So I Found my Light

A poem for Christmas. You can hear me read an audio version here.

So I found my light on Christmas Eve last year,
After some searching, hidden in the attic,
stored in a dusty cardboard box, sealed away with gaffer tape.
I had to tear through the tape with my front door key,
Felt the dust coating my fingertips as I handled the flaps, the
Scrunched up newspaper in which I had wrapped it.
And I knelt on the MDF boards
And the knees of my jeans turned black
And I held the light in my lap and bathed in the warmth of it
The truth of it, the nearly forgotten youth of it
All hand made and sort of intricate,
With little lumps and dots and little scrawly swirly
things that might be words
On the surface that I never could fathom
All tied together with golden wire and glue you couldn’t see
And wondered why I put it away so long.
The other one had broken. I’d had it for a while, and
It was brighter, lighter in the hand, and if it flickered more
It illuminated in a way that hid the imperfections,
Buzzed a little, just enough to mask the bum notes.
And yeah, the batteries were expensive and
The only words that you could see on the side said
Made in China and don’t blame me, don't judge me, don’t
The old light made it too easy to see the things that were
Wrong with me, and if it made things warm and if it made
Things clear
it was
always
sort of
Awkward, and it showed me things I didn’t want to see
You couldn’t turn it off and sometimes it is easier
To live in a world where you can’t see except with a plastic light
Because human relationships are fragile and it takes courage to have them

If we shared the grief of all the world
it would crush us all to pieces in a second, flat
And sometimes even seeing a little bit is far too much
And so I hid it away in scrunched up pages of the Guardian
In a cardboard box in the attic

And got a new one off the internet and the problem
With the light you get off the internet is that you never
Get a guarantee and it wears out and maybe
I thought, it’s better not to have a light at all,
And hey a lot of people manage if they don’t have a light
And then I went without for a month or two,
And people who saw me, even people who didn’t have a light themselves
Went hey, what happened to your light? And I took to thinking
And up the ladder I went and here it is all shining, shining in my hands
And I will try it out for a while in all its handmade personalised
Awkwardness and beauty and shed my light upon the world.

[Repost] A letter from Mr Caspar

(A repost from last year. With reference to Matthew 2: 1-18.)

Template

(Recently rediscovered in the archive. memory of too many open mic poetry nights.) 

(adjective) (noun) of the (adjective) (noun)
(verb) the (participle) of the (adjective) (noun)
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By the (adjective) (noun) and the
(adverb) (participle) (adjective) (adjective) (noun)
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So (exhortation) to (verb) the (adjective) (noun)
(adverb) (participle) (unnecessary archaism)
Betwixt the (adverb) (participle) (adjective) (noun)
And the (adjective) (adjective) (adjective) (adjective) (noun)
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(adverb)
(adverb)
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As it (verb)s
(adverb)
(participle)
Until (shoehorned internal rhyme) the (adjective) (noun) (and another one)
The (adjective) (noun) (verb)s (and another time)
(thought-provoking reversal in final line)

Herodotus

Those who would detect his lies and fictions would need many books – Plutarch, The Malice of Herodotus

What Poe Would Have Done

“What say of it? What say of Failure grim,
That spectre in my path?”
Because when you quote Edgar Allan Poe,
Even for a cheap punchline or a laugh,
It is important to misquote, to chop and combine
Modern sentiment and old-time lit
An out-of-place word in a centuries-old line
Because, you must realise,
It’s what Poe would have done,
And you must hope that when you die
Alone under mysterious circumstances,
Paupered, ignored,
That you hold tight to the apprehension
That people might appreciate your work,
Your narrative flow, your dialogue,
Your focus, your texture,
Your grasp of dramatic tension
When you are gone;
It’s what Poe would have done.

Adam and Eve (Not Adam and Steve)

(The man to whom this poem is dedicated would not appreciate the dedication.)

No, you’re right. It wasn’t Adam and Steve.
I’ve done the research. I believe
You’ll find that in point of fact
Adam’s lover was Jack:
Slim, clean-shaven, possessed of graceful fingers,
A soft voice, blue eyes that would linger
Warmly on the curve of a chin or shoulder.
He listened keenly to the needs of the older
Man, held him gently in the dark,
Washed the fig leaves daily,
Whistled gaily
As he trimmed the poinsettias
Around the trees of knowledge and life,
Smiled and chatted brightly with Adam’s wife
And her own lover, Barbara.

