The Boy Who Could But Didn't » poems

Fridge poetry

Ben — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 18:04:17 +0000

Found in an old pictures folder backup CD. Images from 2004 and 2007.

The Dysthymia Variations

Ben — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 18:42:52 +0000

horror creeps
curling from somewhere dark
beneath unwashed carpet
soon to be another’s mat
mudding over once rich purples
trod by the prince of anhedonia
who would never be king
this is the time
but not a hand nor a finger moves

only black keys and bomb blasts
pepper the night where jasmine
once hailed the coming of saints
preambling a fanfare
never heard, never finished
the sand slips again
untouchable behind cold glass
this is the time
but no one hears it called

A poem

Ben — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 00:47:25 +0000

Tradition denies convention a title

Ben — Sun, 25 Mar 2007 22:07:26 +0000

Starve yourself. Eat words.
Chasing cattle invites just
faith to be misplaced.

Parker in negative minor

Ben — Wed, 21 Feb 2007 12:38:43 +0000

It shouldn’t have to be such an uphill struggle to be oneself.
It should not be so difficult to do the things one wants to do.
It shouldn’t be a game of tactics to be with someone you like.
It isn’t right to feel there’s nothing to look forward to at 26.
It isn’t fair that the only thing you’re successful at is surviving.
It isn’t a worthwhile use of time to always learn the same lessons.
It doesn’t change, it doesn’t develop and it doesn’t get easier. But
It doesn’t mean anything. It doesn’t really matter in the universe.
It doesn’t make sense, but we do what we do, otherwise we don’t.

This isn’t meant to be poetry. Or it is, and meant to be badly written. I used to be able to write decent poetry, a long time ago, but like so many other things I’ve just given up trying. My head is buzzing at the moment with ideas, still strangled by petty meaningless bureaucracy, and ephemeral “urgent” tasks. I want to crawl away somewhere dark with enough light to watch some of the ideas sluice out of my head and into a puddle – enough to reflect something of the world around me.

Know thyself: I seem a reluctant predator of denial, and infested with the parasites of resentment, despond and curdled fury.

little bits and pieces and things. i can weld meter.

Ben — Mon, 12 Feb 2007 19:47:53 +0000

they are fizzing on burning skin -
these tears wet as they slowly sink in
to sluice dry and stale flesh
to prove there’s something still within.
yes, there is still something there
with white face, black lips,
a corpse can once more sing!
it’s not affected -
the quizzing consort in my brain;
it’s not defective, this something going insane.
just a word used to denote
that which can’t be contained.
this is a missive
missile fired. Fire!
just a way of expressing the truth;
this, the beginning, the life redefined,
the first step in cutting the noose
so I can say something certain.
I. Am. Losing. My. Mind.

Dirty Cloud

Ben — Tue, 06 Feb 2007 00:29:00 +0000

Dear dirty cloud,
Where is it that you come from?

Are you logic’s overflowing paper bin,
unwatered and unread to;
fed on fag butts, beer cans,
and scribbles crumpled again and again;
a platter of clammy neurons stewed in old adrenaline?
Are you that half-hungry pull of just the moon upon my head?

Maybe you’re not enough hours spent in beds made
for sleeping – cries unhaunted, sighs undreaming.
Are you a ghost, some lazy gaze at memories?
Are you the voice come to tell me that everything is wrong
or that I’ve sleepwalked too far from somewhere else I could have gone to?

Or are you just the dust pushed unreachable
between forgotten stitching and abandoned seams,
amidst unused pens and lost and untossed pennies -
everyday buried treasure beneath
just an arse, rarely moved, barely moving, sitting stubbornly still for
nothing more than comfort
alone?

Tell me dirty cloud.
Tell me where you come from.

Two years to the day

Ben — Sat, 16 Dec 2006 12:25:11 +0000

Ish.

Ringbinders

This must be where the important things go -
       notes from the job you hate and back issues of The Economist,
next to the photograph you keep of
              the man whose name you don’t remember but
              you let him tie you up and fuck you anyway.

I can’t seem to find the letters I wrote you,
the ones you said were here
when I asked.

Perhaps I didn’t look hard enough on this
              shelf of important stuff -
       those ringbinders and those back issues,
       the unwritten in diaries and notebooks undating the day we met,
       the crumpled café and bar receipts and
       the empty spaces between them, shelving priceless
                     important dust.

14th December, 2004

The Graduate Bankers

Ben — Mon, 21 Aug 2006 14:15:16 +0000

trudging grey streets lines their pale weather faces
cracked plaster walls painting a midsummer chill
with wet woolen coats shrouding sodden-sock paces
they shuffle silent into the drum hall
beneath an old naval clock, stale carpet soaks up moisture
a stillborn rain sluiced from stone-stolen water
leeched clean from their soles but
destined to dry in only drab faded fluff

tick
tock
tick
tock

as dissoluted youth drips into drains, paths and shelters
rain clouds the distant scent of any city greater
beneath air choked, lying crooked, mumbling they go,
their ties crooked, their hair fuzzy but not allowed to show
colour beneath the grey, white, navy and black
and to get no hours back for following the herd,
an untidy necessary part of the timeless insatiable pack
where earning money is the reward of money earned.

Past lives

Ben — Sun, 09 Jul 2006 02:27:52 +0000

Idly browsing through my “AUTHORED” folder (which is all I ever seem to do with it these days) on Amaunet, my lovely still-smelling-new MacBook, I came across the following poem.

It was actually the date that caught my eye – 7th July 2003, exactly two years before the London bombings. I was vaguely aware of what was in it before I opened it. In fact I even quite clearly remember sitting in Duke’s Meadows in Chiswick on the baking hot Summer day when I wrote it – my last lazy Summer holiday, having left university the month before.

As I kept reading, I was surprised by how simply it managed to sum up everything I’d been feeling in the last few days in reaction to the first anniversary, and what I thought was an attitude to life I’d developed only over the past year (quite unconsciously stark in my recent 100 words). Life endures, and by its tiniest of moments.

I can’t write poems anymore. My brain just doesn’t seem to work that way now. I hardly seem to write at all in fact. The environment never seems quite right, nor the time.

But I’m working on that. I’m working on that big time…

Meadow

So long as this place will always be here -
this pure unspoilt meadow that wants to be endless;
these great ferns tickling
the sunbeam heavy cumulus,
spilling heat onto baked earth;
the riverside benches in their intimate glades;
the distant bonfire and its cloudbound plumes;
chatter of chaffinches
and father and son at play,
and from so high above the splay
of transparent fingers from that brilliant burst of light,
perched regal in infinite cities of blue, silver and white,
caressing all of this in a sigh,
where even each grass carries
a graveyard reverence for a place
where nothing has ever died -

So long as this place will always be here,
Death’s vulgar tools -
his sterile words and antiseptic air -
will be lost in the breeze, and the breeze’s sigh.
There will be no death.
There will be just time.

So long as this place will always be here
I am still a child on holiday
from being anything else.
I will always be here,
and I do not feel alone.

July 7th, 2003.