Two New Poems by Gez Walsh

I Am Pimp

I am pimp; I take your language and make it my own.

Your malleable words become mine to do as I wish.

What is your pleasure? What would you like me to supply you with?

I have a lovely pair of double entendres for you to look at!

Or maybe you prefer your expletives neat, and want full frontal titillation?

Do you want your words to disturb the mind and colour the soul?

What about something young and in your face?

I never judge; I like a bit of puerile myself from time to time.

Let my words play with your ears and wet your mind,

I can twist them, bend them, strip them, dress them,

 pay me your money and I shall supply them anyway you like them.

I am Pimp, I am pomp, I am poem, I am poet! 

Ten More Minutes, Please!

I feel your cold presence here in this room

See a fleshless vision through the gloom

I know it’s my time to walk with you,

But in my mind a few things I must do,

Grant me ten more minutes, please!

So I may again walk upon a golden sand

With the one I love hand in hand

Underneath the warm Mediterranean sun

With my legs once more enabled to run

Just ten more minutes, please!

So I may hold my children to my heart

And kiss their lips before we must part

Then sing out loud my favourite song

Amongst my friends where I belong

Then dance the steps of a thousand dances,

Relive the glares of envied glances,

To fight the fights I should have fought,

And teach the lessons I should have taught

I shall remember friends that have walked with you

These are things I need to do,

To swim with dolphins in a crystal blue sea

To meditate beneath a willow tree,

Just ten more minutes, please!

So before you bring down your razor scythe,

Let me drink my last gulp of life

Then reaper I shall willingly walk with you

Hand in hand to pastures new,

But grant me just ten more minutes please!

Glen Sannox by Steve Rudd

Which came first, mist or mountain?

No-one knows, no man alive, nor in the tombed enclosure

By the old Baryite mines: not even the dotted sheep, generations

Grazing on tumbled cairns, stone circles, chambered tombs

Or huts now dents in fields. No-one knows if one day

The mists thickened, or parted like veils

To reveal a maiden’s breast, or a jagged comb;

Or if one day, the granite in the clouds, always nascent,

Simply solidified, into a massive unconformity.

Arête, col, moraine, corrie; these are all words I learned in school

Much later. Words we use to describe something that is wordless,

Elemental, too old to have words of its own, or if it had,

They are now incomprehensible

As marks of cups and rings

Once carved in weathered stone

By hands that long since blessed the sky in prayer.

Such crags, clints and grykes, drumlins and eskers

Were lodged early in the glacier of my schooling,

These words we give to mountains too big for words;

Hoping to appease their Gods,

But surely something this dramatic

Cannot just have been ground out over years by ice

Oozing in the long groan of its melting; surely

These mountains are mere scenery!

Created right now, conjured by the art of wizards, druids,

Using the ochres of rowan, slate, heather and blaeberry, somehow,

And when the mist comes down again,

They will rumble away, on some hidden mechanism

Changing my island fantasy, its acts and characters, once more.  

Life is made of mist and mountains,

But how to tell which is which, ah, that’s the question:

How to tell which came first, and what my face was like

Before the mountains were made of mist, or mist of mountains, 

Before the nameless people flint-scored their marks on cromlechs:

First there is a mist, and then there is a mountain,

Then there is no mountain, then there is.

Deborah Tyler-Bennett reading and NEW BOOK!

Deborah Tyler-Bennett will be reading at Shindig! at The Western, 70 Western Road, Leicester, on Monday 16th September 2013 from 7.30pm, and also promoting her new book, TURNED OUT NICE AGAIN! Stories inspired by the Music Hall and Variety Traditions.

The history of the music halls, and the history of variety, is, in many ways, the unwritten history of England. Unwritten, but not entirely unsung. It was a brief time when the workaday cares of long hours, unscrupulous employers, summary dismissal, and the constant struggle for economic survival could be mitigated, even in wartime, by the simple expedient of spending a few hours roaring out a chorus in a smoky atmosphere redolent of bright lights and greasepaint.  It began in the music halls, at a time when performers could become famous for a single catch-phrase, or for having a larger-than-life flat cap, or for filling the stage with flags.

