THANK YOU FOR YOUR TIME

Hi to all the people I am trying to get invites off. Mary my sister painted this and I would be very grateful for any assistancce you can give me in coming to your event. I need a pretty quick reply as I have to give at least six weeks notice. Thank you very much.

WHAT A DAY

TONY AND GEORGE

Monsters trapped in human bodies jostle
war with world peace and un-tether your song
of hollow moral concepts swaddled
in a bright cloth of defunct language gone
daft in the spirit of this modern age.
Neo classic pillars of abstraction
with your artless blather of throwaway
lines, sow fear with the proliferation
of words like right punishment, vengence and
retribution. Bruiser gods raining word
shells upon our consciousness, blow minds bland
and sanitise banality to purge
your hearts of accountability when
debates cease and the naked dead return
your dividend of talk in crisp cold flesh
packaged in body bags and draped in the flags
you have hijacked. Come, hoodwink citizens,
lead them to believe your cause is just and
unrelated to commerce or cash black
gold below the surface of desert lands.

Haiku

Let the mask slip and
see the goddess of your mind's
mirror reflecting

~

Written rules of life
in true poems no eye can
dismiss or reject

~

Just like the sequin fella with coulouring felts who uses public consciousness as a canvas to re-draft and re-draft until the instinctively mathmatical backwash is freed from wrong computation and the last post radically different, in syntax, smoothed to an ungrabbable ergonomic.

Is that a word? Have a butchers. Lets talk of the afterlife and those navel gazers caressing the seeds of time free druid pawns and playthings of love-mating irregularities under the thumb of t'other half, tell of in tales of Tony at chequers and Marlon starring in a Hotton pub.

What plots and intriques on the dark bank of Acheron when we cross with our oblos eagerly thrust to the boatman.

Shall we talk of the dead?

~

Sunset strips filter through window slats
edging across a bone white wall

and beech wood floor with mole knots
dotting the faded grain.

As dusk draws darkness in
peeling back the pith of light

opaque forms appear in pale shadows
and cast a chill spell in the night air.

A ghostly clan seeping from the
otherworld through pictures on brick
visit the room

filling the hours before dawn with an aroma
of spirits, spectres and long silent ancestors.

Their fuse of flesh life lit and left as
a pyramid of past we’ve no cognisance of

is the human history of reality chaining our
existence to an unfathomable entity.

A void of unconsciousness
no man or woman will speak of until they
speak no more.

~

Love you all more in the otherworld.

Vicki Feaver - Guardian Poetry Workshop Siren

The monthly Guardian Newspapaer poetry workshop is very prestigious.

~

To hygienically stick your mental jizz in the bonces of the bores on that board, be skill-less and tick boxes in one of the numerous contemporary dot to dot career manuals lost minded rhyme-smiths and fully homogenized poets of the lyrically pedestrian unfunny line swear by, for inspirational instruction.

Randomly add a pick 'n mix content of your colour-in influences, then order (un-mangled) a syntax by numbers in dum-de-dumbed down, dim mind-numbing "I am"s, whose relevance can be immediately read as an example of the school whose one compositional method produces oeuvres instantly appraised by the oolamhs we imitate in our poems, original and interesting or cack-handed crap.

~

I posted a recognisably simple fledgling piece to Vicki Feaver, flapped it in past the midnight deadline of July 31. Sent because I desired to swipe for myself her visible poetic gift, coolly exuding from a highly professional online portrait. From this picture I deciphered her crackable psychological code, which the remote power she yearns to encounter when scribing her speech, revealed to me through a working method Amergin supposedly spoke and wrote of over ten centuries ago when Celtic rhyming was a craft akin to quantum mechanics; harnessing electricity an ungraspable concept and television's logic, a magic whose truth only extraterrestrial gods could blueprint.

