Card Player

Card Player



A card player smokes at a folding table
on his balcony over the alleyway,
which is reached by other alleys and steps
worn smooth as a luck-stone always carried.

He says the air’s better in his domain
fifteen feet up from the morning clatter
of chairs and bottles. He’s cool up there,
though the tuc-tucs come and the stalls are starting,

and all over the city voices are stirring.
In his one-room palace his hand strengthens,
his quick hands flick as they flip his cards over
and as they land on the green cloth he exhales

with the “Ah…” of one who makes a discovery
and an “Ah!” and “Ha-ha” of sudden good humour.
Though the game he controls is made of frustration
he’s fifteen feet up from it, in an air

of elevated thought, an unshattered air,
and the card player delights in not knowing
what is going to happen next in his life
of cards. He smokes. Tea sweetens his throat.


***

Climbing towards the Light

Climbing towards the Light


There’s a ladder I have to climb,
that goes up like a white trellis
into the blue sky. The sun’s already up,
nothing is in front of me but this.
The white rungs quiver, steady up,
sway again – it all takes time.

Too high now to go back down
I take my time and rest holding
onto the supports of thick-weave rope,
telling myself it’s easier to cling
than let go, believing I can cope,
cut off over a sleeping town.

Trouble’s already starting there:
business begins as curtains stir,
the whole mechanism is a clock,
vast, faceless and sinister,
without face or hands or safety-lock
to stop it. It works on air

as I do, and it feeds like us
and feeds off us – easy to forget
it is after all just a machine
that goes down streets in dry or wet,
fitting into each morning scene,
quotidian as the morning bus.

I don’t climb to get away.
I quarry into the sunlight,
the unburst bubble of dust-seed air.
Sirens, planes, birds in incessant flight
will soon make nothing of my dare –
resting, I greet the swaying day.

The Night Mirror

I have recently made a short video of a poem called,The Night Mirror. If you would like to see it please be prepared to use headphone or speakers, go to Youtube and type in:

The Night Mirror wmv

Joyce explains that the way to get an Amaryllis to bloom again is to keep watering it after it flowers, say in December, all the way throught to September as a greenplant. Then not to water it (much) from October to December. Then to start watering it again. This has been born out by the reflowering of Joyce's Christmas 2009 Amaryllis which she was given as a present.

Reflowering Amaryllis

That year of growing
taller and taller meant
you reached the ledge to bloom

dear Amaryllis
thank you for sharing this - well
that's what people say...

Feb 3 2011

Feb 3 2011

net curtain, yard - our
Xmas 2009
amaryllis blooms!

Everything's been thought of

I am delighted to be able to introduce this poem by guest contributor John Arnett:
Many thanks, John! Hope to see more of your work.

Everything’s been thought of

Celebrity culture
Media vultures
Electrified fences
Flood defences
No win no fee
Reality TV
Airmiles and turnstiles
BOGOF and log off –
Everything’s been thought of
There’s nothing we’re short of.

Binge drinking
Joined up thinking
Conspicuous wealth
Emotional health
Identity theft
Empty nest
Look away now
If you don’t want to know –
Everything’s been thought of
There’s nothing we’re short of

Attention deficit
Short term benefit
Trophy wife
Allergic to life
Superbugs
Recreational drugs
User name
Repetitive strain –
Everything’s been thought of
There’s nothing we’re short of

Radical preachers
Burned out teachers
Human resources
Rising divorces
Prequels, sequels
Botox, detox
Factory farming
Self harming –
Everything’s been thought of
There’s nothing we’re short of

We’ve encountered a problem and we need to shut down
We’ve encountered a problem and we need to shut down

Leicester Square

Leicester Square Cover Image

I see myself in Leicester Square
which is a kind of overcoat
loose and comfortable to wear,
with bars and diamonds
and tree motifs,
and the weave itself
made up of tiny laughter
and griefs.

Walking through mile-high drizzle
the people here
are dressed to dazzle:
there goes a giant eye,
here comes the Planet Mars.
Some are dressed
as teen-age gangs,
a few as cinemas.
A woman smiles at me,
her gown a shimmering clock
that strikes on the second.

The carousel has run amok;
you can’t see the old grey-beard
who thinks it’s Derby Day;
the clouds fly past him,
Hitchcock’s Birds are coming.

Now that
is weird:
I know that girl
In the mini-dress –
I remember her corduroyness.