He Recalls the Inventor of the Death Ray

i
Some time later, I would see the footage
Of Harry Grindell Matthews and the Death Ray.
He flickered, silent, moving newsreel-fast
Pressing switches, checking dials on his device.
A lightbulb flashed. An object fell from the sky.

ii
He told me, as a boy in wartime
He played in Clydach on the hill
Near the aging inventor’s home.
He wondered at the powered fences
Soaked up all the stories,
Imagined a world the man had designed:
Beams of flashgordon light
Swatting bombers from the night,
Skywritten warnings and news of war.
British Tommies in Welsh-built rocketpacks
Swooping into Berlin and abducting
Werner Von Braun from his home before
The Yanks and the Russians even get involved.
By the time the time the Japanese capitulate
To rayguns and riveted rocketships
Built of Port Talbot steel and Swansea copper
We have already built fleets with dragons inside them
Breathing blackandwhite trails of sparks and smoke and fire,
En route to the Moon, or Venus, or Pluto,
Englishmen at the helm, but made in the Valleys.
This boy’s own promise of a golden age
Made in Wales.

(Thanks to Dr Rhys Jones for reading this poem so beautifully.)

Departure

Last night I travelled standard class
On a shabby windowless aeroplane,
With stained and battered seats and
An in-flight movie screen of the old style.

I had arranged to meet my father’s ghost
In a far-away departure lounge.
He was of course vague and distant,
As he had been in life. He said nothing new.

I flew home on the same plane,
On the same day, in the same class.
I paid no attention to the movie,
Nor even noticed what it was.

The breadth in our hearts

(For Gela and Frances, on their wedding, 29/6/19)

The thing that is most magical of all
Is that after having spent so long
In worlds of the heart
Where everything is narrow –
Where our horizons are constrained –
Where all the spaces that we had to live in
Are defined by other people's boundaries –
The thing that is most magical of all
Is that within you, within me, within us
There is a breadth of love that covers everything,
A space to be ourselves;
A space to take each other on.
In you and I, there is a breadth in our hearts
Enough to make a hope, a life, a family
In a shape that we have chosen,
A space for us to be only, forever ourselves.

Why I Have Not Been Seen Upstairs Recently

Since you broke your leg, they said,
We became aware of the missing stair
And it is important to make sure you know
That from now on everyone will remember
To take care to step over the missing stair.
Obviously, it would be too expensive to fix,
And we do not want anyone to think that
We think any less of them because
They have let their house go to ruin
From lack of care because of one missing stair.
By the way, they said,
We haven't seen you upstairs recently.
Is everything OK?

The Gospel According to Me

(another repost)

Ninja Postman

(Until very recently, this was, I honestly thought, the thing the most people would remember me for)

Proposed Trailer for a Biopic of a Great Welsh Poet

Black Screen.

Drumbeat.

It's always the same voice.

This is How the World Moves

(A repost. Fragments.)

September Will Let You Down

I’ve known you all my life,
And it sounds so glib, but it's true,
You were there the day I was born.
I grew up looking forward to seeing you.
The first time I fell in love,
I fell in love with you.
I still look out for you,
Forget everything I ever learned about
Life when you arrive.
I know you're not exclusive,
Know you make the same
Promises to anybody interested.
I haven’t been so faithful myself.
I’ve had others.
They’ve run hot and cold.
But it’s always you I want.
I want to feel your touch on my face.
I want you to make everything
All right again.
It won’t work.
It’ll rain.
Our plans to meet up like we did
When I was a kid
Won’t ever come off;
The party won’t work out
The way it should.
You’ll turn frosty and
I won’t know why.
I’m holding my breath for you.
I’m biting my lip.
September will cheat on me.
September will let me down.

When I am gone, I want you to do this:

When I am gone, I want you to do this:
Hold a memorial where all the words are mine
The epitaph a thing I wrote myself
And demand that all the guests wear black
And weep, and bow their heads,
And miss me, and miss me, for I am gone.

When I am gone, I want you to do this:
Tape an inexpensive white bouquet
To a lamp post by a dual carriageway
And leave it until the flowers have wilted
And replace it only then, and when you pass
Think of me, for I am gone.

