Here’s a poem from ‘Spirit Soul: Pursuance’ to give you some idea of the contents of the latest book. If you like it, go take a look. The link is here, and on the ‘Free Stuff’ page of the site.

then one morning
eyes slightly out of focus
I was taken by surprise

there in the mist, early hours
was a deer, standing in the garden
grazing, eating berries from the trees

the winter had been hard
this deer was thin, lack of food
had left it no choice but to come to the house

I stood and looked out of the window
motionless, I waited for the deer to turn
then it looked me in the eye, ten seconds

Then gone

Just the connection, an open
one sense in which I can move on
let go of the me of last year

Spring time, will be here soon
new growth, beginnings
a chance to escape the famine of winter

Hope.

Tags: Poetry, Writing

I’m in the middle of an exercise to write a poem a day for November – the resulting collection, once edited, will be called ‘November Suite’. I am using various exercises to generate material. For example, I take the last line of the previous poem and google that phrase. Then I follow the links and harvest phrases and words from the pages that I find, using the material which this produces to steer the sense of the poem. 

The following poem was created using a phrase which I stumbled across – this became the title of the poem and was then put through google. This is an early draft, but I like the direction it follows:

The Voice of Wittgenstein

 “After several attempts to weld my results together
The best I could write would never be more
Than philosophical remarks

My thoughts would soon be crippled
If I tried to force them on
Against their inclination”

An anti-systematic attitude
Like John Cage’s music or Stockhausen
A permanent condition

Numbered aphorisms, as though
The world of existence could be reduced
To a set of interwoven statements

 Everything succumbing to the power of language
Different voices in dialogue
The first of the post-modernists

 Voice 1, then Voice of Tradition
Voice of Perplexity
And the Voice of Clarity

 These voices are inside my head
All at once, they seize language
Mess with it, precise but dissective

Taking objects and making of them
A contradiction, a complexity
Confusion that removes sense of self

Uttering a word, a phrase – I love you
Lost in translation, in perplexity
A permanent condition.

[20:30]

Tags: Poetry, Writing

… from the latest poetry sequence (still unfinished) called ‘Scrapes against the Soul’

The conversations the night sea has with the dawn
Leave an empty hissing through the sea weed, as if
Everything had left the world in solitude… 

And my heartbeat can be heard beneath the lap of waves
Quickened by the memory of lost loves and lost lives
Out beyond the edges of my full recall

Enough now to have spoken with the elements
Everyone wonders where I stand, beyond reach
Remembering a glimpse of someone from 30 years ago 

They not the same, me not the same
As the sea changes in each fragment of a second
And the sun filling the sky before it appears 

And when the memories seem tired, the voices heard before
I remind myself that each sound is unique, nothing repeats
Where I see patterns, they are only my creation

Every conversation the dawn has, with the sea and the mountains
Is new, it will do, it will make, it will be clear
Some space outside solitude that is not made of loneliness. 

 …I wrote this poem some months ago, and before I started to make contact with friends from school who I had lost contact with some 30 years ago. The content and sentiment now seem prescient at the least.

Tags: Poetry, Writing

… from my latest collection of poetry, called ‘Scrapes against the Soul’:

Sonnet

Now you know why I spent my twenties crying,
Aching for some meaning beyond empty
Atheist life of wonder, wandering,
A lost corn-circle waking, open third eye

When I close my eyes I can still see through
Where I see the spiritual opening.
In my twenties I would sit hoping that
The meditation practise brings results 

Like life, trying too hard leads to nothing.
In the night’s silence I was too busy
Listening to the wrong sounds, not waves of am. 

Colours that flow when I watch, wait, empty.
Then landscape becomes chaos of colours
Springs forwards as soul within catches fire.

Tags: Poetry, Writing