Four poems you've not seen before.
Four poems you've not seen before.
Good eveninoonening.
Here are some words I found in my head. It’s up to you if they are serious poems or not. You know more than me.
[ Note: some of these are comedic and feature topics you shouldn’t show to your boss in the office ]
(I haven’t forgotten last week’s poll. A WKTH video is in production).
There’s context after each poem. I’m not the preamble type.
Have a postamble instead.
The next big thing
it’s great you know, this novel.
a hulking slab of meandering prose
twisting subplots
unreliable narrators
I don’t mean to blow my own trumpet
but it’s brilliant
if you like you can read it
do you want to?
I’ll push my novel between pint glasses
through letterboxes
I’ll find you on your break at work
and give you my novel
if you like
I can perform a reading
(of my novel)
on your birthday
or via skype
when you’re brushing your teeth
I’m the next big thing
did I tell you?
when you’re at the gym
I’ll put extracts of my novel
on the treadmill
read you laminated tearjerkers
in the sauna
seriously
it’s so crisp
and refreshing
I’m often catching myself
trying to drink it
you’re in it you know
well it’s not you
but it sort of is
if you like
I could bring a copy
or two to
the party?
hello?
I’ve enjoyed reading that one at open mics. I wrote it in late 2015 and haven’t edited it since, but there is a dirty hidden line I might sneak in as improv. It’s based on an experience I had at a writing convention in 2015, where an aspiring and very pushy author kept putting more and more of the same business card on someone’s table at a pub.
Anyway. On with the next one.
Honey
and you’re just stood there in my night gown
like an idiot
a grim reaper, holding a serving tray older than both of us
and I think my friend uses your shampoo now
and I think my friends would ask where you’ve been
but they don’t because they’re not here either
out smashing their faces on glass ceilings
whilst I’m trying to shimmy the pipes
like that talk show host you like
that’s how you get ahead these days
but I’m not the one with tunnel vision here, no
I know where I’m going
I just don’t know where anyone else has gone
Honey is one of a series of poems in which I imagined a character astral-projecting himself back through time, to relive things at the end of his life. My serious stuff can get depressing like that, but I like it. I had a solid idea of where this person lived and what his house looked like, setting several poems there sporadically over a decade.
This next one isn’t as serious.
Kidnap
follow me home
from the school of lyfe
hit me with your
magic breezeblock
crush healing bricks
in the satellite dish
repurposed
force a baptism
through a sleeping bag
pestle and mortar board waterboarding
keep me on your drip
until the lonely molecule
finds its way
push a new-age cure
through the mind’s eye
of a hypodermic
declare I emerge reborn
from the sopping cocoon
next week
when headlines say
POLICE APPREHEND A VIOLENT HOMEOPATH
I’ll be out of here.
I believe I wrote this one in October 2014. It was the first of several comedic yet artsy poems which marked a critical change in my writing style. After scoring straight Firsts for all my poetry at university, I was worried this would break my perfect record. My tutors liked it, but the more comedic stuff that came after was deemed, quite rightly, an attempt at standup in a poetry class.
I never submitted the sillier poems to any proper assessment, choosing instead to bring them to workshops.
As you know, I have since done standup, including my own show at the Manchester Fringe, which mixed Science Fiction, Comedy, and Poetry.
But way back in 2015, my first ever comedy gig included the poem PHONE SEX, which I will include in an upcoming audio post. It was maybe my third proper rhyming comedy poem that was good enough to publish.
For now, enjoy one last one, a serious one.
Cavemind 1 22/09/2022
Crawling free, the fingers split and bleed
On jagged stone
The blood, cosmos-black in the corners
Where torchlight never reaches
And in the head, helmeted and freezing
Is an idea of a pilgrimage
And a rite of passage
And a secret passage
There is the ghost of an oaken door
This is the clamouring for survival
This is a filter through which you don’t just
Put an idea
But the whole brain and its casing
The whole wet computer
The body carries on, the head is bumped
A pain echoes from torchlight to white plastic to skin to skull
And back out again into the cavern walls
So, to conclude
The Next Big Thing - Satirical piece about a very determined author
Honey - Weird time travel poem
Kidnap - Part of a decade-old series where I made a genuine attempt to satirise everything that ever existed
Cavemind - Darker, weirder serious poetry. I really like this sort of stuff, but until fairly recently didn’t think I had the audience for it. So I’m glad you’re here
I am currently sitting on a huge document of most of my poetry, at leas the stuff I’ve typed up onto this particular laptop and not written onto my phone or into the dozens of notebooks I carry around. At present it is 312 pages long, and since the shorter and longer poems balance out, that means there’s about 312 poems.
From this bulk of poetry, I have extricated no less than five complete poetry collections. There is a silly one, three serious ones in a series, and another serious one that seems to want to be alone in a corner.
I have also produced a poetry book with my sister, which we are working out how to publish. We’re both writing under pen names for it, as it’s so serious compared to my usual stuff I didn’t want to confuse the publishing algorithms that know me as a sci-fi comedy guy. I don’t want to make a big deal out of that one either, as it was more of a personal mission to process stuff than anything else, so to me it’s not as interesting as the other books. It’s well-written, sure, but I feel out of my depth here, and I don’t fancy going back to the serious open mics to promote it.
The primary five can’t come out any time soon because I am working on the big, obvious things. Primarily WHO KILLED THE HUMANS? and MACABRE MULTIVERSE, the new yearly sci-fi horror thing I’m making with Halfplanet Press.
Here’s a bit of the cover.
So there’s a lot going on.
My next post should be an update on WHO KILLED THE HUMANS? which I will be making as a Youtube video and then cross-posting here.
Please do comment if you have any thoughts about these poems.
Love the poems!👍