When I am gone, I want you to do this :
Erect a statue of me in a public place
And write upon the pedestal the ways I changed the world
So that in a thousand years they'll find it in the ruins
And add me as a footnote in their history,
Make me part of history, for I am gone.

When I am gone, I want you to do this :
Carry a cold, hard weight beneath your chest
And feel a terrible affront, a deep offence
When the people that you meet might not
Be grieving for me also, and regret
You never got to say the things you meant to say
And you will never get to say you're sorry.
For I am gone forever. I am gone.

Deities and Demigods

You might catch your breath at the idea,
Grasp the boat’s side, knuckles not as hard nor as pale as this
Wall of sea-borne scales
Glimmering in this cold, crystalline mist.
Your stomach might harden
At the premonition of hell
In the smell of sulphur and charred meat,
In the sight of bobbing, half-finished meals:
Lost men, brave men, men like you.
The dawn might darken
In the opening of this single slitted eye,
Wider than your height
And you might rise to your feet,
Barely trusting the creaking unsteady wood,
Raise your ancestral spear,
Fear that the moon-bright blade
Will not be good
Enough
To end the serpent that girdles the earth:

But since you know its hit point total,
You kill it instead and steal its stuff.

It is OK to be Sad (For David)

It is OK to be sad.

It is OK to say that I regret
The loss of a thing that gave me
Much to remember, to mourn
And say that right or wrong
This thing has gone, and forever
And this is done. And I am sad.
And it is OK to be sad.

It is OK to take a breath
And recognise I am not unmarked
By the deaths of those we loved
And those we knew and those
To whom we had a profound
Ambivalence. And I am sad.
And it is OK to be sad.

It is OK to understand that time
Has passed, the opportunities that
have passed untaken gone forever
With your youth, and say that
More than half my life is gone
And things did not pan out and I am sad.
And it is OK to be sad.

It is OK to say I am afraid of all the hate
And I am crushed beneath the weight of all the
Sorrow of the world when people who are
Good and people who are innocent are
Turned away and all the world is toxic
And I cannot stop these things and I am sad.
And it is OK to be sad.

And it is OK to say the sun still rises,
You are still here, you are still here
And you are young if I am not,
And I do not know what the world
Into which you will grow
Will be like, and mourning cannot stop
The bullets and the knives and the votes
That snuff out hope,
But as we are right now,
I am still alive, we are still alive
And we will take that breath again together
And we will straighten up
And we will smooth down our clothes
And I will place my hand upon your shoulder
And I will hold you tight
And I will look you in the eye
And I will say I love you and I know,
And I will say, I know that we have much to do,
But right now
It is OK to be sad.

Catullus LXXXV

odi et amo. quare id faciam fortasse requiris?
nescio sed fieri sentio et excrucior.

— Catullus

It is the prerogative of first-time lovers
To claim yourselves the creators
Of the language of romance. I know that.
And yet, if in singing to uncomprehending Latins
About things that did really did not as yet have names,
If in locating the precise intersection
Of friendship, obligation and desire,
If in explaining what it is to find yourself
One of many and only one of many
And never more than one of many,
If in curdling inside and
Calling her obscene and calling worse things
And yet still closing my eyes and seeing
That full red lower lip, that cream-white throat,
Those soft pale upper arms around which
I could close my fingers without hurting her,
If in remembering her salt and wit and filthy lovely laugh,
If in being crucified across loathing and wanting
I failed to see that I was a true pioneer of heartbreaks,
What difference will it make?
You will be able to invent all these things yourselves
Perfectly well without me.

Res Gestae

He called us to his bedside.
We brought our dictaphones,
Batteries refreshed
Ready for our Master's Voice.

He said, erect these words
On pillars of brass and stone
In every city of My empire:
“I changed the world forever.

I shut the gates of war, and three times
Peace achieved by force of will
And simple force whose equal none
Will see again for centuries.

These have been My times:
I already have a month of My own
And one day I know the years shall be counted
Beginning with the day I was born.”

He spoke for an hour or more,
listing the things he had achieved.
(I cannot remember them.)
When he was done, he closed his eyes.

He exhaled, and I thought
how frail and used-up he looked
And wondered if, when he had died
And had achieved his promised godhead,
I would think of him, the man deified,
As old and hoarse and dying.