A lover’s shape carved in your bed,
the silence after songs.
We only know what to hold on to
after they have gone.
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For Her (Dowson Day Poem)
At times like this, my mind aches back
The burst-banked evenings of that year;
Where long and brittle shadows
Divided silence, split the skies –
I watch, crossed here, the days flow past
And marvelled at the pace
.
Of how we met, quite by chance
And negotiated trickery.
The old language of those hearts
Somehow survived the journey –
Fibre-optically, tossed down lines,
And shot from screen to screen
.
As was the habit of the time,
We spurted lines from fingertips
And pulled ourselves in poses.
As in vain I stammered from afar
And found myself, in real lives
Self-aware on strange train lines.
.
That time, as distant as your old home,
Bright eyes, red lips, a bed, that drink –
Things changed, somehow.
We glanced downcast and tried to think
Of how to talk to those we knew
And deliver us from news.
.
Yet somehow here, in retrospect
It barely changed, the day’s the same.
Back then, my daughter’s eyes were inconceivable.
Back then, someone else lived in our home.
You stop the boat and turn to me
“All too soon we may well tread
The bitter pastures of the dead –
Let’s do it all,
Let’s do it all again.”
The Things
It could be almost anything; the crackling layers of pastry
greasing up your paper bags, the smell of that air before the rains
which drenched those early, angry kisses.
A way of reading Freud, the endless, hanging scent of dye,
the tapestry maybe worth a fortune
hammered to the white backside
of your kitchen wall.
It could just as well be footsteps mutely humming
on some concrete stairs outside, the fizz of tramlines,
Miles Davis, the sound of distant dogs, that child;
I’ll spend my remaining days out hunting
for ways to take me back, and
for ways to leave again.
Bristol Festival of Nature
I have been invited to read some poems from the collection I am working on at the Bristol Festival of Nature 2014, 14th and 15th of June.
Kids II
Parenthood was the night terror
that spoiled those times I didn’t come home.
A prospective grimy window, left unshattered,
between myself and many others. More than
once I held that vigil – forty days and awful nights
willing a drop of blood to flow, as if
I’d thrust myself into a dull lunar ritual
pre-dating even the oldest stains
on this bed we watch unseen hands and
malformed feet, we dream up names
nicked from old books. An exhalation, a fragile limb
writhes daily, there, beneath your skin.
ZYMBOL
I’m again honoured and delighted to have my poetry featured in Zymbol III – the third publication from those Salem Surrealists across the pond. They allowed me to grace their second issue with The Hothouse Remains, and invited me back for more with Waves and Schooling – surely a sign of dangerous living.
Seriously though, go and check out their anthologies. All three are utterly superb. http://www.zymbol.org
Schooling
Schooling 2014 Benjamin Norris read for Zymbol Magazine
Thinking back, I couldn’t see
how God shaped England – he was
just a character on a screen somewhere,
barely even watched by me.
Something foreign,
for the birds,
certainly too far away.
.
Those days, I paced
in smaller shoes, kicking up hours,
kicking off at school –
.
hesitantly praying some early developer
would be nudged my way
by unseen hands, slipping beneath
lock-tight waistbands that guarded the gap
between what I knew, and that
which I mapped out nightly, kneeling.
.
Much later I developed feelings,
and as my hands were not yet ruined
I wrote with pen and ink –
yet, no deity delivered
though somehow I still sought
a tossed-off thought I’d had at seven
.
Perfection awaits,
all jelly-smudged lenses, belief in heaven
brought via rings and playground glances
that somehow develop into
a slow-panning glossed eternity.
.
We bury disappointment beneath abandonment of faith –
after all, we grow out of countries
and shoes
painfully fast.
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