WednesdayIIII June

Hiding II

He’d harbored a lifetime behind his mother’s net mesh.
The truth showed itself in the packed flat's neat mounds of existence.
They weren't bag-lady crazy piles.
They were discriminate, like their owner.

Books did not sit on the many chairs, they lined the loo.
And battered wooden tables groaned but did not break,
Underneath his collection of geological paperweights.

The hall was full of ceiling-high miles of dog-eared newspapers.
Teetering piles of told news.
Tellings which had struck him so profoundly he couldn't let them go.
Details from outside worlds.
Of worlds he'd never see, didn't want to see.

It was a surprisingly noisy flat
The flat's internal drum.
Beat out to the kitchen clock's tick-ticks.
And a radio's ho-hum played fiddle to the fridge's faulty fan.
He’d measured out the minutes.
Metering his days.
Hoarding time 'til death'd release him from his living grave.

TuesdayIIII June

Hiding

A sharp mind in a dishevelled Mac.
Once he’d been quite good looking,
He’d gone to Oxford.
Gone to the pub and slept with girls.

Now he was grey, greasy and husk-thin.
Life’s blood had somehow slipped away.
He wasn’t sure how it had happened.
Or if he’d ever tried to stop it.
There hadn’t been a trigger.
One day, life had just turned it’s back on him.

Had it been a quick switch.
Maybe he would have noticed.
But the slow decline,
The ebbing away of time,
Had imperceptibly; dripped, dripped, dripped.

And now it hung, a palpable weight.
Heavy and unequivocal.
Time sat in his head.
Like a tumour it ate him dead.
Too much time had passed.
He couldn’t change the wasted past.
Though time can’t have been the cause.
It had crushed him with its claws.

MondayIII June

Word War II: The pen is mightier than the sword

It's a verbal revolution.
The word-bomb’s blown.
And the rhyme is mined,
Tearing mind from mind:
Violently altering book-time.

It'll become known as the war of page and pen.
A writer’s war without beginning, middle or end.

The letters have been fully articulated.
Marching with hyperbole,
No pause for commas or syn-tactical rest.
Their verbal dexterity put to the spelling test.
The hope for ‘le mots juste’ or at the very best -
The ability to achieve a lot more with a little less.
Is their (imagi) nation’s only behest.

But what now our troops in disarray?:
‘A’ fears attrition
‘M’ is on a private mission
‘P’ never asks permission
And has always lacked precision.

The alphabet army sprawls and loiters:
Forcefully fornicating with horny h's.
Brawling in the second clause.
Drinking like the beer'll come full-stop.
They don't sleep in their bunks.
They read useless chunks.
Leave dirty grammer,
Hanging in the shitter.
They stutter and stammer.

SundayIII June

Word War I:

It's a word revolution.
Thankfully there's no peaceful solution.

Morale is high.
Battle thirsty.
Adrenalin rich.
Holding out for a literary kick.
We've had the rallying speech.
The weeks of preparation.
Sitting around killing time.
We should be laying down land- rhymes.
Shooting sonnets.

Now is the time for action.
The bloodier the better.
Excellent, death by letter,
A real blood-letter!

TBC.....SaturdayIII June

Facts are facts.
Virtually impossible to counteract.
For example: moving buses kill on heavy impact.

Empty forests full of Berkeley's fallen trees.
Their leaves whispering in an unhearing breeze.
A simple philosophical tease.
Is this perfectly perceived reality?
Or more realistically, sensory fancy?

FridayIII June

For each one slain
Someone remains
For each one slain
Three lie maimed
Turning dust dirty red,
Wishing they were dead.

FridayIII June: Faceless Soul

Mirror Mirror on the wall.
You are the biggest liar of them all.

That's not me.
Not that I can see.

Eye on eye.
I try and try.
To find the real me.

An aesthetic a-b:
Sun speckled skin.
Eyes,
Nose,
Cheeks,
Mouth and Chin

Mirror, mirror on the wall,
Are you trying to tell me that this is all?
That in this moment we so lovingly share it's all about the hair?
Surely not,
I'm no robot.
Inside this face lies another.
This?
It's just cover.

