So you want to be a poet?

Well, if you’ve made it this far you probably already are a poet, though you may not know it. But wait, let’s check! Do you know what iambic pentameter is? How about an Italian quatrain? A Shakespearean sonnet? Yes, okay, they’re definitions of poetic structures; beats per line, order of rhyme, number of lines, that sort of thing. How about a foot? That’s the basic unit of measurement of accentual syllabic meter. Of course it is! There are different types of feet too: iamb, trochee, dactyl, anapest, spondee, and pyrrhic, all to do with the stress on the syllables.

Still want to be a poet? A poet would be well up on all that stuff wouldn’t they? Except, I write poetry, which makes me a sort-of poet, but to be honest I had to look all that terminology up on Wikipedia. If I’d been a Lit student having to field questions on it, I’d surely have failed. Well, I did fail actually – not that I was ever asked those questions, specifically. Log tables made more sense to me, but I still liked writing poetry. Log tables are obsolete now, while poetry remains pretty much a constant throughout time. And do you really need to know about all that structural theory stuff anyway? Well, the poet Robert Frost thought so. He said: there can be no fair tennis without a net, that without proper structure, poetry seldom yields works of beauty.

And he may have a point:

He watched with all his organs of concern
How princes walk, what wives and children say;
Reopened old graves in his heart to learn
What laws the dead had died to disobey;

That’s W H Auden writing in 1940. Plenty structure and rhyme there, and a silken beauty in the flow of it.

But then how about:

A shattered army, Thames’ filthy tonnage, tumbrils of carrion,
Not a beautiful spectacle
For the drinkers of history, or for me
Or my friends, this island’s parallel issues.

That’s Ted Hughes, writing in 1963. No structure, no rhyme, like being hit in the face with a plank of wood, leaving you with multiple splinters to pick at, which I presume is what he intended. So, maybe Frost was just an old fuddy duddy traditionalist and you can play tennis without a net after all, that indeed certain poetic themes demand a freer form if they’re to achieve their desired impact.

I used to strive for structure in my own poetry, but sometimes the struggle took over from what I was trying to say. Rhyme and structure are satisfying to achieve, like completing a literary puzzle, but they can also cheapen a poem, so why push for rhyme if you don’t have to?

How about this:

I remember sitting together in parks
leaning over bridges
counting trout and swans
holding hands under arches
kissing away suns
and moons into darkness.

I remember platform good-byes
last-minute trains
slamming us apart
and my non-self walking back alone.
I remember smaller things:
a pebble in my shoe
and you throwing a match-box on the Serpentine

That’s Phoebe Hesketh. No structure, no rhyme except for that last poignant hook between “shoe” and “you”. A friend of Herbert Edward Palmer, an English poet and critic, his advice to her was never to let the conscious mind force a poem into shape. That’s important, I think. It can be pleasurable exploring traditional patterns in poetry, and good practice trying them out, and if a poem falls into such a pattern, then let it be, but if doesn’t want to, don’t make it.

According to certain psychological theories, we exist upon a seething mass of unconscious energies that seek to become conscious through us. They are our life’s work, whether we know it or not. And poetry, indeed any form of creative expression, is a good way of achieving that, and it’s not like we have any choice in the matter. For a creative person to ignore the pressure from within is a very bad thing, and will backfire with more neuroses than we know how to handle. But to sit a while with pencil and paper, jotting the lines that are offered up, seemingly from nowhere, is worth years of therapy, whether you know an iamb from a trochee or not.

Poetry has always been an important aspect of any civilised culture, and not just for the professional – if indeed there’s such a thing as a professional poet any more. But can anyone really write poetry? Well, okay, not everyone wants to, not everyone gets it, but I suspect if you’ve a hankering for it, you can write it well enough. As a way of expressing the seasons of your life, there’s no finer way of honouring your self. How to start? Start with your life. Imagine you are a bit of the universe seeking to discover the meaning of itself through your eyes. So you capture a moment in time as if to bookmark it, and you say to the universe, okay mate, this bit’s important. Let’s remember this. Then you look back over the stuff you wrote twenty, thirty years ago, and you can see the change in yourself, the smoothing out, the growing up.

