Poetry Blast #1

While I decide which parts of the book to put up, here's a poem I wrote in the depths of winter, inspired in some measure by watching Nic Roeg's The Man Who Fell to Earth. I had read the book not long afterwards, as well as seeing the excellent adaptation of Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood. I suppose I was struggling to find the language of my own book, and feeling that disassociation that the chill of December can bring to bones and brain. I, too was feeling a bit like Newton and Motes, and started off with a great quote from the film as a base:

"Twas like where you're from weren't never there. Where you're going doesn't matter. And where you are ain't no good unless you can get away from it!"

This Outsider's Season

Winter's done its worst work,
Set into cruel motion
The freeze and crack of this little earth -
A lens that vaselines
The skin of a silver birch and
Runs a rheumy eye
Over the surface of a pond, there.

Wanting the reward of a new scarf
Bought with hot pocket coins,
The battle won
For a little while.
“Mesopotamia,” a whisper,
Floats on and through the air.

The felling of trees
And the black-throat insults of
Roosted crows, trapezing on their branches;
The sounds to democratize
This outsider's season.

Before long, he's learnt the words
"Priority" and "effervescent",
Used their weight to sink their shapes
Into a stranger's bus conversation,
The 33 to the Bridges.

Hearing a siren for the first time
Prickles the scalp
As a single, lone lung of cloud sighs past,
Obscuring the sun's view of midday earth.

“You've replaced no-one in coming here,”
And, he's told,
“No new news from afar.”