ThursdayIII June (Brain just about sorting itself out - who'd a thought it would take so long! Can't be worried 'what's done is done')

Incredible genetic jiggery-pokery.
Primordial pool of preternatural overdevelopment.
Poured into and shaping everything.
Same shapes different shades.
Human hocus pocus.
Skinny husks of fleshy matter.
Atomised, fleshy dot-to-dot.
Undeniably invisible tri-parte spark.

Making you, you and I, I.

Double helix after double helix.
Inextricably bound.
So puzzlingly un-profound.
Dazzlingly soulless sytematisation.
Nothing and everything in self-conjuring carbon casts.

Codeless quintessence.

The unatomised soul the real marrow of matter.
The gapped bridge between feeling and seeing.
Science’s mental messages pulse to emotion.
Hot white flashes across a dark lab screen.
Cause and effect clearly expose worldly wizardry.
Scientific souls cleverly calibrate the incarnate.

But the soul lingers on.

WednesdayIII June

Once every word's been written.
Every stone unturned.
All deeds defined.
And eternities confined.
Then I'll believe you.

Living proof. Pah.
Skeletal truth.

Each new page.
Just another stage.
A place for the word to age.
Poetry's love letter to love written anew each day.
Who'd a thought 'queer' would come to mean 'queer'.
And that even now we don't know how to talk with deer.

A carbon-dated shamen dancer
The archaeologist's answer.
A universal decree applied to the whole neolithic age,
Precariously stood on the proof of one French cave.

How can you know now?
What's old and what's new.
What's lies and what's true.

TuesdayIII June (did you know there is a syndrome called post concussion syndrome?)

I know you.
You know me.
Differences divide and define us.
Sibling similarities join us.
Nothing need be said.
The less said the better.
Understanding built on common-ground
Shared ideas and idiom, home-grown, sibling indices.

I see you and I sitting in a garden, growing more sibling ties.
Lunch sits in front of us - food we know from childhood.
You again show me your garden, identifying some plant.
Physical similarities are basic, though we can't see them.
Met-minds are complex, though we can't see them they are clearer.
You have to listen because you are my brother,
You would laugh but agree.
Keeping a keen grip on sanity.
You see the ideal me,
me of childhood – the scab-kneed, bookish firebrand,
free of adult ties.

Sunlight nourishes your garden’s green.
Twisting fauna nurse nodding flower heads
In ad hoc, tend’d beds.
Surprising and funny that you dedicated time to this.
A shed, grass striped with precision and flower beds.
The concrete pond has become a Japanese rock pool.

You said something the other day
Which perfectly expressed my thought
You said the same words I would have used
Nothing striking but a peculiar perspective
For you to capture it without prompting was startling
There was the time you mentioned the physical hum of a person
I thought I was the only one to have noticed
And other people scoffed.
But you knew.

MondayII June

It’s possible to say it’s pretty.
A white, crescent-shaped scar on pale, freckled skin.
A scar bigger than the skin you’re living in.
Like a sickly child, drained and pipe thin.

Facial scrawl the lasting badge of a bar-room brawl.
Maybe you deserved it – too much lip from a girl-like slip.

Waste-ground flesh.
Born a blank.
Your mum did that, your father stank.

Outward sign of internal decline.
One hand cradles a can, the other clutches at a straw.

SundayII June

Worldly yardsticks are the up or down of the ridiculously relative.
The fussy yang of a constant content.
Art makes artists of us all.
No pomp or fuss.
Brings the senses to themselves, returns them to an ideal form.
No coin or chart can serve to measure making mystery matter.
Making the momentary material.
Capturing sense in nonsense.
Not life or death. Not the be all and end all but still vital.
Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless device

SaturdayII June (after a bang to the head, still bleeding and before picking up the washing and a newspaper)

Change.
All things come to pass.
Yet all things remain the same.
Indomitable time.
Forges indivisable space.