However we should beware the trap of thinking poetry is a road to fame and fortune because of course it’s not. Even the Poet Laureate only makes £6000 a year, which doesn’t get you much of a mortgage, does it? Fame and fortune are their own path, with their own rules, and only about one in ten who seek it, by whatever means, succeed at it. But in the business of writing poetry what we’re really looking for are glimpses of meaning, which boil down to those occasional and all too often elusive personal gifts of insight from the unconscious. Sometimes those insights are beautiful, sometimes they’re ugly, and mostly they’re of no interest to anyone else. But as always, in the writing of anything, the person most served by the effort is you, the writer. Poetry, however you define it, helps us grow a little. It’s just occasionally we’ll hit upon something that’s of a more universal appeal, so it’s not always true we should give up on the idea of publishing altogether. But as ever my advice these days is just to blog your stuff, thus calling it “sort of published”, and be done with it. Poetry can heal all wounds, but pursuing, through poetry, the eternally precious bane of fame and fortune is pretty futile, and worse, it will tear your heart wide open again.

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A blob of glue

I return from Wales feeling a bit flat. This is normal. Wales was beautiful and silent and very, very grand, but then I come home to find the garden around my ears, at least the bits of it not killed by drought, and there’s a pile of mail already nagging at me like flies, and the shower’s bust at the first twist of the dial so you can’t turn it off and the water’s gushing down the plughole and a drought order hanging over us.

So I’m wishing myself already paddling again like a little boy on Harlech beach, shoes and socks in hand, and for a short time not a care in the world, or walking a quiet stretch of rural lane of an evening, watching the sun set over the Llyn, and then a glass of Malt on the terrace of my little cottage as the moon rises over the Barmouth hills.

I fixed the shower with a blob of glue, which should hold until the next time someone uses it, and then I spent the day researching shower units to replace the broken one without needing to redecorate the entire bathroom and I ordered one off Amazon, thus neatly pushing the problem out in time to the mercy of the oppressed delivery man. And then I sat, and I tried to pick up a few threads of writing, but they were elusive, or maybe it was because the phone was in my hand and I’m glued to it already, like an addict, to the fall of the western world.

I learn that in my absence, it has been decided we are to stockpile food and medicines in warehouses that have not existed since 1945, and we’re to borrow generators from the army to keep the lights on in Northern Ireland. This sounds like fiction, the plot of a Ballardian dystopia, perhaps? It cannot actually be true, can it? It’s merely a ruse of those cheeky tabloids, something to show Johnny Foreigner we mean business, and we’ll damned well live off Spam post BREXIT, if it means we can still wag our Agincourt fingers. Or maybe these are the first Machiavellian priming strokes of a second BREXIT referendum, because who in their right mind is going to vote for Spam when we were promised milk and honey?

Then I’m sucked sideways into an article on the whys and wherefores of writing, and how it’s good for the soul and all that, and how money’s not the important thing, and just as well, and who can argue, except in the last paragraph I discover the writer’s just flogging his book on how to write, which is rather bad form, but not entirely unexpected because that’s the kind of world we live in – everyone a chancer and a spiv now.

Then another serendipitous swerve has me bumping into Vonnegut, a writer I don’t know that well, but he seems like a good egg, and he’s telling me yeah, you know it’s true, Mike, art’s not about making a living, it’s about making the living bearable,… which is something to ponder I suppose while we’re tucking into that Spam and wondering where our next tank of petrol’s coming from. At least we will have our art, except we don’t encourage it in schools any more, so we won’t even have that.

And I’m wondering about rushing out to Tescos to stockpile my own “no deal” BREXIT larder – hint, tins and dried stuff – and again feeling this terrible post holiday blues, and Vonnegut’s talking about just writing stuff because all there is is life and death and inbetween there’s this brief opportunity to grow some soul, and that’s where the writing comes in. For you. Your self. To grow some soul. You see, Mike? And I’m nodding my agreement because I’ve been living that story for a while now, but sometimes,… sometimes you forget, don’t you?

Except,…

I can’t forget that view inland from the Barmouth viaduct – that great sandy funnel of the Mawddach Estuary at tide’s ebb, or again in the evening with the flood roaring around the pilings and covering up the sand with quicksilver again, and the green mountains beyond, the mist and the light playing upon them in endless symphonies of mood.

And there’s been this poem trying to take shape in my head, something about those mountains not remembering, or the trees, or the hoary stones, or the foxgloves nodding in the sleepy lane. Not remembering what? I don’t know, but that’s what the poem’s trying to get at you see?

