Audioboo

I'm just having a play with Audioboo.  This is a site where you can record, via a phone app, your own messages / poetry / podcasts etc. and upload them to the internetz.

Here is my first effort, reading out one of my shortest poems On That Day.

4 Wise Men

Birthday Presents

Many thanks to my family and friends who were so generous on my birthday yesterday, I will enjoying the wine, whisky, tame dragon and kindle books soon.

Dad & Shirley, Brian & Kath and Morag also got me some book vouchers and I have been up to the Grove Bookshop already to exchange these for the following...

I Used To Know That - English : Stuff You Forgot From School by Patrick Scrivenor
50 Literature Ideas You Really Need To Know by John Sutherland
Penguin Rhyming Dictionary
A Race For Mad Men : The Extraoridinary History Of The Tour De France by Chris Sidwells
Why God Won't Go Away : Engaging with The New Atheism by Alister McGrath

Real Bales

These were in a field close to Ilkley Lawn Tennis Club, you don't often see proper oblong bales like these any more, most farmers seemed to have switched to the giant wheel shaped bales.  When I was a child there was a big field behind the Red Lion in Burley (which is a new housing estate now) and we used to play there in the cutting season, building castles from the hay bales.

Streetlights 1

Just messing around with the camera on my mobile when wandering back from the pub, I liked the way the camera distorted the lamps into flying saucer shapes.

On That Day

On that day,
I fell in love, and in a well,
I fell in love first and the well second,
Love was tempting, but the well beckoned.

- Yorkshire Soul

Mr. C Yoshimi

Mr. C, Yoshimi,
lives in a house four doors from me,
invites my girlfriend for a cup of tea,
two hour tea ceremony worries me.

I find my thoughts about Yoshimi, become unkind,
good things about him are hard to find,
his eyes and elbows and hands I'll bind,
and poke him in the eye, with a poker, 'til he's blind.

I say, tell me what you did with my girlfriend you twat,
he said she only came round to help me decorate the flat,
and she stayed awhile because she was playing with my cat,
please don't hit me with that cricket, bat.

And now I've got a blind, dead Jap on my hands,
I'm Chinese, he mumbles, I thought you'd understand,
but I suppose the differences between us ain't all that grand,
and with that he fainted, this was worse than I'd planned.

Now there's a copper at the door looking for Mr. C,
there's blood on my hands and the officer ain't pleased,
he says Yoshimi's Mum's flown in from Nagasaki,
I said, hang on, I thought he said he was Chinese.

A simple misunderstanding, and now I'm locked away,
not to see my girlfriend, or the light of day,
she says the cat enjoys having her round to play,
but Mr. C doesn't, 'cos it turns out that he's gay.

- Yorkshire Soul.

This one needs to be read out loud in a quick fire Scroobius Pip style of delivery, it burst into my head yesterday afternoon as we prepped the evening meal.  I'm following the writer's maxim of always having a notepad handy to write ideas dow as they occur, which I have to do as ten minutes after a poem has appeared, if I havn't written it down, it has become threads of smoke and wisps of meaning.

Don't Talk To Me About Love, Teenager

"Don't talk to me about love, teenager,
what do you know ?
You have been infant, and child,
faithfully loved and adored,
and now in the first rush of passion for one who is your equal in years,
you think you can tell me about love.

Though, truth to tell,
I do envy you that headlong dive,
the first surrendering of your still nascent self,
the giving of all that you are to another who is equally ill-equipped to receive it,
and yet so positive, so demonstrative,
for you this swirl of sex is love,
hard and beautiful as crystal,
and as easily shattered.

I have mended myself from that same breaking,
loved again, and discovered the love even more precious,
precarious, heartbreaking, fulfilling love of my own children.

Child, says my Grandfather, what do you know of love,
I love the men, dressed like me in uniform green,
who departed me and this life on the beach,
that bright and awful summer's day,
amidst the gunfire and the shells.

What do you know of love,
you who have not given your daughter to the keeping of another man,
or sat your grandchild on your knee,
or lived in the gentle companionship of your fading years,
to see your friends pass through that veil,
one by one,
'til you are the last one alive, head of the clan,
both revered and ignored,
I would tell you about love,
if you would just stop a while and listen." - Yorkshire Soul

This is the 2nd draft of this one, I'm still not entirely happy with it and as it is a longer free form poem than I have been writing I don't know if I am going to get it to a point where I am completely happy with it.  The first voice is any man of my age speaking to a teenager, the second voice has some echoes of my Grandfather and our relationship, but is is more informed by him than true to his character.

Danny Diplodocus

Image via WikipediaDanny Diplodocus,
walking on Octopus,
Squishy ! He makes a fuss,
next time he'll get the bus.

Two Poems On The Theft Of The Lead From Ilkley Library's Roof

The short one....

Water's pouring down the stacks,
it's dripping off the racks,
it's dryness that we lack,
it's soaked the paperbacks.

The long one...

I went to the library,
because all the books, on my shelf, I already have read,
to discover some thief, from the roof, has stolen the lead,
the rain has come in, and the fiction's all soggy,
the carpet in poetry has gotten quite boggy.
Over in Classics, the story's got worse,
there's a Dickens of a deluge, far more than in verse.
The Mill On The Floss has quite washed away,
the same fate has befallen Madame Bovary,
water pours down, it's cold, and I shiver,
A Dry White Season drifts down A Bend In The River,
Lady Chatterley's Lover has taken a ducking,
his mistress we know he'd rather be...
but while The Old Devils, in this flood, really can't cope,
Moby Dick, on the other hand, feels quite at home.
The water pouring in has filled up The Sea,
and The Sea, The Sea,
and The Old Man And The Sea,
and The Sea Of Fertility,
and many other books,
to subaqueous degree.