Neil I need you

I wrote this in the summer when I was in the throes of connecting with the Write and Recite group, and it is todays poem of the day, so read and enjoy and please leave your comments Neil, Rupert, George and Mike; who I imagine as my ideal readers. Four figures from publishing who will whisk me off on a magic carpet ride of whirlwind poetry readings at converted mills in the North of England and the QE hall on the Southbank, where I can revisit Hungerford bridge and check out my old pitch. See the new faces and sip coffee in the Film centre cafe, gazing out at the bookstalls at last light and listening to the jazzing busker blow his sax. My slim and stylish hardback black notebook will be open at page 48 and I will be engrossed in conversation with an arty looking man who turns out to have been Mr Sensodyne tooth paste 1992. A true story readers; for I have been close to the flame of second hand success, back in the old days when the smoke was my staggering ground where I stumbled along the chartered streets dreaming of golden flagstones and Stephen Spielberg discovering me as I dished up the dips at islington High Street's Pizza Hut.

They were the days; young free and the rest of life stretched before me like an unbroken vista whose end was too far away to believe as real. Alas how time creeps up and takes us all. One day your 19 and turning down opportunity after chance and the next your begging for a smile from the ropey lookers working in Londis. Another tired face whose aura fails to excite. So read on and breathe it.

We are training as language artists
in an alluring Western based ambience
where pastoral and urbane intersect

vectors of cultural flux mesh serendipitously
and there are bards enough proclaiming of posie
from the page to station on every street corner
mountain peak, in all wooded glens,

and working every sector of the poetic spectrum
poets' compose with to reach "there"; be it

- quantitive, syllabic, accentual stress, combined metric
slam, L=A=N=G=A=U=G=E, open form, tragic
confessional, comedic, write-through or mental composition -

Techniques we have come to possess and will deploy
with varying degrees of success, failure, loss and benifit
in the aquiring of skills which increase the consumptional
capacity of our appetite for language


until such time that we feel capable of, metaphorically
eating the alphabet

a goal acheivable in 15 years hence

when we dream of scoffing knowledge on lingo binges
feasting on linguistical fare
lashing our eyes full of letter nosh
sucking soundgrub into our ear's gut

and ingesting text for regurgitation to "other" voices
who passenger on the shuttlebus of love;

where we are all gourmets gorging on blather
in one united assotment of sound, from

a quick smooth swoosh of solid reliable speed hulks
hurtling into a deep unconscious order of unkowable tune, to

freight laden trucks labouring in gridlock on
clogged access routes to the sublime fleeting energy;

whose jolts can compact galaxies to black
holes vacuum packed with an absence of time

tracing our concept mark of living as one with the infinite mind;

and bestowing by its thrumb
seer gifts of prophetic possession
to some poetic depositers of text, be it printed or binary coded opticle
data bits travelling through fibre to gozzy gawp gawk fests yet to begin.
We are the knocker uppers tapping on the window pane of literature
fitting up the page with poesy of all genre and form

from recognisably life affirming
to the unrecognisably banal barren mind space of knowing
if a singular discharge un-owns creation.

And between these two extremities
is life itself
replicating and assembling its note of busyness
demanding access to profess that you wander
round the kitchen like a two bit twok till all from
Ballymum to Ballsbridge sing

"The salmon you seek swims ineluctably upstream
to bind complete the continuum's principle impulse

returning through a labyrinth imititive of bioscape
brainshapes recording the pictoral quiver flue
of a life force unborn but spawning wisdom"

Shall we look into beyond for the faithfully inclined
unhearing what tune of belief to sing as they rise to begin their song?