And it goes:

The hills will not remember,
Nor these scattered, hoary stones,
Nor the foxgloves
Nodding in the sleepy lanes,
Nor the oaks whose leaves,
Turning now their backs,
Anticipate the rains,…

There’s more, but I can’t feel the shape of it yet. It’s being driven most powerfully by the memory of a nearly full pre blooded Welsh moon rising, white as death over green hills and into a queer, luminous turquoise, and the air is warm and the night is still, and quiet. Then there’s the scent of that Islay malt I’m sipping, and it’s reminding me of another country, that’s also my own, a place I’ve not seen in thirty five years, but whose impressions remain strong, a place that doesn’t remember me either. And then there’s that other place, land of my grandfather I’ve yet to visit, and that’s been bothering me awfully of late. But in the main I’m thinking it’s a human thing, this curse of remembering, and those hoary stones and that Welsh moon are all the better for being without it.

Yes,… confusing I know – I’m English and Welsh and Scots and Irish, and I’m a European too, and proud of it. Identity is whatever you want it to be, and it’s best to let it stretch as wide as possible than to narrow it down so much it throttles the life out of us. Dammit what’s happening? Can we not fight back?

So, the poem? Okay, I think I know what it’s getting at now. It’s going to tell me that I am the mountains and the trees and the hoary stones, and all that, and even the foxgloves nodding in the sleepy lane, and that what I feel most keenly at times like these is my separation and a loneliness at the oneness now broken, yet reflected still in the things that are largely untouched, like the hills and the hoary stones, and the trees and the silver moon rising and that view up the Mawddach Estuary. It’s that final realisation on the path to healing the rift with this aching sense of “the other”, that in the final analysis there is “no other”. But that’s a tough sell when you’re drunk on secularism, or scientism, or religion 101, or that petty, petty nationalism, and all that’s holding the whole damned shower together these days is a blob of fucking glue.

(Sorry for the F Word)

Graeme out.

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Sunday mornings

Sunday morning lost in bed,
Awake and aching toe to head,
Resisting hard the need to pee,
The will to move eluding me.

Monday whispers, colours grey
The day, like flies abuzz to spread,
Bad news: Alas, the weekend’s dead.

 

With apologies

But hey, it’s already Thursday tomorrow!

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Goodbye Grumpy!

I’d like to start this year by thanking those who follow and comment on my blog: Simon, Tom, Lee, Rati, Jim, Bottledworder, Walk2Write, Paul – to name but a few; your comments and likes are a constant encouragement, as are the “likes” of others, followers or not, who drop by and read my stuff. Thanks to all, and a Happy New Year.

The Rivendale Review is hardly what one would call an “influential” blog, but has far exceeded my expectations when I set out in 2008, and has become an integral part of my writing life. 2016 will see the same eclectic mix of stuff, things that catch my eye, things that make me think, things I find joyful in life: travels, books, absurdities, curiosities, and funny stories. I shall also write about writing.

So,…

The year begins as it ended, with rain. It’s been raining since October. The rattle of it against the glass is a familiar companion now. The garden is sodden and squelchy, my outdoor coat is permanently airing on a hanger in the back porch. We have come through flood and sickness unscathed, but philosophical. And there is now a sadness too at a parting of the ways.

My car, my long familiar commuter mule, Old Grumpy is to be traded on Tuesday for another vehicle with less miles on the clock. Right now I don’t know if I’m doing the right thing or if I should have kept Grumpy a little longer. As for the new car, a ’12 plate Focus, I’m wondering if it will be any less troublesome than Grumpy has been over the long years of our acquaintance.

To the cosmopolitan gent, the car is becoming superfluous, even derided for its environmentally unfriendly habits. And to drive is to be milked as a cash cow for tax, insurance, repairs, and roadside assistance, to the extent one is wise to think twice about taking to the road at all. But for those of us living outside the city limits, in places where trains and buses are infrequent and rarely link up anyway with the places you want to go, the car remains an essential part of everyday life.

All the eras of my life, since late teens, are defined by the car I was driving at the time. A memory surfaces, say from 1978 – and I remember the plucky little Honda rustbucket I drove back then. In ’82 it was the Blue Mk4 Cortina, in which I began to explore the Lakes and Scotland. In ’86 it was the first in a long line of 3 series Volvos. Those eras were short, three or four years at a time. Then marriage and family life stretched the finances, so the car eras became longer – seven or eight years. In ’94 it was the Rover 216, in ’02 the first Astra, then the last Astra, old Grumpy in ’08.