            And, for those watching who themselves had an inkling of music or comedy, a spark of talent, and could put an act together, it became a potential escape route from the mindless drudgery of watching machines at the factory or mill. In the First World War, men marched to the front singing music hall favourites such as “Tipperary” and “Pack up Your Troubles”; in Hitler’s conflict, it was Gracie Fields and George Formby whose music bolstered the troops and reminded everyone once more what they were fighting for, in a way that patriotic speeches could never do.

            Deborah Tyler-Bennett’s collection of stories draws deeply on that tradition.  Inspired by the music halls and variety, these stories chronicle the lives of a linked group of characters in the East Midlands in the heyday of musical comedy.  Alf and Shirl, Vi, Courtney and Bean (“the boys most likely to…”) Beryl, and the redoubtable Grandwem are all expertly drawn and brought to life in these pages, their trials and triumphs, tragedies and tribulations.  

            Starting out in wartime Mansfield, we follow Beryl’s development, intertwined with the stories of the other protagonists, in their box-and-cox, hand-to-mouth, precarious existence as entertainers in wartime, and a whole host of minor characters who provide both context and bitter-sweet humour, including a budgie called George Formby.  If you liked Priestley’s The Good Companions you will love this book; if you appreciate the culture and social history of the East Midlands you will love this book, and finally, if you simply enjoy good, compelling writing with some deft touches and knowing insights, you, too, will love this book.

            Turned Out Nice Again will be published on 30^th September 2013, at a retail price of £10.99 (plus £1.50 postage, if ordered direct from the publisher).

Strange Alliances - book blogger Elaine Aldred interviews Gez Walsh

http://strangealliances.wordpress.com/2013/09/09/gez-walsh-a-style-all-of-his-own/

An Island by Steve Rudd

An island should be hard to get to; hard to reach.
First, you should drive down winding roads,
Arriving at a small seaport, say Sunday evening,
Drive through the hot backstreets of summer,
At teatime, and the shops all shuttered
Paint-peeling boarded, all locals elsewhere…

Down to a nineteen-fifties quayside
With ropes  and bollards, tar and cranes,
Then clank down a ramp onto a gloomy car-deck
Smelling of diesel, deep in the ship;
Cast off, and feel the engine throbbing.

You should arrive, eventually, to the keening welcome of gulls,
In a small harbour, lined with sober stone houses.
An island should be a destination worthy of itself;
Staying, not “hopping”, we have no desire
To move on, and no return booked, or expected -

This beach of peace and stones an end in itself, 
And not a passage elsewhere.
Inland, the mountains bare their flanks
Of scree to the searing of the sun;
The burns and the waterfalls mere trickles of dry stones,
Now, and the hare and the hart
Lie panting in the coarse and brittle bracken.

An island should be defined by its tides,
And be as timeless as they flow
From low to high to low, 
Keeping the moon captive,
Tethered over white deserted beaches,
Where the grey water slides like rustling silk.

An island should be a place of beauty
Whose mountains, seen from afar, become veils
Alluring by virtue of their secrecy;
Dark obscured by light, then counterchanging
Shapes now there, now absent;
A beauty all the more for being rugged
And ground out slowly, over a million years.

I have tried many times, on many visits,
To sum up my thoughts, to capture my relationship
With islands, especially this one;
But, as with all best loves, her essence
Her essential self, under the surface, eludes me

And all I know is  that, like all good lovers,
Arran keeps me coming back for more.

[Parts of this poem are due to be broadcast by Eamon Friel on The Late Show on BBC Radio Ulster on 31st August 2013]

Angels by Steve Rudd

People claim they can see Angels: so what?
Angels are just a problem of scale - you look
At clouds for long enough, they will sprout wings;

Angels, sylphs, undines, gnomes and salamanders,
Why should we count any of them holy?
Their iron wings stretched out to gather the traffic,

They are the lightning when two spheres collide
And the electric air tintinabulates, sparks,
Arcing with choirs of cherubim and seraphim
As two worlds swing and sway, their portals open,
pealing like the bells of angelus.

