Reflections on a Packet of Mini Cheddars, Bought on a Station Platform at Clapham Junction, Five Hours Into a Three-hour Journey Home (a poem)

Reflections on a Packet of Mini Cheddars, Bought on a Station Platform at Clapham Junction, Five Hours Into a Three-hour Journey Home

They were quite stale,

And not very nutritious,

But I was ever so hungry

And so very far from you.

Kindling (a poem)

Kindling

It is hard to light a fire,

when there is no air to blow it out,

no wood to smother it over,

no water to douse its light.

They say the grass always look greener,

but here, standing on the edge of my own patch of land,

all I see is forest fires.

Too many candles,

in too many hands;

they blur together,

growing, spontaneous constellations,

and I, with only my kindling and flint,

do not know how to navigate nebulae

without getting burned.

I light a campfire, at the very border of my shores,

a lighthouse beacon in a sea of lighthouse light,

hoping that its dim yellows will stand out against the brightness,

will burn dull and small and orange enough –

no glimmer of gold –

that maybe other boats can find

my shipwreck,

the way that fire spreads:

catching alight,

taking to flame,

setting ablaze.

How delicate the verbs of our quiet ignition –

like laying a table –

softly spoken licks and clicks of the tongue,

a murmur around a campfire,

where you and I can sit

and talk a while

and warm each other’s stutters in the too bright dark.

So before you have to cross once more

into that forest fire,

candled sea,

let me catch your voice in bonfire.

Sit and kindle me.

Like the fingers in a magic trick,

white-gloved careful fingertips,

catching fireflies,

so easily.

Ancient Avenue (a poem) - [2012]

Ancient Avenue

See the gnarled and twisted fingers
stretching out from outstretched hands –
reaching across the canopy –
bewringed with wooden wedding bands.


Inspired by a very beautiful part of Southampton that I passed each day to and from Avenue campus. Have been re-reading some early medieval poetry from my university studies there, and I rediscovered my favourite anonymous poem, Westron Wynde. I admire its brevity, its emotion, and how it speaks as clearly now as it did in its own era. I cannot claim to have achieved the same, but the length is about right!     

Sapphireless (a poem) - [2012]

Sapphireless

They say her eyes are blue as precious stones,

though in her eyes I see no sapphires set;

for sapphires have a beauty of their own,

but that is not the beauty I have met.

Or else they say her eyes are blue like pools,

drowning sailors in their crystal depths;

but it would be a folly to be fooled,

for ocean’s blue is just what it reflects. 

It is only when I look with half-closed eye,

and see her lying there, just out of sight –

touching but untouching as we lie –

that I can see her colour, clear and bright.

And all along I guess I always knew

how best I could describe her eyes: so blue. 

Dream Catcher (a poem) - [2015]

Dream Catcher

She’ll catch them when they close their eyes,

and, blinking, lead them through the dusk:

those lonely, drifting, lid-eyed folk,

whom consciousness has left to rust.

She takes their hands that, idle-resting,

cling to inkless pens and hope –

draws them with her finger’s curling,

guides them down her turning slope.

Obedient, the dreamers follow,

loping after sound and smell:

the fragrance of her wild perfume,

the clamour of her ankle bell.

She leads them to her pool of shadows,

spilling from a waiting chamber –

lets the pitch devour her prey,

licks her lips and senses danger.

But nothing. Not the stench of burning,

gag of sulphur, choke of coal;

not an inch of crawling flesh

beneath her threadless camisole.

With quarry held in lapping shadows,

she lets warm breath abrade her skin,

steers them to her open portal,

draws them close and pulls them in.

It’s dark. They know and yet unknowing

still they find her yew-carved seat.

There she utters breathless whispers,

daring to be first to speak.

“Eat,” she says, and puts her fingers

to their lips to make them feed:

cold, crisp grapes and bitter olives,

wine and pomegranate seeds.

Clumsily they stand to meet her,

trembling to touch her lips,

leaning close to smell her neck,

to hear her breath, to stroke her hips.

But her angles cut like sharpened stones,

cadaverous – imperial –

with incense buried in her scent,

putrescent and funereal.

She binds her prey with lips like velvet,

tight around their humming throats –

weaving down their chests and shoulders,

tracing lines and rites and rotes.

Then down their arms and round their wrists

her lips go brushing, feather-light,

round and round her jet-black lovers,

shadow-stripped and bound by night.

With spindle fingers on their cheeks,

she guides them on, her dreaming dead –

until they topple down together

to lie upon her master’s bed.