A ghost steps out
of a Silver Ghost,
a crowd of masked lone rangers gathers
gasps. Someone whispers, “Diamond!” or
“diamonds…” Is it Legs
or Neil or that man Bond?

I tighten my belt
as erically as I can
and amble on: it’s my coat that wanders
out of the lime-light
into the night, no cares
but The Care of Time.*

The Care of Time was Eric Ambler’s last novel.

Why I am not a Rockstar

WHY I AM NOT A ROCK STAR
http://www.enotes.com/why-am/text-poem
A Tribute to Frank O’Hara (although I think I would have made a worse rock star than he would have a painter….

You first realise
about John and the red guitar
when you see him with head down
guitar neck up and the note
the fingers wanted from the red
guitar flies out at the audience,
thru the floor, accelerates
beyond its old shape, and the singer sinks deeper
in his groove and the bassist
is fine-tuning the cellar.

In the interval with a beer
pleased to see us,
he looks up quizzically, seems to see
a spinning falling coin
or as if lightning is spreading
across the sea,
the next set coming...

By the time we
get to Angel
there are more people
going home than occupying
the restaurants and bars.
John’s a moving point
a van thru N.London
w/speakers amp and mikes.
Part of him has gone to Phoenix
and the rest of him’ll wake up to
the book he left off reading.

And who am I – the guy
who can pump hell out of an upright piano?
or hold it all together on the drums?
My band is a wavelength
and my notes are in pencil –

today with a Staedtler 2B pencil
in a notebook that cost a pound.
The bracket opens does not close
and a line ends/
or at least another begins

Snapshot

Snapshot

today Warner at least snaps the space
of her There by the railings
where she stood his lens might catch
some photon of her – not her yet there

the print he makes of this leaks emptiness
vacuum for his undelivered lines –

Click
on the image then/go further in
click plus to magnify the space
and plus again – go in and past
the grey railings to an edgeless frame
enclosing where his silence passed that day…
no more than pixelated air-bricks
sliding to no-texture ghostly white

Warner tapped the minus key/tapped
and came out to the railings once again
still wondering about the scene
the ground that held her/ the skills he lacked
to copy from the time they’d almost met –
the rainbow lens in pavements after rain
that seemed to follow her –
rediscover the tiny suns
and planets spinning
in the emptiness where she was

Brassai By Night

BRASSAI BY NIGHT

In the darkness between lamps
the gutters babble in secret slang
he stops to record a curve
a pair of eyes widened by laughter

in the fluctuations of bar light
he sets up a flair across the floor
"kiss naturally, act nonchelance"
no nuance lost, artificial shadows

of smile and stance traced
from corner to elbow Sun
sunk down notes of a drunken music
a will to embrace Between the lamps

a man a moving shadow a lens
fluctuates between misty and sharp
what comes from the mist is sharp
fades suddenly The Paris mist

is moving fast under the streets
seeps into downstairs bars
- strangely lit the white tunnels
curve steeply away from Paris

Starting Right

Starting Right


A courtyard, staircases you could almost
leap down landing to landing,
walkways, galleries, acoustic blast

as of a theatre – the bricks are handing
on the Elizabethans’ bloody past,
ills the state is still mishandling.

Down from the Bermuda triangle, one standing
holding the bicycle, the other sits on the last
step to the courtyard & does some quick rebranding:

white socks and baseball cap, and then the jeans
need something doing to them. Steadfast
and steady where the cross bar leans

his young mate waits, already dressed.
One black, one white – they have this understanding:
The right trouser’s rolled to the knee. Neat-pressed

the other is left long, an act of will.
The tall black boy is through and will ride fast,
stand on the pedals with handling skill.

His tandem sinewy, unharassed
gets neatly in the saddle – notwithstanding
us in the gods, their swagger isn’t sussed.
They slip from here, through speed and light expanding.


***

Sestina Camden Town

Sestina: Camden Town

The war, the war on Man, the
war on woman, the ghost
assembled armies vanish in
their realms

Allen Ginsberg
Planet News 1968

Sometimes the railway is sunk
between embankments; sometimes it passes
over the houses and canals
of Camden. The railway is like
an old copy of Peace News
still running – if war breaks out or peace.