Like Blake, I've started seeing them everywhere:
Angels hovering over power stations -
(The stations of the cross)

They watch for me: and the hitcher who vanished
From my backseat on that dark and rainy night
Has probably left a single downy feather:

"So in a voice, so in a shapeless flame
Angels affect us oft, and worshipped be"
Does this include that tall dark stranger
By the black canal, who waits
Wings folded patiently, for the lonely midnight drunk,
(Who is also me) to see him safely home?

Does this include the gardeners, now dead
Who left their nurseries for other trenches
But come back on summer evenings
When early moths float under earth-scented leaves?
I do not know about these messengers, enigmatic hearsay,
Tales told by old women to their daughters
Told by old men of Mons to cub reporters.

I only know that, now I speak to angels,
All angels have become one angel,
Whose voice I will hear from now on in my mind:
All angel voices are now one voice, and it's yours.

Garrulus Glandarius by Steve Rudd

Mister Popinjay, up on his branch

Considers all the angles

Before committing;

Head on one side,

Matching the slant of light through branches

Jaunty but wary

Like a young lad, out upon the town,

Entering an unfamiliar bar.

Mister Popinjay

Brought me the summer

- a gift for which I’m grateful -

By decking his house with green

And wearing gaudy feathers.

Fluttering down from somewhere near at hand

He lets me pay him peanuts for his trouble.

Mister Popinjay

Is nothing special

In the greater scheme of things –

He gets a bad press, like cuckoos and magpies

And yet his gaudy feathers’re numbered

Like the hairs on my head

As are those of his colourful siblings

- Or so I’m told.

Mister Popinjay,

Millions of years

Turned you from dinosaur to bird

And brought you to my feeding-table

This Sunday teatime, to what purpose

God alone knows;

Now the moment’s gone again –

You’ve flown far from me, like a lover –

-  “they flee from me, that sometime did me seek”

- But you have seared my mind with coloured feathers and

Infected me with your sheeny jauntiness, now my head too

Is held sideways, looking for the sunlight, jaunty but wary,

Even if you never return, though I hope you will, often,

That, at least, I have to thank you for.

Deborah Tyler-Bennett interviewed by Strange Alliances

http://strangealliances.wordpress.com/2013/04/13/deborah-tyler-bennett-on-lacing-words-together/

Storm Damage by Steve Rudd

Counting the cost, the morning after;

Not as bad as I’d first thought

The roof is still in place, and all the chimneys

Still lean as crazy as yesterday

One plastic greenhouse lurches over, all

Seed trays in a jumble, its strained sides

Still ruffled by each diminished blast,

And the fence of willow screen lies flattened

Twigs and branches strewn around

As though God had cast the I Ching,

Sowed the wind and reaped the whirlwind

With a power that swayed even cathedral spires

Dislodging bats and rooks, unwilling into the night.

I have lived through many storms,

And each has left its mark on me

Each scar, rebuffed by the vast blast,

Despite the wind’s moan, I remain a survivor

Who has spent many nights lying awake

Listening to the tiles fall off my life,

Too scared to go outside

Or get up there and stop it.

But, today, it’s not too bad,

Like many things in life, it could have been much worse,

And so today we make a list

Of all the things needing fixing,

Sigh, and stoop to build again.

Things that need fixing; a long, long list,

Starting with me, although I fear

There, I might have to manage my expectations;

This sunshine’s only temporary –

Enjoy it while you can;

For there will be other nights

Listening to mysterious crashes in the dark,

The howling winds of despair,

The sound of breaking glass.