Audience unable to believe what you are reading, see

the de rigueur smoulder of her stark, no-nonsense, full frontal mug-shot in natural black and white, like some still life sixties siren slipping into a post office on pension day. Gasp as the massively frozen ability behind her straight lipped chilled out stare overpowers you with OTT visual audacity and cold raw talent; oozing from her unashamedly age loving face, framed by a superbly creative hairdo, nestling next to what looks like leaves; themselves appearing to burst with vitality merely by basking in the nearness of such an unadulterated aura of pure “Vicki” vibe, fissured to nuke your post-modern mental motor when gawping at her poetess head-shot.

When my eyes first fell upon that light-generated representation of her physical form, I became instantly impelled to toss her a hand of thin-line free-verse, written last year during late spring when composing a draft idea for a bird sketch, as I stood waiting at the railings of Russell Square one Saturday morning in May, at 3am. A love god called Aonghus came and deposited a sustainable splodge of lingo jizz my mind then propagated to the finished poetic thought-flash of words my muttering mouth formed as a mechanical pencil wrought along the page doing its thing.

~

Two months ago I sent a ghost poem to the editor whose inaccurate spelling accidentally lobotomised the hard-drive of her mind and re-configured her inner pen to automatically craft bland-on-demand dribble she’ll leak when asked to come 'n hack for the rags.

As you may not know, I have an otherworldly nodal-implant harvesting the mental technology our scribble through time programmes, and was hoping to impress Esther with my universally unique state-of-the-art hardware, which has an unlimited capacity for telepathic upload.

I was serial-stalker keen for an online relationship to occur, but alas, her system allows only wrong-word psychological software now, as all the poetic bits from her brain were removed, which, due to an IQ down-grade in the subconscious section of her grey-matter-motherboard, I now possess.

Unfortunately, Esther is a black-hole of poesy at the mo and won’t be capable of running up goods from her gob for the foreseeable future. She is in desperate need of any verse-cells from those with a spare poetic intelligence, who can help correct the cock up via the medium of reading this text.

Make sure she's topped up to her previous capacity by sending your unwanted language skill to her non working areas at the earliest opportunity. Until she’s re-booted, all her opinions remain obsolete and have been safely debunked by a knowing one at the edge of life's barricade.
~

Feeling somewhat glum at my blunder which inadvertently deprived Morgan of her talent, I fell into a mild depression, significantly deepened when the net-negative benefit of her poetic transplant became apparent - and after drinking heavily for the several days I spent alone in the attic foolishly gazing at a 10 foot blow up of Ed's face, extorted from a terrified trainee at Supersnaps - I came to mistakenly believe that the one constant my life lacked in the upswing of its manic state, was a textual relationship with Jane Duran.

This was because I misconstrued the instruction of my Devine Emanation Council operative who oversees the recruitment of human beings, like me, who work for their various business organizations, trading and trailing a blaze in telepathic communication markets throughout the galaxy. My psychotic state, coupled with the chemically altered parameters of my consciousness, meant I imagined Alan - a middle-ages Moorish instructor who bashed out Yeats’s wife's automatic blather - instructed me to jerk some hip 'n savvy electric text her way. But I mistook the message when under the influence of a 2 litre torpedo of 9% ABV scrumpy, and his actual advice was -

"Don't bother. You've no chance of scoring. She needs a full re-bore which may fail and render her an unworkable write-off."

~

Such is the state of my mind, it is constantly hallucinating a group of composite Guardian poets having continual inconsequential coma-thons; the most immortally minded egos engaged in terminally dull intercourse with a cultural void and textually insatiable artist who was the banal verbal star of a spectacularly unexciting group borgey at "Dim Slob" Loink Oxley’s funless depression festival in a North London cellar last November.

Gushing forth from lip 'n nib that forgettable winter night, was Jean MacMillan, boring all within earshot to slumber with her pointless genius for putting people to sleep whilst extemporising nursery rhymes and simultaneously remaining cognizant of seven different conversations, occurring in the filthy and fully equipped dungeon hot tub during that comatose night of non-stop torpor.

As Jean held court in the centre of the whirlpool she told the ghost of Edward Hughes to remove a jester's hat from Laurence, Hardy, Hemmingway or Auden's oeuvre, for her to wear in the joke-free Jacuzzi. A hat, of course, was semblanced from Pam Ayres' daft heyday and Jeans plainly crafted art and Barnsley wit regaled us unconscious once again until we woke and weirdly found she’d morphed into a fascinating she-male character whose talk no longer bored us but explored the boundaries of earthly existence.