Measured moments caught in the hands of a watch face.
Star charted horizons caught in the lens of an observatory telescope.
Time watches for crudely fashioned absolutes.
Making the static eratic.
Reigning randomly over atomic slaves.

Change, all things come to pass.
Yet all things remain the same.
The same but different.

Ancient watery stars flash into earth-young sun-streaked streams.
And leavy rain-drenched dells become dappled sun-stroked fells.
And crowns of anvil-angled clouds fall to ringing rain.
And ringing rain becomes the starry stream.
And the starry stream becomes the sea's constant gain.

The sea's horizon stages the sky's sudden storm.
Moody heavens rippled with angry reds.
A still violent ferment.
The billowed darkness backlit by lightening's puppetry.
As quickly as it appears it clears.

The night turns to another day.
And tomorrow their stars will be your sun.

FridayII June

Home

They're coming home
They're coming home
The boys are coming home

There's a hole in your head?
And the other eye's dead?
And where's your hand?
Left it with Buddha in Bamiyan.

Lying in dirty bloody sand.
War-torn carrion.
Congealing in Kandahar's sun
The bloody end of being 21.

Blown from below, twisted limb from limb.
Burnt bone, freshly fried flesh.
Nerves done in.
Shock takes on the look of death.
As the last breath rattles in.

Too late - a date with fate.
Medical assistance hastily flew in.
Too late.
Too young.
Too brave.
Balls are smashed.
The nerves have crashed.

A surgeon's bride
Shorn of pride.
Home now.
Rotting in a council's no-man land.
Watching dust dance on shitty curtains.

They're popping up everywhere.
The 21st century's casualties of war.
Struggling with city curbs in desert combat.
Wearing the same cool shades they used to pull in.

The dawning of a new age.
History's way of turning a page.
No more holding hands or feeling like a man.
Left with the dead on tarmac in Afghanistan.

ThursdayII June

The personification of humane nature in a vulnerable man unexpectedly packaged and presented at a formal gathering:

Skin taut with tell-tale tucks.
Sweat beading a pimpled brow.
Sparse hennaed strands.
Sorrowfully straggle a shiny scalp
There was a mildly distasteful gelatinous glow.
Beyond this and vain attempts to handle time
Your shyness sweetened,
Chastising surface-snappy sentiment.
Eager and earnest with an urge to please.
Your gentle jokes won over with ease.

WednesdayII June

Breakfast with Grandpa

Wicker shaded light from a champagne-bottle lamp
Turned the electric blanket orange.
The blanket’s warmth steadily built to inferno status between sparky synthetic fibres.
Its extension cable, an ingeniously fused collection of threadbare 1940s wiring, posed a flagrant disregard for firemen regs.
‘Of course I am fine to drive’ – after two good reds and a failed eye test.
‘But you mustn’t let your long hair get in the machinery.’
'Nor should you let yourself flop in the furniture.'
'Flop' wasn’t the word.
‘Jump’ you said.

The fire hazard cord lay across threadbare 1940s carpet
Snaking its way to the blue blanket.
The baby blue of a baby’s basket
It smelt of talc and mildew.

Climbing in freshly ironed sheets the dilapidated springs sank in.
Beside the lamp sat old National Geographics and Reader’s Digests.
The odd Ian Flemming and a book of naughty rhymes.
On the mantelpiece sat two toy hackney carriages, a corporate gimmick and shells.

The next morning you’d set out the breakfast table as though expecting the queen.
With silver spoons and place mats.
First course was cornflakes.
Second was egg.
A boiled egg.
'Always go in the morning straight after breakfast,
The trick is to keep it regular.'

Downstairs the grandmother clock click-clicked to bong.
The ancient gramophone silently played a thousand records.
And molding books of paling print read their own words as sofas talked amongst themselves.

TuesdayII June

A Brief History of a Second

Once upon a second the scarlet lips of a lady mouthed under ruby hair.
She scratched her scalp.
Pretty striking in a leopard print top and tattoo stained arms.
Not only that she was beautiful - a shy, unselfconscious quirky.
The red blip-blip of electronic light winked, a table siren.
A salt cellar and the ketchup sat silent amidst the chatter.
A microdot fly circled from wet glass to sticky straw.
And through the pebbled, sellotape-yellow glass -
the light from within glowed without.
Taunting poor lonely gloom pacing in the pelting rain.