All of it is real, every piece,
the trains, the lives, everything that passes,
and yet at times it seems like stale news:
dead stories blown by the canals,
the ink gone blank as soon as it is sunk -
sunt lacrimae rerum, or something like

the late Evening News: a paper I would like
to read again, discover zones of peace
where minds were broken or a heart was sunk,
knowing the bedroom where the night train passes,
where dreamt roads become burnt-out canals,
and morning brings the shock of dreaded news

or freedom from it. And still The News
is dreadful, do what you like!
Below your room, above the canal,
the trains rattle on. The face of no-peace,
for all that, reaches you, draws level, passes
so close, you see its pain has sunk

because everything that matters has sunk.
Through roofs and walls more wireless news
builds up like static, enters, passes
through ether. The wagons sound not to like
their steel-walled cargo, passing piece by piece:
their screech is mirrored in the still canal.

Making minute threads of the canals,
up where the whole sky is greyly sunk
in sound – a plane, iron bird if you like,
just passing through… There follows a peace
which is Prussian Blue, the Planet’s news
at last - where Ginsberg’s cool news passes

low, reaching through absence into peace,
while morning Metro’s clutch of bleeping news
chirps at the Oysters and the freedom passes.

A Woman Magically Appearing

To a Woman Magically Appearing
Twiggy Exhibition National Portrait Gallery
Feb-March 2010

You can look down
On all the decades of
Your Twiggy-life if
You sneak up the back
And along to the balcony
With the iron railings
And see the people
Looking in your eyes
And reading what you wrote.

Once in the not-quite square
Gallery w/its ornate marble floor,
There’s the one of you
With huge eyes soft-tone
Close up – you can see
The freckles and how you
Support your chin against palm
Nice fingers neatly folded
Just brushing lightly parted lips.

Then there’s Ronald
Traeger’s photos, dead at 32,
Blow-ups of you laughing
On the Downs or
Free-wheeling on a
Bicycle with small wheels
And big handle bars in your
Mini dress legs shot
Out and forward
In lace-up shoes and ¾ socks.

And there’s how they caught you
In the ‘70s “me as a woman
Not as a photo shoot” –
In a small interior your place
With its mod circle
Paintings + floral-quilted
Arm chair and the intimate
Architecture of you in a
Red evening gown,
And recently in the 2000s
Just as predictably blemish-free. And

The one that stays most
With me from ’67 – when we
Students with our sex stories
Walked in that rolling way left shoulder
Slightly pointing forward as
If this walking would make us
Talk better or be more alive
To the currents of the time –
It’s the famous one of you
At a Ticker Tape parade:
“Melvin came up with
The idea of making masks
From B & W photographs of my face
Which he gave to the
Crowd to wear…” and only
You are real in yellow
Mini-dress and black leather
Draped around your shoulders.
And you finish your account,
“Melvin and the art direction team
Won several awards.”


***

Edward Hopper Floating Curtain for Jonnie and Anne

Edward Hopper Floating Curtain

each summer trailing from an open window
across the flat gardens or down the street
I see again that Edward Hopper curtain
a white promise lifted by the breeze
a presence of unshared regret
lingering across my vision/and the light
that comes and changes things
where all alone a woman
kneels on the bed and looks/I
not knowing if she knows just how
the light picks out the rumpled waves
the sheet she’s kneeling on in New York

in London that same light has come
to visit me in the just-before or
just-after I dial or log on boot up

it’s as if Edward Hopper knows my place
the way shadow is and how the light is straight -
straight as my trunk or table -
showing new across the carpet
like a lance from worship or silence
from some place other in the world
that came alight while we still slept

I daren’t go up too close
to those paintings at the exhibition
in case I get pulled through
into that bar somewhere on the corner
in America where loneliness
works by electricity or into a cinema
where the light is red and blue
against the tawdry lushness of cinema curtains
where an usherette lovelier than a film-star
shines in her polyester like a torch

come back home and look through a window
at a scene or part of a scene by Hopper/
it’s just a wall or a building or part
of a wall or of someone in another window
across the night over the street
and even though there is no message
on the answer phone
I still know Edward Hopper
dialled my number while I’ve been out

Once-The-Mission

Once-The-Mission

Flatlands, eel grass, marsh harriers hover,
copper sanded estuary, reed banks;
paper and glass still prosper; vessels
like floating caverns, grey container-men
Harwich-bound, blank the docks. Pluck owns
the river – swifts weave through park's air space,
lion-cat stroked in the foliage,
Limehouse massage, in and out calls;
once-The-Mission flanked by bovver
is unreal estate, locked gate. Pranks
came at night, a skull-and-cross-bones,
concrete stained by graphic rain.

