Writing Music About

Weathering

A collection of poems from 2024.

Weathering

We are less today,
less than we were yesterday.

It is a process.

You wouldn't know it
just by looking day to day.

Only when you catch a glimpse
of what we were some years ago
do you get the sense we must,
in every passing moment,
be just that little bit diminished.

Backwards

I walk backwards into shops
so I can see where I have come from
and how to get out.

I keep my receipts
so I can count the cost.

I wrap each one around a stone
and carry it in my pack
so I can feel its weight.

Once

Once, when it was new
it had been enough.

Briefly

Then,
while these things came and went,
it had been
quite the thing.

Briefly

Now,
these things have passed
and we,
in passing them,
feel nothing but emptiness.

Briefly

Before we pass too.

Greenwich Mean

When the symmetry of the day starts to bite
she tells it not to be so stupid.
Tells it that days are not symmetrical,
that they have no form at all.

Tells it to get back in its box,
then yells at the box for being stupid
and putting ideas into its head.

She wraps the box in flames –
only the gentle ones that lick and caress.
They can do no harm, she thinks.
They can do no wrong.

Introversion

How will you know me
when I pass?

How will you find me
when I find you're out
and leave no note of
my visit?

My darling,
should I know you
by your absence?

Where are you
when I send my smoke signals
into the mists
that cloak these shores?

Why do you never come?

When the Shadow Sings

When the shadow sings
its voice is clear and dark.
It doesn't sing of fear,
as some might think,
but of freedom:
Freedom to exist in corners.
Freedom to choose to bow its head.
Freedom to walk on the shady
side of the street.

When the shadow sings
I sing too
in the half light.

Watching My Mum Cut Bread

Loaves back then weren't
what they are today.

Back then each bara was a foreign land
of rolling loamy tracts.

One didn't need a map
so much as stamina
and deftness
as one roamed around it
with the blade.

Lesser mortals might require
a change of horses halfway round.

Not my mum.

She steers the saw,
following the contours that history
has bestowed upon the thing
(the cut is never straight)
producing slices millimetres thin.

It's the only way to make
the golden ratio
of bread to butter.

And to provide slices enough
for the invading English at teatime.

Sprouts

I am preparing sprouts
with a grapefruit knife.
I have no choice –
it's all she's left me with.

I take each one in turn and,
with one side of the serrated blade,
saw off the runt of the stalk –
the part that had attached it
to the stem,
that brought it nourishment
and communion with
others of its kind.

Then I take the knife
and carve a sacred cross
deep into its flesh –
not so deep that the
poor thing falls apart
but enough that it
surely knows that it's been cut.

Deep enough that
the heat of righteousness
will penetrate it
to its putrid, sulphorous core.

Mr Ond

Mr Ond will see you now.
See you for what you are,
that is.
Who you really are,
what you stand for,
and for how long.

Mr Ond will see you now
after all this time
of standing.

Mr Ond does not wish
to see you stand for more.

The Mentor

"You're not exactly prolific!" he scoffs.

I'm showing him my String Quartet from 1984,
written in the school holidays.

He's looking at the long sustained chords,
delicately dissonant,
hanging in the air like gossamer.

"I could play a thousand notes in that time!"
he blusters
and promptly demonstrates
at the keyboard.

"And I could change key like this...
and this."

He is taking my theme and transposing it
at will up and down the keyboard.

It's not my music
It's not what I want my music to sound like
Not what I want anyone's music to sound like.
It's grotesque.

Like an idiot who has swallowed a dictionary
but has no sense of the way that words
feel inside the mouth
or on the tongue
but just knows how to expel as many of them
as possible from his great fat head
in the shortest time.

"When you come again," he says,
"give this special knock
so I know it's you."

I don't go back again.

Uphill

Today we are pumping.
Pumping water up the hill
to the higher land
where there is none.
Up to where the earth is parched
and grim reminders of our folly
lie around the place.

We will pump for two hours
then stop and cool off.

Some say that water has no right
in being where it doesn't fall,
and if you want hydration
you should move downhill.
But we are uphill folk:
we must follow our nature.

So today we move the water
to the higher ground
where providence decreed
there should be none,
but we, in our infinite wisdom,
know better.

Amputee

The four hundred year old amputee
is standing in the plaza
next to the fountain.

If we had ears
we would hear him scream –
a scream that is a hundred years old.

Never mind all that.
The deaf will take a saw
and inflict more pointless mutilation.

"I did not choose this life," he says,
"did not choose to spring forth here.
It's not my fault that you do not like my form.
I don't much like my location."

Isomorph

Something about the face
is terrifying.

Something about the
undisguised manifestation
of the type.

Most of us
have diverged from the type
through random permutations

The types should not
be present among us
in their undiluted form.

Nature should preclude
that eventuality.

But here one was.

If you can imagine
the face of a clown
stripped of its specific makeup
leaving just the generic.
That's the nearest
I can get to a description.

I knew them as we all do
from deep down in the psyche
where they types are laid,
and where they are supposed to stay.

I ran as fast as I have ever run
but the terror has remained.

In The Night Garden

In the night garden
children hit the earth with rocks.

"It won't yield,"
someone shouts.

It used to.
Used to yield
water, wheat and meat.
Even blood,
when times were tough.

Now they get nothing.

In the future they will
sit in that garden
in the early hours
wishing for nothing,
yearning for the relief
that nothing can bring
when they've had their fill.

Spring Comes Early

Spring comes early,
a month or so ahead of time.
Yet even in the nascent warmth,
as young shoots sprout
and bud with promise of new life,
frigid polar air sweeps down
from where the jet stream
once held sway
to blithely snuff it out.

This is the order we have wrought
upon the world of wonder
we inherited.

Chaos and confusion are the
seeds that we have sown,
and the bounty we have bought.

When the Computers Run the World

When the computers run the world
we will be free.

Free from being accountants
and tax advisors
and lawyers
and supply chain managers
and warehouse operatives
and logistics managers
and import export clerks
and stock takers
and asset managers
and investment analysts
and central bankers
and credit score evaluators
and quantity surveyors
and actuaries
and loss adjusters.

We will be free.

Free to be teachers
and dinner ladies
and waiters in cafes
and life guards at swimming pools
and nurses
and carers
and social workers.

We will be free
to be poets
and artists
and composers
and dancers
and chess players
and mountaineers.

Free to live as humans
and use our gifts for humankind.

Free to be inefficient
and to recognise once more that
there are more important things.

Free to reimagine
what it means to be alive.

And those who can't conceive of such a thing
can go back to travelling the branch lines
and crossing off the locomotives
they have seen.

Back to where they can do no harm.

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