If You Want Me

For my Valentine

Swell then, heart,

You rattling thimble!

Balloons may burst

Before they pass the clouds.

If feet shake and flesh prickles

With every step

That could be the last,

Then why should we walk?

If every syllable will float

Unprotected in the air

That waxes with our words,

Then why should we talk?

Happiness haunts with subtle dread.

You know, if you want me you should have just said.

Happiness

Monday. 8th February. Durham.

I found solitude where the hours expand

In the stale blood stains of coffee cups.

As when the pendulum

Swings past perpendicular

My increase was exponential.

Then the City

Opened its jaws

In a long, contented sigh,

And I walked in the valleys of its molars,

And I felt the warmth of its tongue.

And you know

That this cathedral

Is false hope.

Its tyrannical spires

Stretching everywhere higher.

On the way back down we passed the graveyard

And talked about death in eager voices.

You know rotting's such a bore—

I’ll stain the air with dust.

But what to choose?

A bench?

A tree?

A black smear in the sea?

'Twere now to be most happy.

‘I am happy’ is always a quotation.

The word arose

Before the cold stone

Of St. Mary’s College.

Before I was:

Giddy?

Emotional?

Not particularly sad?

But then:

Happ-eee.

So now that’s done.

But all happy families

Are not alike,

And you are not

That lost Venetian girl.

Today I wanted to ask

If you trust me.

I wonder if you know

I am of those

Too happy in their happiness

That monster their peace

With full-throated ease—

'Twere now to be most happy,

Like a train on a track,

Like a roofless room,

No turning back,

Or halting soon.

'Twere now to be most happy?

When you walk out in the morning with the sun beams on your back

And the dawn says you’re not breaking yet you still detect a crack.

And here's a performance of an earlier version of the poem (with a heavy cold!):

Changes

The scratching cries of blustering birds.

The tickling breeze that gently heaves.

The branches sway to keep the time

Amidst the soft applause of leaves.

Now comes a dying nasal whine

And rasping clearing of the throat.

The cheap-chirp birds and whisper-leaves

Could not compete with billy goats.

And if I was to add my voice

To woodland multitudes,

I’d stay my tongue and think what noise

I’d splutter forth to contribute;

What buzzwords, bywords, hand-me-downs

Would suit the tenor of my theme;

Or if a loud and bestial shout

Could wake the forest from its dream.

The time has come for artifice

To shed the shadows of the past;

To build myself from ashen blocks

And find a new self fit to last.

So come, you changes, murder me,

I’ll turn and face the strange.

Revise and ruin all you see

Erase it all and set me free.

Party Pooper

‘But I have that within which passeth show;

These but the trappings and the suits of woe’

-Hamlet, Act 1, Scene II

Excuse my disinterest

But I struggle to see

What swell of occasion

Could overtop me;

What drift of disinterest

Could rally my speech

From this sullen aloofness,

My trappings of grief.

Forgive my disinterest

But who gives a toss

If it’s so-and-so’s birthday

Or our dinner is ‘posh’?

Four years with your girlfriend

Is all well and good,

But I don’t give a damn

Unless I’m understood.

So I’ll swim in my silence

Brush small talk aside,

And frown and feel hollow

Like somebody died.

If you won’t catch my moods

Then I’m out of your reach.

Though you offer a lifeboat

I'll stick to the sea.

The Parable of the Talents

'England is mine, and it owes me a living,'

-The Smiths

Joe totted up his net worth on

A dog-eared restaurant napkin.

His date was twenty minutes late

And he was hardly happy.

Joe totted up what he could give

To a vast indifferent world.

To woo uncaring multitudes

He totted up his worth.

And writing on the napkin’s right

In a cramped and nervous scrawl:

His virtues, talents, modest skills.

On the left his faults and flaws.

He started with the positive;

The things that he could do;

Like mediocre portraiture.

He used to play the flute.

But he quit karate needlessly

In a fit of childish rage.

The novel he was born to write

Never stretched beyond a page.

His French: no more than a bald Bonjour.

His verse was pretty bad.

He felt like the man who must multiply gold

But instead hid his charge in the sand.

His heart kept time in a sickly thump.

The sweat sprang from his skin

And left damp marks on the feeble start

Of his feeble offering.

He crunched the list in his clammy hand.

‘This isn’t all of me!’

‘But,’ said the absent place of his absent date,

‘This is all that I can see.’

Palm Sunday

Sunday.

The trees swallowed me up

And cogitated me softly,

With the leaves falling down in a vertical march,

Like the weeping of trees, a procession of palms.

They were not gold

But pale and brown,

Though far away

They shone like stones.

So as you were sinless you cast them at me

To bloody my body with loss of belief.

Now nothing remains of the lies that I weaved,

But I don't want to see.

So I shed my skin with muffled cracks

A constant, gentle breaking

And shift this flaking, wasting corpse

In one painful act of waking.

Now turn your eyes away from me

For I don't want to see.

And take your tongue and bury it

My covered ears still bleed.

And take this light away from me

For I don't want to see.

For I don't want to see.

Consall

When you’re alone the wind takes on a character,

Mingled with the road that could almost be wind too.

And birds.

One a blunted pinprick,

The next a creaking door,

And then a whining nasal choke

Pleads that they chirp no more.

The stream chuckles quickly and softly

Censored by a sharp avian tut.

Across the stream, the light is green

Amidst the trees, at awkward angles

Aloofly offering leaves for gifts.

But not the vine: high-diving,

Hitting the absent water with even gestures of green.

Climb higher. A tree is felled:

Its fallen branches parallel.

Too straight somehow.

Another bows its mossy arm

To wish the ramblers well.

The ivied storybook oak

Looks perfect in the damp.

Its smooth and well-considered curves

Stand proud in a kingdom of dishevelled ferns.

When you’re alone the wind takes on a character,

Mingled with the rain that could almost be wind too.