Monday June

Regents rippled canal double-rippled by a duck's dedication.
A watery criss-cross prettily patterns the murk and mud.
Deep down on a man-made layered bed lie:
twisted bikes, drug-dealers' sins, the odd Kray twin.
Skeletons I bet.
Next to empty bottles and cigarettes.
Four clobbered up fisherman take in the first of Camden's Spring.
And the bin-man, shorn of his locks, smiles as he takes our rubbish in.

Sunday June

What is in a name?

1.'What do you mean there isn't a name for it?'

2.'Well there's no one word for all its parts.'

1.'I am still not clear?'

2.'There's no one word for what this is.'

1.'Does there have to be?'

2.'Well it helps us to know what it is.'

1.'What's the name for trying to describe and not? For trying to mould many meanings and not. For trying to explain and not. Without a name for this doomed desire we know what it is. Without a name - it is what it is.'

2.'We do.'

1.'What do you mean, 'we do'?'

2.'We have a name for the experience you just described'

1.'What?'

2.'Inarticulate'

1.'No that doesn't cover it. That word suggests one is generally lacking in vocab which isn't true. One is just struggling with a particular collection of parts at this moment in time.'

2.'It would help if we had a name for this'

1.'I am not sure it would'

2.'It's true it wouldn't make it any clearer but it would be nice.'

1.'Would it mean we understand it any better? Would it help take it away? Would a name make it easy? Look at green for example - green doesn't make green easy. There's pale green, racing green, grass green, emerald green, turquoise, which is a sort of green or is it blue? And think of all the colours that make green green.'

2.'Green is green'

1.'No it is not.

It is true green is a colour BUT it is not a primary colour it is an additive primary colour.

It is a mixture of yellow and blue, or to be more exact yellow and cyan. On the HSV colour wheel, which if you didn't know is also known as the RGB colour wheel, the complement of green is magenta. And magenta well that's certainly not green it is a purple colour, what ever purple is, corresponding to an equal mixture of red and blue. On the RYB colour wheel the complementary colour to green is considered to be red. So green is certainly not just green, however helpful you think that name is, it's not'

2'Just like black and white are never black and white but grey.'

1'Exactly.'

2.'OK your right it is what it is and that's an end to it.'

1.'Or to be more accurate it's just the beginning of it.'

2.'Why?'

1.'Well it keeps changing'

2.'So everytime we get closer to a name what we're naming changes?'

1.'Yes.'

2.'Well that makes it a little more difficult.'

1.'As though it weren't already.'

Saturday June

Duchess

People like you are made the children of gods.

The reason life gave us life.

Or one atom split to two.

Why Adam whipped out his rib.

And DNA found RNA.

A single spacious neuron contains infinity, at its centre you sit.

As fully composed as the dawn of day.

You rose above and elevated those below.

As solid as double-diamond.

As inuitive as empty prairie waiting for snow.

The alphabet bowed out and gesture admitted defeat.

Neither could account for such gracious gravity.

Such immense majesty.

If I could build you the Taj Mahal or if St Paul's had space, it wouldn't be enough.

Words wilt with inarticulate dismay.

Embarassed by their inability to convey.

There's no account for the ways you found to smile.

To love.

No more an account than for seconds or sands.

Your love disarmed the day.
Set children free to play.
And gave soul its reason to stay.


Advice

Old before your time, you said.
Sit down you said,
Patting the bed.
Your closely curled grey hair was thick with pins.
The room smelt like talc and polish.
The quilt was padded and pink.
Our feet flat on the floor, knees touching.
We lay.
The setting sun stroked your skin.
And bathed the room.
A welcome warmth settled in.
Your advice was sadonic, infused with the wisdom of age.
Dry with wit.
It cut to the quick.