The Grumpy era was marked immediately by a severe downturn, a period of grinding economic austerity, of rocketing energy and petrol prices. Grumpy saw petrol rise to £1.50 a litre. The Grumpy era has been a choppy one, an era of breakdowns, expensive repairs, and a general fragility of affairs that has sapped confidence and led to a contracting world view, rather than one that expands to encompass new horizons. The old Cortina took me to far away places, places I had never been before. Sometimes it feels as if old Grumpy has taken me nowhere but rather kept me on a narrow circular holding pattern. Holding for what, I don’t know. On the up-side, the grumpy era has been one of the most creatively productive. And whatever the ups and downs of it I’ll be sad to see him go.

A recent rain poem (2014) from the Grumpy years:

Crystal Teardrops

The day dissolves to a silver mist,
Lighter than air,
Drifting,
Settling softly
Among bare branches,
Where minuscule spheroids swell,
Coalescing to a smug fatness.
Teardrops of crystal,
Transparent berries among the black thorns,
Rich yield of cold nourishment,
Hanging motionless in a mist,
Still drifting,
Thin as ghosts,
Aimless as smoke,
From dying embers.

A lone leaf falls.

_______________________

And finally, an older rain poem (1990), the Volvo years:

Hawkshead

I hear the gentle sound of rain,
So soft, so fine, against the pane,
And I am in Hawkshead once more,
Remembering the time before,
When you and I first passed this way,
One shy and clumsy Autumn day.
First heartfelt kiss, first tender word,
In growing shades of dusk I heard.
A walk, a talk, from shackles free,
Snug from the world, just you and me.
It seems so long ago and yet,
The moment I cannot not forget.
For here it was that first I knew,
Without a doubt, how I loved you.

 

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Cool creatures, cats

I did an odd thing this morning – I deleted a post I’d put up the night before. First time I’ve ever done that. It was a poem called “Safe in the Shire” and was basically about the violence and suffering we see on the TV news every night, and how it creeps into our bones, paints the world as a very bad place and tells us to be afraid – to be very afraid. It was a clumsy swipe at the perpetrators of that violence but also at the media for their emotionally manipulative reporting of it. I basically called them both stupid, and I called myself stupid for feeling safe and remote from the suffering, that all I had to do was turn off the TV and everything would be okay, when it clearly wasn’t. I pulled it this morning because I feel my voice is weakest when I adopt a certain tone – a negative tone. As a weapon against the forces of evil and the media, it’s about as effective as a wet dishcloth against a Kalashnikov, or like a mouse spitting in the cat’s eye.

Speaking of cats, I’m away from home at the moment, cat-sitting at my sisters house. The silence is astonishing, and the cat’s needs are refreshingly basic – just food, water, and a voice to keep it company. I can say anything I like to it. It doesn’t matter. It’s the tone that counts. They are sensitive creatures, cats, and can feel the vibes of a room through their whiskers. I speak kindly to the cat, and I mean it. I ask its advice. I ask if it’s still raining outside. I ask its opinion on the upcoming local elections. The cat is patient, but cannot hide the fact it thinks I am a little strange.

I like both cats and dogs – dogs can be tremendous fun, but of the two I am more of a cat person. I give it space. It comes and goes, shares the firelight with me for a while, then slips out through the flap. I asked it about the poem just now. It’s obviously gone away to think about it.

I’m pretty sure I know the answer. We have to be ourselves. There is indeed great suffering in the world and, beamed daily into our homes, it can affect our lives in two ways. It can make us fearful of the world, and it can harden us, render us insensitive, because it’s a distant suffering and there’s nothing we can do about it, so we shut it out. Neither is a good thing. It chips away at our humanity. It festers. It erodes our compassion for our fellow man. But I cannot counter a negative with another negative. That’s a dark game against a grand-master who’s always going to be several moves ahead. And I’m trying to see the positive, trying, like the cat, to tune its whiskers into that which makes me purr. For the cat I’ve discovered it’s a simple matter – tap the spoon against the food dish. Big purr, and I’m the cat’s new best friend. There’s positive for you in the cat world! But for humans it’s more complicated, and it isn’t helped when every image we have thrust upon us is a bad one.