S/he said telepathy's just mental adventuring into the unknown, and as s/he told us of what comes when we dare surrender blindly to the word by instinctively stepping into a circle of faith reserved for us alone, an unknown poet in the corner conjured up Ogma, a word-deity meaning the good god none there had heard of till that night, who enlightened us with the hardcore uncut logic of creation as s/he fell silent and Ogma spoke -



"Oh all ye genuine thinkers who flap language revealing the methods your muse revels in during the joy gushing forth speech, come surf to my one stop language shack stocking genres from Langpo to metrical verse. On offer - verbal compatriots - is free and safe lunacy top ups with every fibre spent believing..." -

~

...it will be fun to compose as many poems on this board as we can when the next Guardian bore appears offering us their insights into and examples of poems.

Basically have a group writing session where we e mail our efforts to whichever personality poet's mug-shot is pasted up on the least wanted page; not written with a view to submit them, but to generate material we may send in subject to our desire to gift in stuff anytime up till the deadline. I will send my efforts in to whoever's picture pops up next.

It's just a thought I want to warm you with, as this place could do with a bit of group action and effort for the mutual poetic benefit of all who will chance to give online writing exercises a go. The concept of failure or loss is factored out, I sincerely believe, when groups genuinely engage in a joint artistic enterprise of this nature.

I sent the poem below in with I LOVE YOU VICKI in the subject field and this pre-amble

Hi Vicki

Please forgive me for being late with my work, but I was seized last night by several drunken transvestites who wanted to dress me up and shoot me in an outfit which may have meant I've made it onto page seven of the Big Issue. Out of fashion section. A pastel number which really accentuates the line of my arms and waist, in such a way which doesn't draw attention to the fact that I am 27 stone of sheer flab.

I was also high on heroin and crack cocaine after being abducted at straw-point by a number of christian milkshake enthusiasts who got a bit carried away when they saw me waving me Wotsits at two very well known nonentities I will not mention here, but who have been saying untalented things about online dominoes.


This confident dice I currently seer falls favourably. It is steered by an accurate eye and makes straight aimed throws cast at the intellect’s bullseye in a tossed offering adhering to the creature ethos of your online poetry workshop. Verse-truth pervades where words lie folding in dreams blown real by breaths of imaginary air Vicki


LATE MAY DAY

A fluttering
above
in the skin
soft slither thin
leaves of a
beech tree

alerts her to
a bird in the
branches
over-hanging
an oak bench.

A grey
feathered fledgling
awkwardly flaps
falling to the pitted
tarmac and nestles

its downy breast
against a coping
stone border of
the oval green. A
cricket match ends

as the birds first
flight from its nest
into the unknown
traffic of a new
world view

begins. The creature
takes its bearings
from earth level

and looking into
the depths and
complexity of
existence

anchors an
eyeline securely
on the confusion
life's nexus of
glimpses distills

across the freshly
stretched backdrop
of a silent dumb sky

offering no
foothold of slender
wood poles with
which she can measure
her ascent through
understanding

up to God's hand.

Basement George

He knocked at two am; a light rap on the grey door accompanied by an incoherent voice strung out on cocaine, mumbling a request to

- open the door; let’s talk. -

This was the first time George had made a personal call or crossed the hitherto strictly amicable and neighbourly divide Ray had expounded so much mental effort on attempting to create, with diffident nods and friendly smiles calculated to ingratiate himself with George, in the hope of creating a social buffer built on mutual respect.

Ray wedged in the earplugs trailing from a small plastic radio, turned up its volume and began praying for a different reality; one sound proofed to insulate him from the dysfuntional behaviour of nutters like George. He tried to focus his mind on a drunk radio-caller mapping out his booze fuelled vision of tackling anti-social behaviour to Pat, a snappy sounding jock manning the graveyard shift at the decks of Talk-Sport Radio, station of late night chat.

