Fixed! - Poetry and wiggling

[Edit: had a problem with this post, so if you see two emails, apologies]

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What you can expect to see in this post:

• Some poems

• Some polls

• Some history about my life as a poet

This entire post is free.

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As you’re the person who will possibly be picking the books up and reading them, your opinion on their structure is incredibly important.

I am glad I get to have these conversations with you, it’s one of the benefits of being self-published; that I have direct communication with my audience and we can figure out what shape is the best shape for a book.

For stuff like the upcoming Sci-Fi Comedy story collection, Who Killed The Humans?, I have a solid shape in my mind before I do the writing, but with poetry collections, there’s a bit more wiggle room. Sure, I know I want the paperbacks to be squares so they look like little vinyl records, but outside that I’m open to suggestion. I am open to wiggling.

Above is one concept for a cover. Another benefit of being self-employed as a writer is that I get to do all the covers myself.

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Anyway, we were talking of wiggling.

This is your opportunity to wiggle.

I have been writing poetry since at least 1997. I was five years old, and wrote a poem about interdimensional travel for my autistic brother.

Yes, that’s really how I started.

It made sense at the time. Later in life, in 2017, I would recite it from memory in the Wetherspoons in Ormskirk, because my poetry professor had dared me to.

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Now, in late 2024, I am currently looking at a 336-page long document containing some of my poems. There are some which I have deleted or not yet typed up from various notebooks, but most of it is here, and in 2025 I would like to publish some of them.

I recently asked my audience on X what they think about collection length. The majority seem to want 39 pages, but five votes isn’t exactly conclusive.

Note that pages does not equate to poems. With the paperback format I am going for, some poems run at four to eight pages long. This also doesn’t include images, which may or may not be added to the books.

I want to know what you think.

What are your thoughts on the paperback length?

Thanks for answering that first poll. Here’s one of the poems.

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GEODESIC II

orange window ghosts scale the ceiling
with branches in the frame like fur,
a choking car horn beeps, a fox cowers 
someone outside knocks my cider can
into a patch of moss cryogenically preserved [for another poem]
 
frost particles adorn the window’s edge
glass steams up with our names
(our hands already imprinted
from several nights before
like the smeared picosecond after lightning)

and even the fabric of spacetime is cold
between two superclusters
between two time-displaced bodies

as galaxies of thought and feeling activate
the weight of your eyes keeps me rolling inward
over membranes and dimensions uncharted
but life moves too fast to fall all the way

so caught up in this orbit, I become your centrifuge
I wish you’d spin me faster
and faster till the best of me
condensed at the bottom and I
never needed a backbone anyway
it only crumples when I see you

[later, civilisations rise and fall as we slumber
the mood changes, the sun grows fat]

and in the morning after all mornings
there’s a new world outside
a new orange feeling in the room, a future unwritten
and sunbeams fat enough you feel like you could balance on them

As you can see, they’re not in the style of the modern instagram poetry, so some of them do take up more than one page. That one above was from False Vacuum, the first of two collections I put out in 2022.

You haven’t heard of them because I didn’t put anything into advertising them. I put them out for myself.

It’s pretty far removed from my Sci-Fi stuff, but you’ll see those elements still persist.

A geodesic is the shortest path an object can take through curved spacetime.

I’ve been thinking of renaming the collections before republishing them, in the hopes they are more catchy to the average person (a few people at poetry events asked me why it is about a vacuum cleaner, when it isn’t, it’s about vacuum decay, the collapse of a universe, being used as a metaphor for the smaller moments in our lives, obviously.)

So, as much as I will miss False Vacuum, I think it might be a good idea to give the collection a new title (this will also give me room to change its length and structure without confusing the four people who got the original book).

It’s a hard choice for me to make, which is why this poll is here. I don’t want to be caught up in nostalgia when a better title might exist. Please vote on the above poll to let me know what you think.

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And up next is something from the sister collection, Branch Density.