So I pulled the damned poem, scrunched it up and tossed it into the electronic bin as petulant nonsense. Instead, I counter the bad news of the world tonight with the simple pleasure of being back in the house where I was born, the house where I grew up. It’s not much of a weapon, I suppose, against the forces of evil, but it’s the most sincere thing in my armoury right now, and therefore the only thing I have that’s worth anything. I have such fond memories of this place, and of my parents – both gone now – and for whose lives, unknown to the world, I give thanks. Yes, there is great suffering, the causes being always, as Krishnamurti taught us, the defective thinking of man. And as a man, I cannot counter it with yet more defective thinking, because that’s only going to make things worse. We have to be positive, even if all we have left to us are the smallest things. I was raised in love, in this house and I remember it. I feel it most strongly, and I offer it back to the world, instead of that stupid poem.

The cat’s in again, looking at me. It’s either come to tell me I’m on the right lines, or I should put another log on the burner.

“Don’t sit the fire out, Michael.” That could be my mother speaking.

Cool creatures, cats.

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A poem a day

I’ve been reading a lot of poetry recently, all of it self published, through the WordPress blog, and I’m enjoying it.

We have plenty of dead poets, their words filling the dusty tomes of the past.Theirs are the voices we know best, theirs are the poems we learned by heart at school, and we all have our favourites. Some of those dead poets attained a degree of fame and celebrity in their lifetime, others despaired, self published their works then died in poverty, only to become revered by later generations. Sadly though most of those self-published were never heard of again, and their works are lost.

Even sadder, things have gone from bad to worse for poets and poetry. There are no lucrative publishing contracts any more, no more celebrity poets of the stature of the great Romantics, and the days of publishing by subscription are also the quaint relic of a bygone era, replaced by a rancid mire of disreputable vanity publishers and other dubious “author services”. So the smart poets are moving online. They’re setting up blogs. They have  dayjobs, and post their poems for free, by night.

While to the uninitiated, this might seem futile, little better than keeping your poems in a drawer, these poets have readers, they have followers. Their comment boxes are full. They have fans! But these are not household names, not poet laureates, nor holders of court in literary circles. They’re simply people in touch with themselves and their muse. They write well, and often, and their persistence has led to a quiet popularity among their peers, to say nothing of a dedicated online readership. Their poems are not to be found in glossy hardback in select bookshops – no – it’s much better than that; their poems are on the phone in your pocket.

So, you “follow” a poet you like and their poem pops up in your reader. You read it, and the poetry then becomes a part of your day. I have lots of books of dead poetry, but I rarely read them now, because time is pressing, and that’s a pity because it’s the daily exposure to poetry that’s the magical, all-important thing. It lifts you to another plane, snicks your head into a different gear, a different way of thinking and seeing.

Poetry is not meant to be an inaccessible literary form, one to be picked apart by highly educated critics in tweed jackets and bow ties. It’s meant to be a voice that everyone can listen to, a voice that everyone can hear. If a particular poet doesn’t speak to you, don’t think that it’s your fault for being slow or insensitive or lacking in poetical finesse. You can always find another poet who will touch you. The most effective poets have a way of cutting through the surface of life and exposing a jewel of emotion, a thing that can alter mood, and coax our brainwaves onto that more subtle frequency, put us in touch with a higher innate sense. But for all of that, poetry is about daily life, about the experience of our lives, and our reflections upon it.

The myth of poetry is that it is elitist, that only those who have done it at college can really understand it, that only those few poets who have escaped a merciless drubbing at the hands of pinch faced critics have a voice worth listening to. I failed English literature at O-Level, forty years ago, then went on to a career in a technical discipline void of anything even remotely artistic, but my ignorance of literature does not prevent me from enjoying, or connecting with books, or poetry, or indeed any other art form. Nor should it prevent you.

Art keeps the balance in our lives, and a balanced life knows no despair.

If you have a drawer full of poems, would like others to read them, but can’t find a publisher, consider blogging them. It’s an unlikely medium, I know, but one that’s catching on. Whatever you do, don’t pay someone else to publish them for you, or you’ll end up seriously out of pocket and with nothing to show for it but a crate of hardbound copies cluttering up your garage.

People read blogs, and they’ll read yours. And if you’re just not into writing poetry, consider following a poet’s blog instead. You’re sure to find one you like – just search WordPress Poems. Their voices can be a real balm for the soul as you set out into the grey fog of your morning commute. So find yourself a poet and let them in, or better still, find the poet inside yourself.
A poem a day,
Keeps the greyness at bay.
You too are a poet,
Though you might not know it.
So please don’t be shy.
Give blogging a try.
It’s really good fun
And the readers will come.
With apologies to Mr. D. Oggerel

 

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Trying to be truthful? Be my Valentine.