Friday June

Super-cyber monorails strung between monoliths to trend and spend.
Wires, rail and roads criss-cross concrete peaks on a heat-frizzed horizon.

In an emerald jungle enclave (the only zippy, buzz-loud wetness in a hot-bold city) rests an empty marble-cool museum. Where elaborate turquoise domes lord it over their young, taller concrete counterparts. The single museum visitor hears their steps echo round the halls and watches their reflection in the cabinet's glass.

Swarming petrol-powered bees roar above the aircon and fans - deafening traffic-bloodied ears.
And the cheerful city cockerel jeers as blue twilight draws its veil.

Thursday June

Soft summer rain peppers the pavement.
Spongy straight steps.
Missing cleave and syncopation.
Carrying on regardless.
Not radical but functional.

A narrow, lean-to alley.
Parallel walls so close they can hear the bricks breathe.
Netted windows filthy with fumes.
A rubbery orchid in a garden of weeds.
The face of a tired maitre d' sucks on a cigarette.

Opening the same door; each time expecting a different answer.
Forget the question and the answer.
Carry on regardless.

Sky high in a distant place.
Not 'here'.
A place beyond touch, smell and taste.
Where senses not recognised are strongest.
Where excerpts of 'there' become a 'here'.
Where all parts merge and become whole.
Where doors lead no where and everywhere.
A place of shifting sands but solid ground.

Wednesday June

Post Office People: Chocolate cup eyes.
Shiny patent shoes and a grubby yellow shirt.
Scar competition waged below the time frame for the next step.
Mon-Friday 9-5.30, it's their next step. The step beyond and on.
From no time to office hours to no time to end time.
Packed low and heavy and parceled in pink.
The slim hands of a girl and the aroma of old talc she stands in line for her next step.
Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless device by Cromerty Sole

Wednesday June

Her gaze broke the heart of the supermarket shelf.
The aubergine visibly shrank and the spinach flinched.
The aubergine's purple lustre winked gorgeous against the spinach's iron-rich green.
She was testing the quality of the produce assiduously, fondling it like a lost lover. Starkly mimicing the movements of a burly housewife whose been doing it for years.
Her eyes swallowed and gouged like a starving animal.
Her hands and eyes doing what her mouth couldn't, wouldn't and hadn't.
Why didn't anyone hold her, why could no-one see.
All alone she stood in the aisle.
So terribly alone her frailty was as fragile as fading blooms and broke the hearts of the giants around her.
A sickly alien drained of movement, rhythm and sound she stood.
All around her: 'water, water everywhere but not a drop for her to drink'.
by Cromerty Sole

Tuesday June

Not really a solution. A gossamer thin pretence torn this way and that by a breeze. Lots of bush but no beating. Lots of chat but no substance. Saying nothing said it all. It couldn't carry on like that. Something had to be said. It was and then it wasn't. There turned out to be no need.
Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless device by Cromerty Sole

Tuesday June

Flailing lines of electric comms.
Sprawling synapses slink and stick.
The chest's own boom box waiting to bang.
But to bang too loud to what and why?
Still not lost but found.
by Cromerty Sole

To write an anonymous poem a day is a goal. For good or bad, the poem if it is to breathe, must be somewhere to read.
by Cromerty Sole

Tuesday June

Borders,
Boundaries,
Barriers,
Blankets,
Brick by brick.
Wire on wire.
Stone dove-tailed to stone.

Walls for protection.
Agriculture,
Climbers,
and
Domiciles.
And international security.

Walls for definition.
And division.
Walls for peace.
And walls for power.
One wailing wall another’s barbed wire.

Walls for pragmatists and revolutionaries.
And a temporary solution.
Walls for toilets and walls for palaces.
For climbing clematis and for a harem’s premises.

Walls built for breaking.
Some walls broken before the making.
Some walls bloom in a rocky chrysalis.
Others are built with tension-torn deliberation.

They keep ‘em in and they lock you out.
They keep you safe but can suffocate.




(Some are like a mother’s arms
And some call to arms.
Some are padded, some are thin)