INTERSECT

In the beginning was the intersect 
a map of fractures, the pathways of cracking surfaces
interjecting
and earlier still the liquid universe waited
something vaguely sensed by shamans and psychics
and sometimes science fiction authors

and now the solid moments are abrasive walls on either side
of timelines like train times or time tunnels
it can hurt to cross paths

and down here it’s like a river splitting
and up there it’s like a spider’s web
so huge that the origin is lost
as if it grew from everywhere all at once

and to travel back is to watch the glass uncrack
the surface unfreeze, to feel the encroaching heat
of a melting cosmos
before it was poured into shape

(the human, an ingot of consciousness
cast from a vast vat)

and to travel forward is to see crystals growing
like the building of rigid networks
or memories, the turning hands of clocks
as parallel lines, to hop[e] from track to track
just to look back
to where triangular craft huddled together
in darkness
a mosaic of experience unlived
shattered by time machines

This poem references events in the Sci-Fi I’ve written, and gets a bit meta about it too.

Intersects are the primary method of travel through time and space for any civilisation capable (as of yet, only two have managed to do it and survive). You don’t need to know this to ‘get’ the poem, but it does mean there’s some easter eggs built in for the handful of you who like both my Science Fiction and the Poetry.

The title Branch Density was thought up in 2015 for a mini collection I submitted for uni. It refers to the many worlds theory, to multiverses of fraying probabilities.

Again, not sure this has wide market appeal. It’s also not a scientific term this time. I made it up, a further nod to that collection being more about fiction than reality.

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Thank you for completing those polls.

Here’s another poem. I was looking for one I performed on live radio last Sunday (hi Ruth!) about publishing, but I bumped into this one along my way.

Balance
05/08/2021 13:51

It’s a matter of balance
of mania and art
the pathways open, aren’t always clear
blood / concept / fear
depression / creativity / anxiety
greenlight / crash / holiday
it’s something inevitable
and it’s beautiful

that the stream of consciousness
must be filled with something
populated, the fish of new ideas
need a medium and that medium
has grit and fossils and sharp things
and there’s a dark undercurrent that
plucks you from your footing
that wants you dead
or at least spiralling
that wants your ink to spill

and most of the rest of the world
will never understand
that sort of pull
the magnetism between you and
the next invention

and there’s always some intervention
always someone worried about this
new pursuit
“Should you really be this
when you’re not done being that?”

I like this one. It’s jagged in all the right ways.

It’s important to me to get the dates and times of the poems down when I can, has been since 2014. I had this idea that some future reader might paw through the things and divine a deeper meaning or trajectory by charting those spacetime coordinates and reading the dated poems in chronological order.

There is a bigger story being told, through all my work, and the poetry has been an integral part of that. It is the muscle and sinew. I am glad to have it back.

If you’ve read Who Built The Humans? you’ll know there’s a completely different genre of my poetry hidden in there, too. Fifteen comedic short stories written as highly alliterative slam poems aimed at some future human species, from long-necked immortals to glowing future fools. I don’t advertise that fact very often, because to be honest it confuses people. But once they read the book, they get it.

I find my standup comedy has a similar otherness to it as well. Watching videos back, I do better when I’ve more time to tell a story, and when I have room for improv.

Back to the poetry. I’ve been tempted to repub those fifteen WBTH poems on their own, as a collection so they can reach a wider audience. Because hiding a poetry collection inside my debut book, whilst very cool and sexy of me, wasn’t the smartest move marketing wise.

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I’m glad I am a self-published poet, even if sometimes I get looked down at by my supposed contemporaries. I won a scholarship at uni for my sci-fi poetry, and the comedy poems have helped me settle quite comfortably into the comedy scene in my home city. I think I am successful because I have my own parameters for success. I read a thing at a place and people clap and line up to tell me how clever and funny it was. That’s all you want, really.

What else is there?

But, if you know of a press weird enough to take on my poetry, please let me know.

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Audio?

I’ve got talking to a few recording studios recently. And whilst I can’t presently afford the recording and mastering, I can tell you that some progress is being made. Hoping to make music videos for them, too.

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One last poll.

Exit music - Pictures of You, THE CURE