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/