One of these days I will meet a girl
Write handwritten letters
Fold them delicately into hundreds of paper birds
Take them to the river
Where the ghosts live
Let them fill each letter bird
So that they will sing the words every morning
And place them in a box at her door.
Ingredients:
6 guitar strings
A handful of small notebooks
1 pen to be replaced regularly so as not to lose flavour
3 jazz albums, 5 blues albums, 2 post-rock compilations and a hip hop mixtape in a format fit to taste
(note that if you can find it vinyl is always best, but don’t be afraid to try other mediums)
A full dictionary torn roughly
Enough Charles Bukowski, Anis Mojgani, Shane Koyczan, Dylan Thomas, Tom Waits, Rives, and Sarah Kay to saturate
1 human body, the more flawed the better.
For added flavour add 1 plaid shirt and a dash of 20th century American literature
(Hemingway or Kerouac are the obvious choices though more obscure references can and should be experimented with)
Instructions:
Throw everything recklessly into a mixing bowl
Stir vigorously until mixture begins to form free verse that sticks to the spoon
Knead so that enough of the world gets in as this will allow for balanced growth
Bake in an oven for a couple of years until piping hot
Garnish with a chapbook or microphone depending on taste.
Congratulations, you have just created your very own poet!
She kept a jar filled with hummingbird feathers.
Every morning she would take one out,
Examine it,
Place it in her hair,
Tucked behind her ear,
And proceed to dance
To a tune specific to the colour of that feather.
The day she met you
It was a midnight blue.
She danced to The Smiths.
When I’m older
Like sixty eight and forty odd years past my prime
I’ll have a cat named MEOW-lnir
So all my grandchildren will know
That my love of puns and comic books is not to be fucked with.
I will stand two hundred feet tall with a cane
And I will whisper incantations into the clouds
To make it rain
I will be the magic man
My descendants will tell stories
About the time I once gambled with trolls
For nothing but a pair of shoes and a box full of moonlight
Or the time I learned to speak to birds
Or how I melted a sword into the shape of a pen
Traded a watch with a squid for ink
And wrote poems for the foxes that ran around at night
They will tell these stories
After I am long since dust
Long ago brought back into the universe
Pushed back into the rib of this ship we call the cosmos.
When I’m older
I will lie a lot more,
But never admit it
Because the stories will tell more truth
Than I ever could
I never understood the non-committal death of a Monday morning.
The sun is the same,
The blue sky, grey sky, cloudy sky, clear sky,
The traffic noises,
The people talking,
The trees,
The shadows,
The pile of dirty dishes on the dust covered desk,
The dust,
The books,
The clothes exploded across the floor,
Everything is the same!
The room has not sunk into the many circles of some Dante-esque hell.
The soft breeze coming in through the crack in the window mutters just as it always does
About the death of dinosaurs and the roaring of lions:
“They roar and they roar and they roar,
Just like the king lizards did
Not that it matters
You’ve never heard either!”
Slowly, like every other day,
The image of a man who is part bear and part supernova
Rises out of the morning fog,
Shifts from being dust and mist into being a hard thing,
A bone and flesh thing,
Face half covered in hair pushed in on one side where he slept.
The man stretches in the mirror,
Prods his imperfections
And decides they are part of who he is.
He does this every morning,
But on Mondays he believes it a little less.
He thinks to himself:
“I bet the dinosaurs died on a Monday
And never saw it coming!”
He makes tea in a small blue pot,
Watches the loose leaves dance,
There and then he decides
No more thinking about death on a Monday.
This one’s for the summer beer.
The brown bottled IPA.
The El Dorado hopped,
Paper labelled,
London brewed,
Seven percent ABV,
Beer.
The sun does not beat as much as it lays its hands gently on your skin.
You looked at the clouds and saw catfish and dragons,
I saw a bear and an old man half way through falling off a chair laughing.
We drank beer and talked about movies,
Skimmed conversation over the heat like stones along that lake in Scotland.
You said the thing about film noir is the snappy dialogue and talked about how Brick was a modern classic.
I picked out another cold one, broke open the top and handed it to you.
We enjoyed the cold bottle together
For a brief moment.
Then went back to talking
Humphrey Boggart
And blues music.
I told you about Blind Willie Johnson and you demanded we listened to him
On repeat
For the next hour,
And we did.
All this we did over cold IPAs,
They tasted like gold light and hints of fruit.
So this one’s for the summer beer,
Accent to the conversation beer,
Brown bottled, brown paper labelled beer,
Refresh and relax
Beer.
This one’s for the summer beer.
1. Skull in fire place
Flames long gone into dust storm
Aged casually.
2. Stopped clock tells one time
One time is right twice daily
But when do we know?
3. Pint glass still empty
Except for old music notes
Drinking jazz ’til three.
4. Grey sky bright noon sun
Cold fresh and wet grass kiss
Morning comes slowly.
5. Old lightbulb broken
Filament dancing coiled
Analogue ideas.
Bill Murray
Alfonso Ribeiro
HG Wells
Frederick III
A stargazer
We all have one thing in common
Maybe more
It was on the night I stayed awake
Like many nights
Listening
to The Doors,
Sun Kil Moon,
Among others
And I heard the wind rush the window
Rushing and rushing
And rushing
And rushing
And going down the street.
It wanted everyone to know
HEY WAKE UP!
THE WIND IS LEAVING!
It’s going south for a while
Or maybe east!
I don’t have a compass
but it’s leaving!
And a part of me wanted to go with it.
Travel.
Get up and go
3am wandering.
Hitch a ride.
Grab a boat
Or a plane.
Go to America.
Be a writer.
Fuck money!
Love a woman so hard it kills me,
Have her love me back!
Live!
Live!
Live everything in a rushing sound!
HEY WAKE UP!
THAT POET IS LEAVING!
The one who writes and doesn’t gig much!
The one no-one really knows about!
But I just laid there
In a warm bed.
Maybe tomorrow
I’ll have the balls to make a go of it…
Maybe tomorrow.
The wind rushed the window
Jim Morrison screamed
I sighed.
The Carpenter's Sparrow 