- Well, sure, they should be making laws against it. Ban the lot of them completely. Street rats going about the place terrorising honest hardworking people just for the fun of it, thinking it’s brilliant craic and a great gas all together. Filming it on their mobile phones and putting up websites about it. Scum, that’s all they are. -

Unimpressed with Ray's failure to respond, George struck his fist on the door and re-entered his room with a muffled curse, loudly slamming his door and, as he threw himself onto the bed, hurling a tirade of abuse at the flimsy partition wall he kicked upon landing.

Pat was engaged in his usual routine, playing devils advocate to an idiotic caller named Terry, his voice effortlessly oozing the soft bland burr of sophist reason weaving along its 107 FM path to the ears of insomniacs and night-shift workers throughout the city. The background moan-fest and signature of Sport-Talk’s early AM show.

- So you think the government should introduce legislation in relation to this problem Terry? Some kind of anti-social behaviour law? ASBO's maybe? That’s certainly one way of addressing the issue, and one which our listeners will no doubt have opinions on. If there’s anyone out there who want to have their say on this topic, give us a call on the usual number. -

It briefly crossed Ray's mind that, if he possessed a phone, he could call Pat and acquaint him with his own anti-social situation of being the unlucky neighbour of George and closest witness of his slide into chemically induced madness, fuelling an aggressive paranoia now directed at Ray through twenty millimetres of jaded plasterboard the colour of dog dirt fawn; functional, like a dump. A picture came into Ray's mind of holding up the phone so Pat and his fellow listeners could hear George's routine, imagining the manufactured concern in Pat’s glib response as a hollow empathy filtered out of the radio’s tinny plastic speaker to scratch at George’s deaf and drunken ears next door.

Trying to remain silent Ray began dressing as Pat and Terry continued to chat about the possible connection between hooded tops and anti social behaviour; one which Terry believed to be obvious and the intrinsic links of which he began to expound upon with all the eloquence of a man trying to argue the existence of extraterrestrials from inside a portable toilet.

- What do they be wanting to have the hood up for when its warm? They can be only up to no good. -

- Could they not have the hood up because it’s wintertime Terry and they, understandably, have the desire to remain as warm as possible, which is what the hood is there for in the first place? - Pat, not unreasonably countered.

Terry seemed oblivious to this interjection of sensible comment, blithely waffling on and unburdening his load like a conspiracy theorist railing from the stump of Speakers Corner.

- Well, I watched a news report on the RTE about a gang of young ones in Westport who do nothing all day but happy slapping and now everyone in Mayo’s too scared to go into the town for their shopping. Pensioners and disabled people too terrified to leave the house for the fear of it. Grown men unable to walk the streets because of it. It’s complete and utter madness. They should be shot. -

As Ray slipped into a pair of lightweight mountain boots whose robust clunky soles and stout tailoring offered full comfort and equipped the feet of the wearer with a trusty sense of protection, Pat began working up to a predictable denoument, preparing to cut Terry and his unconvincing argument loose; discard him into the ether after a a last word salvo of synthetic outrage had completely rubbished his opinion.

- But Terry, you can’t tar everyone who wears a hoodie as scum, - said the record spinning chat king, in a register of professional insincerity honed by years of late night blathering to oddballs and weirdos,

- I, and many others, including numerous friends and family have worn hooded tops on many occassions and neither I, nor any of my friends and family, as far as I’m aware, have ever mugged or felt the urge to physically threaten anyone when wearing one. Do you not think, Terry, that you are going completely over the top here; that the opinion of making hoodies illegal and shooting people for attiring themselves, in what many people consider practical and comfortable clothing, is an extremely illogical one which can serve society in no beneficial way whatsoever? -

But Terry was unswayed by this artificial voice shifting through the gears of midnight reason and told Pat he was firm in his conviction that hooded tops should be outlawed and withdrawn from the racks and shelves with immediate effect.

- It’s the only way to stop it. - Terry said, impervious to the critical flaws Pat had isolated in his theory.

He sounded drunk, lonely and increasingly deranged. Another sacrificial lamb from the dial chained masses, functioning as Pat’s verbal punch bag; a fish in the barrel-offering to be slaughtered at the altar of late night radio.

