hiraeth

I sit here in the small of the back of London, crouched, tense in the hollow at the base of its Underground spine, only stopping through. In just twenty hours, I have seen the vivid, thorny green of my home: the wild garden, the grapes, the cream and the raspberries. Here I lived, living, live? Impossible to translate into present the beauty of the past: walking through Alisa's room is like walking through a ruin: it seems like relics, and it's difficult not to drift back in time. I come back home - home- home - and brim with love and sadness in the dark sweet night. Mum is writing a piece about lodgers, about the last great lodger - Alisa - like the great Roman ruler at the end of an empire. Soon she'll sell this place, and then we'll have to leave it behind, our great home, our great lives here. The photographer comes and we stand on the stairs, in her room, in the garden, and swap smiles that are so real . And so, in one big burst of love we reduce the moments of the past, the years, our house in Green Eggs And Ham to a few flat photographs. Yet we all live on; I joke that mum's stolen my novel, reduced my debut drama to some piece in the Home pages, but I'm secretly not afraid - there will be far more tales to tell along the way - in which Alis, Mum and Shaz will doubtless make quite a few appearances...

Bath

The green grey landscape, turquoise baths with golden Roman columns and silver rusty springs filling pools with antiquated coindrops of water, fountain money... outside the rain strikes like slim silver, threads silver steam so it's rising from the blue green pool like Time: eternally escaping...leaving only tiny water droplets, the residue of memory, in our palms.

frockshock

Nothing fits my fretting state, so I trip
into a chintzy charity shop and quickly strip
off my own tear-stained stock, only to slip
my fingers into silk rosed topshop frock and quip
to myself that it’s far too baggy for my newfound
state,that even if I bought it I would hate
the bump of fabric at the front,
the little rosy tucks,
the cotton crib at the pit
of the stomach, a reminder of the blip
that forces me to peel the dress from skin and slip
it on the hanger, return it to the plummy woman
at the till, lower my pregnant glance and quickstep out of
the shop of hand-me-downs, eyes bursting at the seams:
from this gold-daisied dress I glimpsed or guessed
the shape of things that might have been.

The Red Academic

Property is theft anyway - at least, that's what I tell myself when stealing from my flatmates' shelves in the fridge...

"If property is theft then intellectual property is just stealing from the communal body of knowledge. My only hope is if ideas cannot be owned by anyone, if ideas exist purely as selfless facets of human wisdom rather than claimed & copyrighted snippets of someone's thoughts. Losing copyright over intellectual property would mean that no-one would strive for originality, to say something new, because they could not derive personal glory or fame for it - if good, it would be shamelessly repackaged and plagiarised. That way originality would no longer be the pinnacle of human achievement. This would leave people free to learn for learning's sake, not for fame, and search for what is 'right' or what seems truthful, rather than what is original. Too often people say something purely because it's new, exciting, unusual - with little regard for the truth of their statement.Surely pointless to distract readers from the pursuit of human truths, in search of novelty?"

The lips of two hands, curved and flashing flesh:
the white drug in the dip, fingers that reach
to sip hallucinogenic hazards like hot milk -
For both are white and tenable
in the tipped hot cup of hot-cupped palms
poured out like life-source, sipped, kept
warm on the lips of kids in schools
and drug addicts alike. What is it about white
light that so kindles love?

This stuff's not firelight, yet pills and milk
both bring the mind
to another plane. How strange
that the liquid love donned out in broad daylight
by schools and mums trains tots
to seek as teens the soft warm love
of the drug, the E, the pills cupped like a breast
in the hot held hand at the back of the club,
the stream of milky white, the next best
step.

St Davids

If like some nutter combing coast, I searched
for Stuff we'd left behind along the shore
and gathered it all up into a poem
for some other nutter to find once more

The poem might look like this: four teabags
and tin foil nicked from shelves, a pack
of CDs wedged with salty towels, one Crazy,
a heap of shells, some wood, a ruddy rack

of words that try too hard to re-
create creation, attempting to retain
moments like butterflies, whose beauty lies
in fleetingness: the transience of passing rain;

your brown eyes; iris-sparks bursting from the soil;
your hand in mine: moments that words would only spoil.

the bath cycle II

He sinks skyward, and by the sudden cold all over he knows he’s reached the clouds. He ran this bath to escape the hot brown earth, the dusty summer sun, the heat, and when he lowers himself into the bath it feels like he’s risen above this world, weightless in the water, soothed and refreshed by this cold climate, this thick new cloud-element for him to exist in. The sky, the sky: blue sometimes, gray others, polluted always. Shuddering he thinks of the sun: a blazing foghorn torch in this cityscape, just strong enough to push through the crowd of fuggy fumes, determined to drench the ground in its life-force. Climate change feels like it’s coming on fast. The paranoia’s struck, and every time he pounds the pavement he feels like pollution’s parading toxic in his lungs. Cars, fumes, flames: he fears them all, not only because of their macho machinistic power, their capability to crush human bodies into nothingness, but because of their environmental impact. He fears not the here and now, but the future, and if WallE has taught him anything, it is that eco-disaster is not so far away. He seldom goes out these days, and when he does he drops his hands in his pockets and tries to breathe in as little as possible. The bath seemed his only escape, the pure cold hope of the water rising around him, cleansing him of the fumes and the flames that he so feared.

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