Forty-nine Torsos (2012)

I read a newspaper story about forty-nine severed heads being dumped at a roadside in Mexico and wondered what on earth conditions someone to be capable of beheading, en-mass, other humans. This poem is the result. It was originally called 'One in Fifty' and a version of it appeared in my book 'A Limited Season'.

Forty-nine torsos

We keep pigs here on the border

so I came equipped,

a sticking knife, a hacking saw,

left the stunning gear indoors.

Señor put us straight,

there’d be no element of surprise.

He likes to see in their eyes

the realization

slowly kindle, flare up and die.

You wouldn’t treat a hog so rough,

all that struggling

spoiling the choicest cuts,

engorging the meat with sour blood.

It takes two hombres

to hold them still enough to cut.

To remove the heads you must saw

through gristle and gullet,

not neatly slit from nape to jaw

like pigs to be hung up and bled.

When the sawing severs

arteries, adobe walls get painted red.

These pigs all the while resist the inevitable,

their protests rise

through viscera in pretty pink bubbles.

Plenty of guys have come down, ready

to stand and be counted 

by Señor, and not be number fifty.

Deadly Nightshade (2012)

My father had contracted the esophageal cancer that would lead to his death when I wrote this poem, which was based on his own description of his disease as a fungus. The idea of a mushroom spore gradually taking over its host was too inviting to resist, and coming from Kent, where ancient woodlands are never far from our thoughts, the fungus quickly spread through one connotation after another.

Deadly nightshade

A mushroom lodged in the damp

stump of your throat. It smelt

like the inside of an old shoe

and now your breath smells of brie,

or athlete’s foot. It grew fat

and got greedy; the more you fed it,

the less it left for you. You shrivelled

as your pipeline silted up.

The doctor shone

a light down your throat

and it didn’t come back. He said

you’ve a black hole inside you

eating everything it touches. Your skin,

its event horizon. Think of yourself

as a caterpillar whose metamorphosis

into a mushroom has begun.

You’re a Taurus now but soon

you’ll scuttle away as a crab,

or at least the mushroom will.

You should have bellowed 

at the first sight of red, 

you should have charged

down to A&E sooner than you did,

before you lost out to gravity.

The doctors have washed their hands.

Hospital food is fed to you

through a tube, the sacrificial bull

being fattened up even as its life

drains away; or is blown away

by a mushroom cloud. Nothing

goes to waste, every morsel gets

recycled. This is a green disease.

They’ve treated what’s left

of you to a soothing view

of a bluebell copse. Heady woodland

air blows in through an open window

and freshens your breath

in one way at least. You see more

of your family now than you ever did.

They come for the spectacle.

It is hard to describe becoming

a mushroom. You have lost 

the gift of speech: your disease

has become incommunicable.

The doctors say it’s not contagious,

but that dust blowing in from

the bluebell woods is heavy

with mushroom spores.

A Premature Revelation (2012)

In 2012, still a relative newbie to poetry, I was using news stories as inspiration for my poems. By the spring of that year I had taken measures to improve my skills, including joining a very good workshopping group and enrolling in a university-taught writing course, and I can see, looking back, how this poem had benefited from these steps. The poem itself is self-explanatory and not without merit.

A Premature Revelation

Luz Milagros was found alive in an Argentinian morgue twelve hours after her birth in April 2012.

Before I forget ever being a part

of my mother—her liver, kidneys,

bowel and bladder my giblet siblings,

like mandarin segments suspended in a jelly

—I would recall just once the soothing sloosh

of words whispered sweetly through aspic.

Mother spread open, a ripened avocado,

her insides turned outward, and there

I lay, the waxen stone, nestling

in her guacamole flesh.

It happened so quickly. It took all my will

to stay dead to the theatricals,

bright lights and howls, as I was back-passed

to a handy casket of stainless steel.

As the lid was sealed, I drew my primal 

breath. The shock of surgical steel

 

bled through folds of winding cloth 

and leached the last of mother’s warmth. 

Only then I opened my eyes

to the absurdity inherent in my lot.

Life, my life, though eventful, was over 

in the ping of an ECG machine,

and alone I tired of its telling and telling,

its diaphanous plot, its premature ending.

The seal of my tomb broke with a sharp

intake of breath, and I was reborn,

arriving in Argentina, infant philosopher,

and instant sensation. All at once

hunger spoke my name, and succour came

at the teat of a gorged and weeping breast.

Mother’s milk tasted of sweet avocado 

pressed from her reconstituted flesh.

Apostasy by Morning TV (2012)

His name was Eric Bennett. He came stumbling across the Bradford Stadium pitch in flames like a human torch. My wife saw it first and called me to watch. I wished I hadn't seen it. I watched helplessly as he stumbled, unable to help him, unable to do anything except remember his name. Of course, it slipped my mind eventually, but for that there is Google. The poem says as much and, I still think, says it with admirable directness, brevity, and simplicity.

Apostasy by Morning TV

The speed with which the fire took hold was graphically described as faster than a man could run.

—The Popplewell Inquiry into the Bradford Stadium Fire

There was an old man ambling across

a football pitch, seemingly unaware

that from his trouser cuffs to his supporters’ cap

he was a biblical pillar of fire.

I memorized his name, spoke it

like a mantra over the coming days

and it pains me that I can’t remember it now.

All I remember is how his suffering—

for he must have suffered in his stripped down

animal heart—

tore apart my certainties,

and how I carried the old man’s cross

as mankind its disgrace,

and bore through the loss of my own faith

witness to that innocent’s immolation.

Escape Velocity (2012)

This poem is about my feelings of alienation on being a working class man living a middle class life. It is certainly not how I would approach the subject now but I think it has something original to say and says it well on its own terms. Let me know what you think!

Escape Velocity

Up and away, across concatenations of roof-tiles

and satellites, our flight from hopelessness

to exhaustion ends here in these migratory oases

of middle-class suburban botanicals, cookbook

horticulture, avocado and jojoba, all outside-in.

None here can speak of ambition without irony.

A nagging insistence wormholes our detachment:

some accents are harder than others to shake—

some cause my jaw to ache. Our old neighbourhood

reminds me not of itself, but of my primary school:

too small in every sense. It is how we must appear

to those already in orbit who blasted off from here.

The Return of the Slush Poet

The Slush Poet came to be in 2012 when I first felt the urge to write poems and wanted somewhere to share them. I was astounded at the following my poems garnered and encouraged by that following to write better poems, many of which subsequently crept out of the slush piles and into prestigious journals and eventually books.

This is my first post since 2014... So, where did I go?

The answer is, down two distinct rabbit holes in quick succession. The first was my decision to undertake an MA in Creative Writing under the tutelage of the then Poet Laureate. This led me to adopt techniques that lent greater density, complexity, and structure to my poems. Unfortunately these attributes seem to have been anathema to publishers since very few of the poems I thought my best ever got published. This was, let us say, deflating.

The second rabbit hole was Brexit, which I opposed vehemently and campaigned against, re-purposing my Slush Poet Twitter account as 'Brexit Job Losses'. Like Alice in Wonderland I encountered many bizarre characters down this particular rabbit hole, one of whom was myself, for political activism is a drug that can make one act quite out of character.

The result is that I stopped writing poems a couple of years ago, having neither the desire to write them nor an audience to appreciate them. 

But like Sean Connery, I have learned never to say never. So it is time to attempt some kind of reset. I am going to post on this blog all of my best poems, the ones I think have the most merit irrespective of whether they were ever published. My modesty cringes, but I have to say there are some corkers among them and I hope, as I upload them, they are enjoyed and I get to rekindle my enthusiasm for the art.

Here goes...