- If it was up to me I’d be making them illegal tomorrow. It’s too dangerous not too Pat. The whole country’s going to the dogs through young ones who’ve got no control and can only think of mobile phones, burgers and runners; hiding themselves and smashing the place up. Vandalising, sniffing glue and taking all sorts of mind bending drugs. -

Terry was beyond redemption and Pat began working up to the inevitable blow off, crunching the logistics of Terry’s vision by concentrating on the fact that criminalizing hooded tops was a very impractical enterprise to embark upon.

- I’m sorry Terry, but I don’t think that’s a sensible idea, or one which has a chance of working in any way whatsoever. I would strongly argue that it is in fact a pretty stupid idea and one that no rational normal human being should hold, as it would be an incredibly foolish and effectively impossible undertaking. -

The first sound of Terry's attempted rebuttal was instantly cut off as Pat disconnected him from the airwaves and cast him abruptly into the night with all the aplomb of a pub landlord slamming the door on a sozzled patron. Ray pictured Terry's booze befuddled brain taking a few seconds to realise what had happened and imagined him aggrieved; like the kicked out drinker who had spent his money and time boring a pub manager before the sudden pushed exit left him facing a locked door instead of the late night lock in he had been expecting. Pat’s voice effortlessly segued into a flirty timbre for the next, female, caller; switching to a register leaking an homogenised brand of airwave magnetism male DJ’s aspire to imitate in their quest of becoming radio emperors and housewife heart throbs.

- OK, we’re going to have to leave you there for now Terry and take a call from June somewhere in the South of the city who wants to tell us what she thinks of hooodies. Hello June your though to Talksport. So, June, what have you got to say? -

Ray slowly laced up the boots and reclined back on the bed fully kitted out for a night street roaming. Excellent footwear to keep out the cold November chill of a windswept seaport.

June began pouring out her opinion with a cliché, telling Pat how a few bad apples were giving the rest of the kids a bad name; but just as she started to warm to the theme by giving the example of her own teenagers, who were all law abiding hoodie wearers, "Hot Legs" by Rod Stewart drop kicked its way from George’s stereo and through the wall in a sonic boom, drowning out June’s voice and Pat’s sudden switch from love god to attentive asexual conversationalist. Pressing the earplugs tightly down with the tips of his fingers Ray tried to suffocate wrinkly Rod Stewart and concentrate on June telling Pat about her perfect family, closing his eyes and searching his mind for faith.

Rupert the Man

Rupert Loydel, the head knob of the Langpo press Stride publishing was getting a kicking from the bores on the Poem UK site, where they witter and gossip, so I stuck it to him as well, as I am in that frame of mind to be positive about my dislikes.

~

Rupert came to do a reading at Edge Hill College, Ormskirk, Lancashire, UK (My home town) when I was in the third year and the poetry class (all 6) were told we could have a gig doing support, but I was the only one to avail of the offer, along with a few MA students.

I was the last support slot before Rupert and, as was my practice at the time, delivered my five minute set from memory, eyes closed and mic clutched in hand for the first one -

Take that trip to where your spells can cast
themselves and linger not too long upon the way

some thoughts may be too far researched then
wrongly shape the words you feel a need to say.

What's inside is abstract and precision with the fit
of words helps refract a potential multitude of

meanings one soul spark of thought can dazzle into
life on its journey of translation

from mind through mouth to audience before you-

At this point I opened my eyes to see an audience and continued to finish -

held from spellbound to disinterested

depending on
depending on
depending upon your words.

I then did the other two, a metrical sonnet Aughton, and a section from a performance poem Moods Are Passing Clouds. I had put about an hours rehearsal time that day into the five minute reading from memory.

During the delivery of his metallic 40 minute reading only one poem, about his dad, was spoken in a way which afforded genuine connection between him and his audience. The rest of the reading was about as unexciting as being stuck on hold when phoning the tax office, and his mask that night seemed to be one of professional misery and the above-it-all-torture of an under-recognised and self declared linguistic giant amongst the 20 or so names which constitute the Langpo landscape UK side.