There they’ll sleep in knotted chains,

committed to their tomb of bones:

her body fractured, ossified,

her lips like alabaster stones.

By dawn she knows her prey will leave her,

banished by the blinking sun,

leaving her to sleep alone

in sheets of cold obsidian.    

They’ll see her through half-waking eyes,

and, blinking, glimpse her in the light:

that lonely, drifting, lid-eyed girl,

who catches dreamers in the night.

The day the teachers left (a poem) - [2016]

The day the teachers left

The day the teachers left, the schools stood still.

They hadn’t gone on strike and they didn’t go home ill;

they just left – disappeared –

not a note and not a word,

and before the parents could call in and say it was absurd,

they all were gone,

by the blinking of their clocks and the rising of the sun,

every teacher, tutor, lecturer, professor – every one

had vanished – and left the world to manage

with eleven million children,

from Dorchester to Stanage,

needing somewhere to go and somebody to teach them.

The government officials stood looking each to each.

Then they packed them all in meeting halls and local parish spaces,

(the oldest fiddling on their phones,

the youngest with their laces).

They tried to find a video to occupy the time,

stalling just enough to work out what on earth had gone awry,

and what to do,

but whatever film they’d choose,

the kids would sing cacophony in gripes and groans and boos.

They didn’t want to watch another adaptation of Macbeth,

and that wildlife documentary would bore them half to death,

so even though it’s never acceptable to watch Frozen in June,

all pretence of education was lost by afternoon.

The children celebrated, rejoiced in whoops and cheers,

while headteachers delegated to remaining staff through tears,

and the parents rang demanding what the hell was going on

and who would provide their childcare if the teachers had all gone.

The media, of course, spun headlines through the day,

asking “how many weeks off do teachers get for holidays?”

Through all of this, the classrooms stood, stiller than the halls,

with carpets stained and chairs untucked, displays still on the walls -

a sorry sight - with projectors left on overnight,

and books abandoned on shelves, unread,

not even misunderstood,

dictionaries and Dickens, and all the other texts they should

have read if they weren’t

- as the children say -

completely dead.

Soon the kids grew restless;

they didn’t need to stay,

as the keepers of the classrooms no longer blocked their way,

so despite cries of ‘Don’t you dare!’

and an odd ‘Detention!’ in the air,

the children simply did not care,

and they left too that day.

Because children want to be children,

so it probably makes sense,

that if you force them to be adults, they’ll be animals instead;

and if you try to tell a child to not be childish -

it’s probably on you if you don’t get what you wish.

So the kids got rid of all that they were taught:

the criteria and the exam timings and the termly school reports.

They walked out bleary eyed beneath a sun that burned their skin,

not one of them prepared,

not one knowing a thing.

And for a while it seemed like that was how the world would end,

with children filling parks and playing football with their friends -

not a C grade between them,

but grinning ear to ear -

and every twenty-something longing to join them there.

But the world didn’t end,

and it wasn’t long until

the kids began to wander back,

and even stranger still,

they turned up at the galleries,

the gardens and museums;

they drifted into libraries,

and theatres; you could see them

haunting the old schoolgrounds,

peering through the gates,

lingering on campuses,

alone,

then with their mates,

to sheepishly inquire to any who could hear:

‘I have, like, a question - I don’t wanna, like, learn or nothing,

but it would be cool if someone here could, like,

explain maybe?

Like, I tried googling it, but, I dunno,

I still don’t quite get how to work it out,

like how to solve for x, I guess,

or what spreadsheets are about,

and, like, how do I start a business?

And where did the stars come from?  

And I still don’t get why Boo Radley just doesn’t leave his home?

So, like, if anyone could help me - that would be pretty cool.’

But nobody could answer;

there was no one left at school.

It was years before they found out where the teachers really were,

while exam dates came and went, in a bleak, ungraded blur.

On a far out tropical island,

speckless in the sea:

a tiny teachtopia – where they lay along the beach,

with a  book in one hand, and a drink in the other,

the full-timers and part-timers, the substitutes and covers.

They had built a university from palm trees and stone;

they held lectures for each other and debates beneath the sun.

The painters studied physics; the mathematicians wrote poetry,

and when the helicopter landed with the agent from the Ministry

of Teacher Retrieval,

they offered him a glass,

and invited him to join the talk on Medieval dance.

But he declined, fixed his tie,

demanded to speak to whomever was in charge.

An older woman approached with a reassuring smile,

and she asked if she could talk with him in private for a while.

