A tour of the exhibition

I spent the last week as one of the artists at a community-based arts festival organised by this fine new local organisation, the Southampton Chamber of Arts - here's a tour of the work on display...

Deep in the heart of heritage

Chain-heavy, iron cobra’s caught mid-strike,
Halloween-themed stove spits sparks
from once-discarded engine-parts
and the shepherds’ skull and trident flies
above a split black cat, LED-red-eyed,
cyborg skeleton inside,
guards a charred-black infant, never cried,
dustbin perch, peeled-back hide,
while sharks chit-chat with flamingos
gold-chain style, watercoloured curves
beckon me and sigh, lick fingertips,
turn their faces coyly to one side
to bat their lids at stained-glass poppies,
portraits, skies and symbols back-lit
as the rare cog-headed butterfly
alights upon the pulpit and the chop-shop motorbikes.
Across the aisle, oblongs shine out at me –
images of Tuscan countryside
boardwalk shadows, misted seas,
sunsets, sunrises, winter trees,
way-back-when St. Denys scenes,
and happiness is boxed
by a smirking purple dame,
turquoise feathered hat on top,
looks knowing at a Merlin motor in a frame
and the seasons’ turning burns like flame,
a lyrebird sings angelic strains,
strings strummed and humming on church columns,
piano hammers hung on silent springs
awaken tigers, lilypads and poison frogs,
happy ‘see my bits’ blue dog,
layered skull and octopus,
half-a-Dalek, Ganesh dances,
Hanuman makes mischief on a plinth
and a plus-size waxwork hand
with giant whorls and arches
reaches out to teach us –
what might come of this?
Nothing’s ever lost by asking.

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'.

Polyamory - of a sort

From a seed sown on facebook...


The Prince

“How often do you fall in love?”
“Very”, I reply.
“How much is ‘very’? Tell the truth.”
“Every day”, I sigh,
with a book, a scene, a character,
a passing patch of sky,
a pleasing string of numbers
or artistic use of line,
with accidental patterns
that grab and hold my eye,
in marble-veins or water,
or window-frosting rime,
with songs of depth and solitude
whose singers make me cry,
a glance from someone beautiful,
and more so if they smile,
with the sway of wind-blown trees,
moments out of time,
and sometimes just with strangers
who might otherwise pass by.
“So, should you fall in love less?”
“I suppose that I could try”.
“But would you really want to?”
“No, my love is fine”.

The tarnishing of our jewel-in-space

I recently heard the phrase 'blue shit' meaning the foul activity of the Tories. Here I explore what 'blue' should be and what they have done to it.

Blue Shit

Blue should be the colour of clear skies,
of water-scattered light,
but you pollute it,
plunder and abuse it,
floating factories stripping the seas
of life, dirtying the aquamarine
with greed and the last gasps
of those tossed aside,
world overboard,
ignore the cries,
focus on your dividend size.

Blue should be the colour
of a tropical lagoon,
a pure mountain tarn,
or ancient ice,
but you put a price on it,
asset-strip-mine it
for a fragment of hedge-fund,
an extra week of winter sun,
or to treat your aspirations
to a reupholstered urban-tractor 4X4
where you primly sit when you drive off
to get your arsehole bleached,
singing "me-me-me"
from your perfect peach.

Blue should be the colour of depth,
profundity and wonder,
but your arbeit macht frei,
consume-or-die
vision of the world
pulls it under, turns everything into
plastic landfill's methane hiss
and the fake nappy-ad piss
drunk en masse
by WKD lads' shagging-shirt hordes,
tears condensing on the chilled steel
of empty wards
where the poor ones kneel,
no hope, so beg for the rope,
for you refuse to feel
the ripped-away smiles
and cold dead lips
of your ideology's vampire kiss.