The following day, because Rupert was such a heavy hitter, he did a workshop with both the MA and poetry classes, and I detected that, beneath his grumpy facade, he was actually pissed off for real, and naturally convinced myself that this was due to the high quality of my support the previous evening.

The format of the workshop was like doing factory work and it was made clear to us that the stern hued, foreman faced literary squib before us was a man whose workshop leader MO was of a no nonsense or leisurely chit chatty type, as he had public transport considerations to think of. An uncuddly George Sziertes from the opposite side of the lyrical track. (George is always droning on about trains and what happens on them, but never buses.)

A commercial enterprise of art by numbers. Poetic construction using a method equivalent to the dot to dot or colouring in book, which involved Rupert playing snatches of songs on a tape recorder, and the participants who he had deigned to share his being with, writing to barked commands as the non-rhyming genius of meaningless verse bestrode a small section of classroom floor like a caged animal, exuding the magnetism of one whose mind was utterly focused on catching a train back ino the bowels of SW England.

The enterprise resulted in a bumper number of turgid works the more generously minded would call "workshop poems", but which were in effect, a collective outpouring of complete shite, manufactured by a random lengthy conveyor belt-like process of robotic collaboration, where Rupert took on a camp commandant role, issuing instructions and orders with a quiet and authoritive control, furthering the impression of poetry I had been recieving from poets in the UK during my three years study. Namely, that it was a very serious business with no real place for japes and titters, unless the crack or gag passed muster and had been grunted assent in an exclusive kind of way by an imaginary panel of laugh assessors who, far from wetting their knickers with my mental efforts at releasing the titter gas, would have had me horsewhipped for gross unfunniness.

~

It was a tough old slog that afternoon, with a distinctly rushed feeling to it. A marathon session of poetry making, with Rupert's mien being a mix of Mein Fuhrer and straight faced gentlemen joke-hater doubling as state executioner, with an overall demeanour suggestive of striding through a 1930's Berlin patio door dressed in leiderhosen and trench coat, barking out short snappy orders to keep the precise and long-winded poetic compositional method of his own devising running on time. One of what I presume are many methods used, which have led to the results in his own, massively under-read ouvre.

~

His aura that afternoon could be likened to that of the seasoned sex worker who is always seeking to finish early. He was there, he did what was expected of him and immediately exited, with no conversation or pretence that the exchange was anything other than the business of creating pointless poems no one believed in, but which helped pay the bills one acquires in a life as a poet of no importance whose work will be immediatley forgotten once consciousness slips into the big beyond. Indeed the only use of his method would be when the participants became creative writing teachers who could palm it off on other wannabees themselves as a legitimate mode of gang bang creation.

Fill a few hours on the time sheet, or turn it into a full chapter by utilising it as a group exercise in a how-to-write book they would call a manual, thus making it appear to that the art of poetry is nothing more than a commercial skill one can pick up. Like becoming a mechanic or accountant. Just read follow the manual's instructions, do the 101 exercies and hey presto, you are a poet. Forget meter and all the usual stuff that's been the foundation for centuries. Rupert the one man revolution had decreed that all that jazz is rubbish. The methods have changed, not because they involve hard work and above all ability, but because all the contemporary poet of the Langpo school needs to do now is to pick words out of a hat and put them side by side, and then back it up with unreadable criticism which contains absolutely no meaning.

~

The night of Rupert's reading was the one when I acquired my first bona fide fan. A bricklaying poetry buff from Kirkby, who approached me and offered to buy me a pint. I took him down to a pub in Ormskirk and we bumped into Gavin, a mate from childhood and I dragged him over, telling him the craic. My fan was of the opinion that Rupert's reading was rubbish and stoked my ego all night by saying how great mine was.

He was quite interesting for a couple of drinks, until he started showing me his own scribblings, when it dawned on me, that in my rush to obtain the trappings of a real poet, I had overlooked the fact that my fan was in reality, a lonely middle aged divorcee who lived in a bedsit; much like I will be when success beckons and I go up in the world by moving out of the homeless hostel.