Deborah Tyler-Bennett at Warwick Arts Centre

King's England poet and short-story writer Deborah Tyler-Bennett will be reading at Warwick Arts Centre on May 20th at 7.45pm

Ambulances by Steve Rudd

Touch my head,
Touch my toes,
Never go
In one of those;

My warding-off rhyme, as a snotnosed kid
Fear tightenng my chest
Whenever I saw their white shape weaving
Through traffic; or heard their urgent bells on the main road.
Always, it meant trouble - someone gasping on a carpet:
“Meat wagons”, my dad would call them, dredging up
Words from his war, when they hosed them out,
Their floors red with shedding.

Women down our street would stop their gossip
And nod, knowingly, at these omens on wheels;
Wishing them on their way elsewhere, the clang
Diminishing to distance; a slight pause
Then everyone pretended nowt had happened,
While those who summoned the pale carriage, elsewhere,
By paradox, were willing its approaching siren stronger.

These days, I’ve been in so many ambulances.
They’ve grown to be part of my life.
Bigger, yellow, and friendlier now somehow, these days;
But they still barge along the road wailing
Like widows, their blue lights strobing distress
In all directions.

I can handle it better now, though; now I’ve been in one -
Been to the terminus, been that sick white face
Above the orange blanket on the trolley.
Slam the doors, accelerate away, woo-wooing.
Been there, done that, and now,

I no longer dread all ambulances;
Just the last one.

Deborah Tyler Bennett at Nottingham Festival of Words

Deborah Tyler-Bennett is writer in residence at the Nottingham Festival of Words.
She will also be reading at Debbie Bryan's shop, Lace Market, 18 St Mary's Gate, Nottingham event 5-7pm, Friday 15th February 2013

The Year of the Two Comets by Steve Rudd

There will be two comets this year, they say;
Neither of which we’ll ever see again
Or so they theorise - nothing is certain,
After all. Things come around again.

The earth itself, cold as a comet today,
And the snow trails drifting out there
From upright rocks around the pond
Ice glazed as it rotates around its poles

Snow drifting across the garden in the wind
Like the cold tails of oscillating comets
“An eemis stane in a Yowdendrift”
Singing, bumbling endlessly through space

Many times I have been cold enough myself
To mine, and to those in my atmosphere,
To make the planets wobble in their spheres;
My eccentric orbit trailing wreckage across
The night sky of my life; so many ruined skies

And now the comets scar the spheres
And there are drifts in snow,
The snow, beneath which each of our cats lies.

Winter, the ice-world; vast clouds of lights
Caught in the bare trees like the fishes
In a stargazy heaven, jewels in a blue fire
A net four billion years old, pointing this way and that

While the singing gas and vapour bumbles on,
Always inexorable, on its path towards the sun
With no idea of our years, no concept of wise men,
Staring and pointing in the desert,
Or dinosaurs distracted by their light,
Crashing in swampy undergrowth.

This gift you gave me, Mam, my atoms,
Are gas and vapour, this wheelchair
Genes that made me what I am tonight,
Were forged in fires of Aldebaran.

I was my own comet, my coding
Carried by celestial messengers
Long before your atoms became you
Or Galileo even put his quill to parchment.

Your atoms became you, carbon hardening,
To points, as jewels become a woman,
A woman with a gift to give, pearls on a box of sky,
A gift with only one slight imperfection,
One bit missing, so as not to offend God.
Giver and taker of all gifts.

And back in autumn, back even before I knew
Two comets due this year would lace the skies
With stitching through the fabric of the night,
Even before the Mayans said the world would end,
My friends found, in dead November’s garden,
A shuttlecock wedged high in winter branches
Caught like a star, a perpetual comet, in a bare net,
Tending always back towards the joy of summer.

Sometimes the portent isn’t realised, interpreted,
Till long, long afterwards, after the comet has left;
After it’s whistled off again into the dark.
The radiation cast by stardust slow to spark.

Well, Mam, we’ll both be gone, and so will many men,
Before the year of comets comes again,
But come again it must – it surely must;
God made us both of singing cosmic dust.
Inevitably comets will be back;
Their permanence, the comfort that I lack.