I took a trip to Zhengzhou yesterday, the capital city of Henan Province….I took in some sights and a slice of history. Then I wrote a poem.
Solidarity
Politics
Not quite the truth
My picture: sometimes I jut cannot do what I am asked to do 🙂
By a falling tree,
soft leathery lies.
Small cracks appear
” Just ignore them”
they said.
Falsehoods of time,
they have no one to turn to.
Only their parents,
once again.
Saturday 20th April, 2019
My Picture: Bookshop in the center of Xinxiang. I often go there to think and write.
Well versed in news this morning.
Parades are plentiful in Belfast,
a murdered journalist and omens from above.
What makes you think they will love you?
Elections in the Ukraine, jokers among the pack.
The crowd shouts ‘Why did the chicken cross the road”
But the joke isn’t funny anymore,
when ladder days are every day.
The BBC tells me that we have 12 years to save the planet,
but like you mother….. you can’t always trust the BBC.
So, all eyes to the heavens and silence on command.
As the desert moon probe crashes again, again and again.
Outside, in small towns a stream of voices shouts
“We’re innocent ….think of our children…..”
But nobody thinks of the children anymore,
it’s all on you.
In the end, I decided to sleep tight and be thankful.
Maybe I will write to complain about all the fake news on TV,
just like before.
Or listen to the midnight fear,
and the bells ringing in Washington, Belfast and Caracas.
The nearest thing to being alive, this morning.
The Indifferent
Today was not a good day.
Some people never seem to think,
and weep with soft eyes
when you tell them you do not
fear men that torment you.
They try to establish a dangerous consistency,
as you talk with people about
Camus, Dickinson and Bukowski
all examined and returned again.
They laugh at you because you
know what happened in Guernica,
Nanjing and My Lai
“Only we know this truth” they cry
And as for how truth and love have been lost
time and time again.
Well…they know nothing of this.
I try to hum a tune
or write a poem, but it becomes
a fixed subject.
Because I care and know that
hope will be encountered.
So…my friend Sophia, a radiant
point in this indifferent place
took me for coffee, and told me to
“Grow your fixed ideas,
because you are true”
So, we drank the coffee,
and I bought some flowers.
I put them next to my Bukowski books.
A form of resistance
in this deep-rooted time.
Domestic Issues
My Picture: Poster promoting women’s health. Hanoi, Vietnam
It was winter and wet,
our children gone.
Your anger fueled by grain
and family traditions.
Persuasions, to no avails and
my body a punching bag.
Beautiful diamonds,
no longer carry your traditions.
When the insects sleep
the wounds heal.
Silent knife, I hate you
for what you try to subjugate
and take for your own.
I am leaving now,
this can’t be living.
No longer receiving,
your pains and sorrows.
You broke my body, but not my mind.
The blows from you,
will hurt no more.
The strange death of poetry
My Picture: Bookworm Bookshop: Hanoi, Vietnam.
“Do you write about love like Neruda?”
“Do you understand the nature of immortality
like Dickinson?”
“Have you read Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens?
“They are American you know?”
“What do you think of Dylan Thomas?”
“Oh…..but he is Welsh”
“And what about Sylvia Plath and the confessional
movement?”
“She is a woman, but an American woman right”
“Of course we cannot not accept you,
unless you tell us about Whitman and the
American epic”.
“Oh yes… one more thing.
We don’t want any poems that
caustically indict bourgeois poetic values,
or celebrate the desperate……
like that Bukowski fellow”.
“OK?”
“Yes Sir….”
A Journey Home
My Picture
Some bus journeys are ordinary,
open windows and traffic running by.
People chewing the food,
watching the world photographed
on giant hoardings, the junkies junk.
Here, it doesn’t matter what Trump does
or how much oil and blood there is in the desert.
You just watch disinterestedly, and ask for more coffee.
The weather stays mostly the same.
And who cares about the Whooping crane
or the Eskimo curlew, they’re probably dead anyway.
So I listened to a podcast, David Byrne
on a desert Island and watched the world go by.
Passing unknown homes and people
screaming at each other.
Nothing left to fight for
and yet angry about the repeats on TV.
The Harshness of Life
My Picture: Xinxiang Cafe, China
A coffee in my favourite cafe,
escaping the harshness of the
cautious loners.
The coffee was hot and clean
and the staff always say “hello”
in practiced English.
Tonight a woman told a man
they were finished.
She told him he could go to hell.
Someone once told me to go to hell.
It was just after we made love,
and the phone call from a strange woman.
I only met her once, when I was drunk
and probably said ‘I love you’
That was my mistake.
Night Father
The Independent Newspaper. UK.
A Wandering Poet 