the grey-and-beige
is wrong, looks like trouble,
but doubled-up one school night,
snuck out to taste the flavour
of Iron Maiden,
so much sweeter than copper on the tongue,
a lonely lad’s first gig
well worth the late-back round of Dodgefist.

Fast-forwarding from ruddy rage,
riffling halfway through biro movies,
corner-paged,
I’m in Nai’posha, the Maasai’s cattle waterhole,
named for rough waters, ‘that which ebbs and flows’,
sun-drained then quenched
with rains and silty seasoning,
and it’s my inauguration by means
of shield and spear and knobkerrie,
story-telling,

quaffing nailang'a,

blood-and-milk straight from the gourd,

now I am a tribal brother,
clansman,
witness to the intimate cutting of others.

In the latest scene,
I say “I do”.

A fatal illness

I was recently interviewed for ASLI (Art Saves Lives International) which is an organisation aiming to tackle mental health issues and stigma through creative expression. The interview about depression and childhood physical abuse is published here and includes my poem 'Stingboy'.

When there are (almost) no words

The photo below is now famous and rightly so - it shows a four-year old girl in a refugee camp, displaced by the Syrian Civil War, surrendering to a long-lens camera because she thinks it is a gun. There are almost no words for how wong this is, and in how many ways, nor for how angry it makes me (and many, many others). Almost. But it was suggested as a prompt by I am not a silent poet after much discussion about it on their facebook page and so I tried to articulate my anger...

In Atman Camp

I see you, power-hungry man,
stomach full of
belligerence and bile.
I see your guns and tanks,
their barrels,
your ill-concealed excitement
and over-compensation.
I see the lists of dead and wounded,
missing, disappeared,
bodies empty as shell-casings
swept into drifts,
their blue lips
your Viagra kiss.
I see the conquered territory
you piss on,
a few feet here,
a few feet there –
and I feel its never-again
poppy-strewn familiarity.
I see your callow excuses
for why you need a war
and why the suffering,
not yours,
is worth it.

I see all this
in the eyes of Adi Hudea,
one tiny refugee
surrendering to a more benevolent
sort of shot
than the one that took her father,
massacred at Hama.
I see her innocence
taken in infancy,
I see what you have done,
you and all your kind,
and I call you out.

Photo by Osman Sağırlı

The positivity of migration

UKIP and others who whine about migrants are tiresome - here's the first draft of a piece about my own, more positive, observations about Polish people ('Polacy') in Southampton

Polacy w Southampton

I

Big man, crew-cut blonde,
baby in a biceps cradle,
gentle gorilla-father;
a second child plants conkers
in a newly tilled municipal flower-bed.

II

Zesty girl on the school bus,
alpha of her Year 8 peers,
climbing rails like they are monkey-bars,
open-mouthed surprise when I ask
‘excuse me please’ –
proszę, przepraszam
in English-accent Polish.

III

One of so many languages
spoken here and mingling in mid-air –
by workmen crowded onto lunchtime public benches,
discussing football, cars, sandwich fillings,
by gaggles of much-preened teens
gossiping between texts,
by students, shop-assistants,
phone-box users sharing news,
by friends and poets,
by people of the city –
multicultural and working,
the opportunity for something new.

When love comes to drown

Something for World Poetry Day: relationships...

Flood

When you cry,
I try to hold on
but you are racked with sobs
so mediaeval
you could be a thousand years away.

When you cry,
I get angry
but I don’t know what at,
because I can’t see what’s upsetting you
so, for all my tools and skills,
I don’t know how to fix it.

When you cry,
I move in to hug you,
but my strong arms
dissolve in your tears –
my legs follow
and we both start to fall.

When you cry
my world floods
and I forget how to swim –
submerged,
all teardrops are lost,
indistinguishable
in the saltwater surrounds.

Ponds, rellies and makeshift tools

Reading my brother-in-law's facebook post about the weather and garden flooding from the perspective of an everyday family situation (and some DIY), I was taken by its almost prose-poetry style and the trio of trios found within. With his permission I edited it into verse form.

In threes

As I brush my teeth,
I look out of the bathroom window
then go back to the sink
as the minty foam is on the point of escape.

I've not been down to the bottom of the garden for quite a few days
but the silver of the sun-lit ponds seems to have become bigger.
Tom (my youngest son), Dad and I go down to check –
the top pond has burst its banks
and there is a stream running over the top of the dam
into the second
and leaking
into
the third,
and
out again –
water,
water everywhere.

The overflow for the top pond is easily unblocked –
the water flows freely,
whooshing straight into the other two ponds.
Also blocked,
the overflow pipe for the third pond is twenty feet long.
The longest things we can find –
a special spade,
a handle for something,
a stick,
are taped together
and we fight our way through the undergrowth,
bloody brambles, sodding holly,
into the stream below.

We feed in the long, unwieldy thing,
push-pull, push-pull,
then more whooshing –
on reflection,
it would have been more sensible
to unblock the lowest pipe first.

Digital wampum

Inspired by some of the works in Offending Frequencies (Poetry Review 102:4 Winter 2012), especially the photographic responses by Yemisi Blake to new poems by Elmi Ali and Jo Brandon, I produced the following:

The hanging piece is entitled 'Digital wampum' and uses plastic components from VHS cassettes (a defining technology for someone who was a teenager in the 1980s) to depict key dates in my life, the black and white arrangement encoding them in binary. The words indicate the events these dates relate to.

NaPoWriMo days 6 and 7

Day 6. A valedication or, in this case, a farewell of sorts to one of my least favourite of towns, written in draft form on the train journey home after the last time I worked there, finished in order to be posted for NaPoWriMo.

Gulag Basingrad

Trade-estate warehouses
Full of bingo and tarnished golden arches,
Festival Place squatting toad-like
Where a town used to be;
Terrible bars, identikit chainstores,
Serried ranks of insurance corps,
Offices along the tracks,
Clone-suited and commuter-crammed -
Filed under ‘dull’ in the OED,
You have theatres,
And Memorial Park,
But not enough to raise the heads
Of skeletons in sports valenki
- Basingstoke, I will not miss you.

Day 7. Each line is a declarative statement (more-or-less) until the last which asks a question.

Carriage-fellows

Bangle-lady threading beads,
Cement-booted workmen read,
Blowzy grannies off to shop and drink,
Ladies wot lunch, Chanel-pink,
Teenage texters tweet and bleep,
Paper-rustlers, Kindle converts,
Crossword-solvers, Wifi surfers,
Mums with kids and shopping bags,
Some stare blank-eyed at backs of seats,
Or maybe they are meditating,
Others watch Landscape TV,
Fields and trees and clouds and birds,
While two rows from the rear-most door,
A sometimes-poet orders words,
And wonders ‘who will read this?’

Ceremony

Way back when, I had the good fortune to be made an honorary Maasai ('tis true). Here's something that sprung forth from the event...

Ceremony

A proud group
Walking
In Finery
In Dust
I approach and question
One I know
The others watch quietly.

An Invitation
To welcome and understanding.

A tree-bole cut and polished
Hardened by Fire
And used
Before my conception,
A charm
Bound, Beaded, Scented, Given
To protect
A Ward in the Wilderness.

An Invitation
To knowledge and belonging.

Surprised, a spear flies
A shield is raised
And in a circle,
Stories told
As a fire burns
A gourd is lifted
Round the Circle
Leaping, chants to the Sky.