Valentine’s: a bottle of pink plonk and a pair of cheap red knickers? 

I was out shopping with my family today – our usual Saturday thing. I drove  into town, stood in the usual shops, then drove home. Empty handed. The world of material goods just doesn’t do it for me any more. What I’m looking for is a mystery and does not exist in tangible form. It seems I also look for it in all the wrong places – mainly charity shops these days, where the books are cheap, and the titles somehow more alluring than in the proper bookshops, where the prices are eye-wateringly high, and the argument over what’s hot and what’s not is still dictated by the false war of commerce and the locking of publicists’ diabolical horns.

Ironically, it’s in the charity shops, I think, when the books have fallen off even the backlist and are consigned to oblivion, that the titles finally have their proper say and speak to us as the author perhaps intended all along. Here, the titles seduce, intrigue and entice, vying with their delightfully jumbled bookshelf neighbours for our attention. But I already have a pile of unread charity shop books, so I kept my hands in my pockets today.

I caught a glimpse of it in the supermarket – this thing I’m looking for – but only recognised it by its antithesis. Valenetine’s is coming up of course – hard to miss at the moment, with every shop window filled with satin hearts and roses and cheap red knickers.

I took a while, away from the good lady Graeme, to peruse the Valentine’s cards, but came away dissatisfied and empty handed. They were either saccarine sweet – all fluffy teddy-bears and heart shaped balloons – or unashamedly smutty. Here’s my gift of cheap red knickers, the cards seemed to say, so let’s drink this bottle of crap pink plonk, then let me tear those knickers off you and,… well,…

We’ll draw a veil over that one.

The good lady graeme is more than pair of cheap red knickers, I thought, even though the marketing gurus of my local/global supermaket chain are trying to tell me otherwise.

How to celebrate it then?

Celebrate what?

Love, of course.

I tell a lie, I did buy something today – a copy of the Times. I’m not a frequent purchaser of newsprint but George Clooney was on the front page and I know my good lady has a secret soft spot for the man. And buried deep inside the paper was an article on Love poems. The aim was to get you to invest in an iPad app, but I resisted the temptation and, in a mood of deepening introspection, I read the poems instead.

As an old Romantic, I discovered I was familiar with most of them: Wordsworth’s “She dwelt”, Shelley’s “Love’s Philosophy”, Yeat’s “Song of wandering Aengus”. But there were other poems I’d not read before – Rossetti’s “The first day”, Keats’  “Bright Star”,… and as I discovered these poems, really focussed on them and tried to feel their voice, I felt a final shuddering of something.

What the hell was that?

Ah,… I remember,… Emotion!

But it was not the words of long dead poets that finally connected me with the soul of the world. It was Carol Anne Duffy. I don’t know her work very well. There are too many dead poets to be worrying about to have to consider the living ones as well, and I’m an ordinary man, not a literary buff. Carol Anne Duffy is the current incumbent of the British Poet Laureateship, our queen of poets, and her poem “Valentine”, read aloud this afternoon, finally moved me to a place where I found what I’d been looking for. I hope I’m breaking no rules by reproducing it for you here:

Not a red rose or a satin heart.

I give you an onion.
It is a moon wrapped in brown paper.
It promises light
like the careful undressing of love.

Here.
It will blind you with tears
like a lover.
It will make your reflection
a wobbling photo of grief.

I am trying to be truthful.

Not a cute card or a kissogram.

I give you an onion.
Its fierce kiss will stay on your lips,
possessive and faithful
as we are,
for as long as we are.

Take it.
Its platinum loops shrink to a wedding-ring,
if you like.

Lethal.
Its scent will cling to your fingers,
cling to your knife.

Read aloud? Yes,… as far as the line “Trying to be truthful”. Then something took my throat and I finished the poem in silence. Love is more than a pair of cheap red knickers. However you celebrate Valentine’s with your lover/wife/muse, be truthful. And do not be ashamed or embarrassed or afraid of love. It may be the only thing that connects you to what is real. And you won’t find that in a supermarket.

A moon wrapped in brown paper? I’ll never be able to look at an onion again in quite the same way.

My regards to all.

Graeme out.

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