‘Don’t worry, dear. You’re not in trouble,’ she said,

but he struggled still to meet her eyes and hung his thinning head.

‘I’m here to bring you all back,’ he began.

‘You’ve made your point and we think it’s time you fixed what you’ve done.

The children have run riot; they’re learning on their own;

and how are we supposed to measure it? The employers don’t know

who to employ. There’s no data to compare!  

We need you to come home; there are thousands of papers there.

The education secretary, she understands your dissent,

so she’s willing to raise your salaries by a generous one percent.’

The older woman smiled;

she placed a wrinkled, sun-tanned hand

on his arm, and said,

‘It’s not you we’re disappointed in; it’s your behaviour, you understand.’

She poured him a martini,

and walked him down the beach.

‘Once you’ve learned your lesson,

we’ll come back to teach.’

The Divided Kingdom - in response to the EU referendum

Today the people of the United Kingdom voted to leave the EU. Or rather, I should say ‘half’ of the people of the United Kingdom, for what shook me the most about the result today was how close it was.
          51.9% to 48.1%. These figures stand to symbolise the disunity of a population and the distance between generations. Is it not alarming that we can be so divided? Disconcerting that we can claim a democratic majority with a 3.8% difference? I would be arguing the same if the results had been the opposite. For in short: this is a divided kingdom, and what is worse, by making the decision to leave, we have defined ourselves by this division.
          I have felt the rise in paranoia. I have seen stances grow more extreme. I have heard the voices of children in my classroom parroting the prejudices of their parents, parroting the persuasion of politicians. And now, staring at that blue and yellow arch on the BBC News homepage, I see the first step on a bleak journey. The UK has made a choice. It does not want intelligent argument, thoughtfulness, research or fact. It is fear we want, emotion, rhetoric, even a bare-faced lie if it can get a reaction or one more vote. Not even the repugnant political personalities of Farage and Gove are enough to give second-thought to that heady mix of sensationalism and easy apathy that drives UK politics. Half of the voting population have elected a change that is still yet to be clearly explained or justified. What was the point again? Immigration? Economy? Freedom of … what exactly? Gove was right; we’ve had enough of experts. We just want to know who’s right and who’s wrong, who’s left and who’s right, who’s red and who’s blue, who’s black and who’s white. We want easy answers and to know whose side we’re on. But when we define ourselves down party lines, class divides and generation gaps, we can never be a united kingdom, no matter how proudly we assert it.
          Today I have looked in the faces of twenty-somethings and teenagers in tears, not because they are sad or angry or even disappointed, but because they are scared. They are scared of an uncertain future that is not in their hands, of opportunities closed to them; and more than anything, of how much their parents could betray them, putting their present fears over the next generation’s future worries. In a poll conducted by my school’s sixth form (largely made up of students merely months too young to be entitled to vote), 92% said they would vote to remain. So where are those frightened voices now?
          Lost in the chasm of that 3.8%.

          Blame too must perhaps be given to those 27.8% who did not vote. Who naively believed that the British people could not be so foolish, so misled, or so frightened to actually make this decision. Who had such blind faith in common sense that they did not feel the need to raise a voice for the common causes of reason and factual truth. But let this be the lesson learned: that rational, quiet voices can no longer tread water in the vitriolic sea of louder, deceitful ones – that sometimes, when sense is drowning, we must declare what is obvious to keep ourselves afloat.
          Before today, I had never seriously considered living anywhere but England. I had continued blithely in the belief that, for all its flaws, the UK was going to be alright. Indeed, the one redeeming quality of this ‘Great’ Britain was that it seemed to have enough humility in its present, and enough shame of its past, to get on quietly in one piece. But now I am not so sure.
          We have become arrogant and proud. I don’t want to live in a country divided down its middle, a nation no longer united, whose predominant message to the world is: “We don’t want you!” Because we can all hear that message, and one-by-one, we will all be turned away. We will turn away our professionals and our students, for we cannot promise a better life or education; we will turn away our artisans and academics, for there is no value in art or science here; and then we will turn away each other, as each of us who once voted to remain will vote to leave.
          What a sad little island will be left behind, trapped so close to the borders of the world, but with its doors shut, its windows barred, its fingers in its ears.
          I could be wrong. I cannot know. Impacts will barely be felt at first. But I still fear the route we are taking, the lines we are drawing, the future we are building. I want so badly to be wrong. But it is hard to be wrong in a country that has decided that it is so right.