Search Party

Search Party


The plans we make are dangerously at sea;
I note your natural confidence and ease
about train bookings, the itinery
that takes us to the Southern tip, then sees
us on a trail that winds intrepidly
into the depths of more uncertainties.
I go along with what you say, then freeze -
wanting to pull back from this unsettling journey.

And then the news that you haven't returned
from an excursion to a wild life park
over six hundred acres in the West.
You stayed to see the sunset as it burned
the trees, lingered there after it was dark,
a friend reported, or bare-facedly guessed.


Then, not worried for you or about you,
we thought we saw your form fly genie-style
emerging from a vase. Just how you flew
we didn't surmise, though it made us smile
to see you smugly calm and bang on cue.
Each day I have to walk a forest mile
on shifting floors, and ratchet up my guile -
no map or guide, the light our only clue;

and your penciled note: "Head for first light
and don't stop 'til the Asian birches start."
In truth I don't quite trust anyone here,
though I stick close to the camp fire at night.
They say there's a new danger everywhere:
seen from far, you couldn't tell us apart.



Under the restaurant's concrete canopy,
the terrace overlooks the lake. We float

above the gentle darkness, less weary
now that we have a bowl of matelote,
a table and - increasingly remote -
chance of a bed. This good, reviving Cote
du something starts to make me worry-free,
though deep down still anxious about the journey -

I've lost all track of you, and lost your smile,
expect to see it like a pale night light,
can't place the way it dimples into shadows.
Instead my watch's luminous blue dial
tells me we've still got hours to kill. I doze,
give up, decouple; it doesn't feel right.


I measure a chaotic football ground:
buses in perpetual movement commute
past me to an unseen moving-around.
The city moves on from route to crazed route;
the engines growl and rumble, shudder, shoot
into tunnels, a sharp, determined sound.
The smallest spat could lead to a dispute.

It's in this sprawl there is a slender chance,
split from the rest at last, of seeing you.
An out-of-town high street, a doorway where
an old kebab shop has a teashop air,
though the unlikeliest of rendezvous,
is where your elfin shape could take on substance.


In slanting evening light where crowds are massing,
wishing we'd thought to bring a camera,
seeing that not to act would cost us dearer,
we move with them, the group we thought was passing,
involved in scenes that get embarrassing.
When anger spills over, nothing could be weirder
than not knowing who it is you're harassing,
crushed against a costume and its wearer.



It's not so much the weight of others makes me
afraid, the need to shove and wriggle free;
rather, it's irony. I tracked you down
against all odds, and if in this strange show
I lose you again the joke would gain renown
amongst our peers. Hold tight and don't let go!


There's a small park near the hotel: I stare
at a white page and try to write this down,
before it peels off in the fresh air
of morning, floats away across the town.
Fact is, last night, over pizza and wine,
you told me the story of your adventure,
starting with how you climb through night to where
the stars shine bright as an amphetamine

high. It was here you had to admit being lost,
and how you stayed lost for, “over all
a longish time…" I write and scribble quickly
all that I can remember and recall
of you, your voice and what it said to me,
vaguely aware of coffee on the roast.

Molecules, Thin Notes

Molecules, Thin Notes:
Towards a Psychodrama for Weldon Kees


The pencils sharpened long ago
are grey towards the point, the car
abandoned at the Golden Gate,
what make was it and how many
miles on the clock?


“I did my bit for old Miami,
stayed in a boarding house there,
three short weeks one Summer.
A waitress lost her job over me:
I lost my sense because of her.

I parked again in Lovers’ Lane
where the airliners fly low towards
their landing, and the railroad
meets the drive-in picture-house under powdered stars.”


The murder hunts the day of his disappearance
could have sirened the mystery of his loss –
a man pushed in a river for his watch,
a boy stabbed by a railway line
and grizzlier sadistic headlines, gone
like Happy Hour slates chalked for a day,
cigarette buts swept by a janitor.
Each passing year the headlines and the horror
replaced by new, and then outdone
by Armageddon archives of the bomb.


“I did my time in Mexico
jumping freights and hopping trains.
There’s no sun quite like that, burns
and purifies, steals up like peyote,
makes changes to the conceptual brain.”


Did he leave some molecules, thin notes,
tucked in to an Arthur Waley – undiscovered,
a poem for the last steps before the Golden Gate?
His apartment buzzed one last time
with a small bevy of gallery owners,
magazine editors, and Ruesch now working
on a film; drank and conversed about their man,
throwing no light. No light could be
thrown: his life, it seemed, like Robinson’s,
was constructed by one pencil
sharper than the rest.


