The poems here were written between Tuesday 22nd, Wednesday 23rd and Thursday 24th of June 1999 in the run up to, and some of them at, the Glastonbury festival. The locations where these poems were written include the bathroom of an Italian restaurant, the front room of a house in Whitworth and lying in the grass outside a tent beyond the Green Fields of Glastonbury. Thematically, they have little in common, but in the three days in which I wrote them, I experienced a lot. I would have presented these simply as part of the regular poetry page, but the poems struck me as being somehow special, something I wanted to set aside from the other poetry I was writing. Enjoy.
Solstice
I can still smell the woodsmoke
On my hands;
Tainting, touching, marking me.
When I close my eyes
My retina recall the points of the fire
Too far was too cold,
Too close was burnt
Legs and stinging eyes
(no fire without smoke).
Our orange circle,
Protected like a pentagram.
Sailing through black seas,
A ship of friends, not fools.
Sailing for the moment when
Ra's lids parted.
The sun came up.
It never truly went down.
Statues
They stood around the hole,
Still, in all senses of the word.
Still there, still standing, still
Not moving.
Faces like paper masks from a tragedy
Not one of those dry eyes met anothers.
Not even mine,
My paper mask holding tight
To the cling film of polite behaviour,
Stopping my tears, cries, murmurs,
Stopping my breath, it seemed.
So I stood, red faced.
Ashen eyed.
Eventually, holding my emotions
became like holding my breath.
I had to struggle
To hold it all inside.
I walked, didn't run,
From those grave faced statues,
Pulled of my mask
And let out more than a breath.
Time Passes
I feel
dry earth and stones
on the soles of my feet,
sun on my neck,
sweat on my brow.
Mud on the soles of my mind,
rain on the memory of the vertebrae,
dirt shrouding me,
nature's camouflage.
1 place.
2 times.
2 people,
me, and me,
watch the same fields.
Over the hills and...
I stayed.
though my heroes pointed outwards
to the distance,
The house with the golden windows,
The silklike green fields,
The outside, ideal world.
I stayed
while they went,
visiting the things I couldn't even see
& returning,
sated and sunburnt,
to tantalise with tales their awestruck audience.
I stayed
because to go would be
to run, and I've never been good at running,
especially from myself.
They went,
and returned just the same.
I stayed,
and changed.
Seperation Lullaby
As we lie,
Apart
Yet closer than two people have ever been,
Remember this:
Although we have a distance between us
And it hurts,
I know it hurts,
The world is not ending.
We overcame so much
Sneers, unhappiness,
Ill communication, our own shyness
To be together
And for two weeks
(or years, or seconds
To my subjective mind)
We were, unified, complete.
How can we,
Who have a bond so strong
It overcame my universal shyness
Let distance seperate us?
Straw men in paper
Circles in ceramic
On a plane of wood
Supporting a vessel,
The liquid brown of tea
Warms my stomach,
much as the lurid tabloids
-& the grey curfew of clouds-
Chill my soul.
Amazing, this newspaper,
Selling sensation by the pound.
A new lurid shock every day
In full gaudy colour.
Must we seek
The cheapest thrills,
The seediest sideshows,
The lowest ground?
Must we be
The Victorian gent
Cruising the tenements
For a warm whore for the night?,
Surely, I think,
As I read of sex-mad starlets,
Drug-craze shockers and 'our boys'
We can't have sunk this low?