Saturday 30 September 2017

The Writers' Room


The Writers Room,  with Dom, Kim and Eley recorded last Thursday. The programmes will be broadcast on Corinium Radio website for two weeks commencing 23.10.17 Mon, Wed, Fri. 2pm on the first week and 2.30pm the second week.  CORINIUM RADIO 
Two poems uploaded on Facebook page, and YouTube: "A Kiss" and "Landing" all a bit gravelly, but okay!

Sunday 3 September 2017

Chops I


Self Portrait as a Werewolf Talking to his Human Self

Struck to the core, the heart’s red core by Liardet’s
Self Portrait as Shamdeo – I misread as Shenandoah –

Talking to his Future Self I find myself faced by two antagonists:
Ferocity and Sorrow. I comb jasmine, waterlily in my hair,

rub the bristles on my jaw, removed from this apparent world,
pursued by gods of earth and air, a demons pack, setterragic a ssalc 

of backwards hunting carnivores jacketed in smoke, foul breathed
and wide, extraordinary yawning. Spirits of the claw.

I lick my paws. Tormented by the yap of wolves Sophia’s dream,
her wisdom finally devolves from dust in twisters of the wind

Air-tunnelling the Roman gardens, on the enlightened Parthenon,
long-emptied theatres of the dead and gone who ushered in

their own loathing, doubt and hunger. How wearisome you are.
For a spell raised on all fours and now to rise on simian feet,

it is a shaky progress to your clothes line on the water’s edge,
the moonlight shore where hangs a scarecrow article,

your battered coat, removed so long ago that now we struggle
to adorn ourselves with human clothes. You contemplate,

I whine and fawn, bite at your heels. You draw me back,
would hold me down in the struggle of twin entities

who squabble over worry bones, our knuckles strewn
on appetite, rune stones whose scattered grammar claims

a god whose lamb lies in the ruins of the first recorded text,
unaltered yet. slant-wise in your mirror let me write it down:

Red in tooth and claw the neighbour at your door, 
the baying dog who knows you is your own reflection. 


I doubt Tim Liardet would bat an eyelid at my using a poem from his recent volume The World Before Snow as a kickoff point for a practice piece – Chops: good for a blog that needs feeding. I was struck by Liardet’s earlier collection, The Storm House: serious and disturbing. He is an examplar of the craft.  The lines above may gradually become a kind of shallow imitation - which suits the subject rather well.