“The subway cars I ride are knackered now,
the rooms I write about long since disbanded;
the syllables of dialogues that ended float
where the railway does something dramatic
before disappearing under roadway, houses, shops.
In hot July brickwork clings a flower,
course green and yellow: I’m untidy here,
all my senses peeled back. Do you mind if I join you,
shirt clinging in the heat, the static
where the screeching tracks head South,
the wagons open top?”


+++

Alan Ginsberg Dream

Alan Ginsberg Dream




29/07/07

Alan: I decided to write down those memories I recall from the non-ego memory e.g,

When I was so little
I was barely a weight
in my mother’s hand…..

Then, I see in my dream, the reader has a choice between hyperlinks to reach the end of the poem. The hyperlinks become feely bags you can reach into and pull out the poems. Some of the bags are shaped like Teddies. Joyce knows some of the poems – she comes in as I am pulling out the one above. I wake up.


1946

When I was so little
I was barely a weight
in my mother’s hand

knitted shoes
the size
of her thumb

the beating
of her heart
was my Paris

the conversation
of strangers
London’s mighty roar.


1956

Being on the river
with my mother when
she was still young
enough to fall
on the pavement, pick
herself up & carry on –
luckily her glasses
not broken.

Tall just up to her
shoulder, sitting together
on the wood-slat,
cracked varnish seats
and reading the names
on the sides of barges
yachts & launches and she
knowing I am short-sighted,
saying: “You may
need glasses some day.”


196-

From the Summer
of being fucked up what did I learn?
That people we don’t know
are just as important as people we do,
and other people’s mothers and fathers and best friends.

That night I travelled up the Northern Line
thinking to sleep at my Auntie’s house:
all locked up and silent, forgot she’s
away the weekend – stalled me - I travelled way down
the Northern line to Oval, Cleaver Square
to tell Martin about my girlfriend
and having nowhere to sleep –
and chanting Martin, Martin to no effect, no
window slung open in reply –

Up the Northern line, back up again –
in Pond square I found a
parked car – the replica of Martin’s
black 1950’s Morris his parents ‘d bought him
second hand – knowing it’s not Martin’s car
I get in and find there’s a neatly
folded blanket on the front
seat – curl up that summer night
in door-mouse comfort, feeling
like a Camembert in a picnic basket
sleeping until 6.0 am, when I



stealthily slip the handle up & roll out
onto well-worn tarmac under green Highgate Trees,
remembering to refold the blanket


thankful for this unlocked car
in the morning when Ginsberg was
king of Czechoslovakia
and the May – headed back past Highgate Cemetary to
Achway, and Mum and Dad in Brighton
for the weekend, saying I
spent the night with a friend.

+++

Mallarme

To a Woman Dreaming

O woman in the act of dreaming,
with your sweet misnomers, understand
how I can plunge into roadless bliss.
Keep my wing safe in your hand.

The freshness of evening light
fans you with the passing of each beat,
with a force so delicate
it pushes the horizon back,

quivering vertiginous. See
how space is like a vast embrace
which, sick of being born for no-one,
can’t pour itself out or calm down.

Couldn’t you feel the paradise
begin like a concealed laugh,
and flow from the corner of your mouth
to the depth of your one white throat!

Aegis of red sand beaches,
stuck in golden evenings – this is it!
This whiteness of closed flight you place
against the fire of a bracelet.

From the French of Stephane Mallarme

Peppermint Aero Green Box

Peppermint Aero Green Box

What goes in to nothingness
comes out unscathed:
minute unnoticed changes

from dark swathes of inner space,
the leaves’ green tips of carbon flame,
tall pots new-staged in restaurant window.

The Gardener’s Hut looks out
as if from its own transformation –
traumatic or benign?

I don't know what's in the green box:
a glossy close-up curving back,
a memory that springs out at you.

I see a box where flowers were,
and where a nice girl sat reading
framed in April sunlight;

and the tulips lining up
were trying to catch her eye
while the taller shrubs looked on

and the poets stood very still
and tall pretending to be planes,
or floating seeds, amber tea

pouring through dry air.
Sometimes, on the edge of hearing,
they can hear the church bells

grandly inaudible and loudly not there,
waiting for the world to end
at the turning of a page.

+++