The second episode of Not the 8.30 News – the internet’s fastest growing and not-at-all derivative satirical current affairs show. With digs this week at the Health Secretary, Steve Barclay, the Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, the Justice Secretary, Dominic Raab, and, for that penalty miss, Harry Kane.
Category: Creative writing
The elephants in the room
It was billed as an evening of music and words. And because it was being held at the Chang Thai bar in Ludlow with its Buddhist kitsch decor, was called The Elephant in the Room.
What the organisers hadn’t reckoned on was a bunch of boozy builders on a pre Christmas night out rolling in just before the first poetry reading. Elephants in the room. Plural.
I don’t think the landlord was down as a performer. But he got the first line: “Don’t be a prick in my pub” he said whilst simultaneously pulling a pint.
The second line fell to the poet, Gareth Owen, reading his piece about a Western gunslinger with a Virgilian theme. He may have said Virginian theme. Sixties television, Shiloh Ranch and all that. But we couldn’t be sure as the shushes and the shut-that-doors ricocheted off the walls when some of the posse went out for a smoke and others came back in.
And then something magical happened. The words began to register. Maybe it was the meter. The narrative. Or all three. As one by one the lads fell silent and listened. By the end they were captivated. Shot through the heart with a silver bullet as it were.
Poetry can do that. Move everyone and anyone in unexpected ways.
They didn’t stay after that first reading. But I like to think the words stayed with them.
Thank you to my poetry coach Pele Cox for being there to witness the magic.
Not the 8.30 News: Episode 1 – the start of something awful one
The Big Live Breakfast Burrito is perhaps the weirdest show on the Internet. Hosted on LinkedIn and restreamed live to YouTube, Facebook and Twitter plus a heap of other platforms in theory in should be unwatchable. But somehow its compelling mix of what one viewer called “unstructured nonsense” works. Or at least I think it does. Although I would say that because I’m an occasional contributor! Here I am channelling my inner newsreader and making my first attempt at satire. Let me know what you think. Even if it’s rubbish. It’s the silence that kills you.
A Postcard from Tenerife
Dear Mum
Wish you were here!
El Medano reminds me of Swanage.
Sand, sea, sunshine, taut salty skin.
The tide of geological time turning as the waves wash in and out and in…
But then these days everywhere reminds me of Swanage.
Wish you were here
In that jumper I’d now give anything to possess, dad playing on the beach.
You camera shy just out of reach.
A pair of empty sandals* in the cradle of the deckchair.
There but not there.
(How I) wish you were here…
Dear Mum
Like many parents my mum and dad dutifully plotted their children’s travels around the world by sticking our postcards home to the downstairs toilet wall. Partly geography, partly social history, it’s a family A to Z covering literally everywhere from Aberystwyth (my stay-at-home sister) to Zanzibar (her globe-trotting baby brother). But follow the path (easier when you piss standing up) you’d see the journey comes to an abrupt end. By the U bend…
The sticker-upper-in-chief (our dad) died. And shortly afterwards so did the tradition of sending postcards because, let’s face(book) it, #holiday is a whole heap easier than buying a stamp and finding a postbox. Trouble is mum – like many women of her generation – has never really done social. “They’d have called in Wrinkly Facebook if it was for us,” she joked. Before dementia wiped the smile off all our faces. She’s still with us though. Her name is Sheila. And this poem is for her.
*This line was inspired by my mum’s sandals sitting on a deckchair in a family photograph I’d looked at a hundred times before but not properly seen. For me poetry is all about seeing things properly.
The poem was also written because I’d been asked to pen something on the theme of travel for The Big Live Breakfast Burrito on LinkedIn. If you haven’t listened check it out. I also penned an alternative based on the shows hosts...
Dear Mum
Wish you were here. You’d love Burritonia
Will couldn’t make it so I’m here with Antonia.
Eric’s the rep a right Tam o Shanter
With a fella called Matt who’s a bit of a Ranter
Then there’s a woman named Van – Vin Extraordinaire
And Simon (and Craig with a chin-ful of hair).
Day Two.
The sun’s been quite strong so Eric’s turned pink.
And Matt’s prone to whingeing so he’s kicked up a stink.
And Van’s poured a glass of Canarian wine.
Though it’s barely past breakfast and hasn’t struck nine.
Now Simon’s got factoids he can’t get the cream
Craig’s knitting his beard like he’s lost in a dream.
Antonia’s mouthing a mysterious word
And from Will only silence nothing’s been heard.
Wish you were here.
The father, the son and the surgical spirit
* wuldres wealdend || woroldáre forgeaf
“Take as long as you like he’s ready for you.”
Shit and surgical spirit.
There, I’ve said it
It’s only taken 22 years
A forehead kissed. No words. No tears
Too airless. Two chests deflated.
His dressed in half Windsor-knotted Sunday best. But on a Thursday. Curated.
Dead cool.
The book tented open at line *seventeen
Steepled where his stomach would have been
His word. Diminished. Unfinished. Small.
Eviscerated.
I can magic all this back. Son. Father, wholly ghost.
But it’s the shit and the spirit I remember the most.
That and the piped music. Bland enough not to wake the dead.
“Go up to his room. He’s waiting for you,” she said.
The print of him was already smudged at the edges of the unmade bed.
Sheep hollow filling with snow.
So by mourning there’d be nothing left to show.
Except a bible-shaped drift
Undisturbed.
Pure white. An allegorical rift
Between Christian and pagan. Beowulf stabbed with a pencil (marked thus * by heart line 17)
Now in the other scene.
Morning. Curtains open shut then close. Blinking behind the veil as book and body burned.
* The glorious Almighty, made this man renowned.
This is a poem about loss. About christianity and paganism. And how, ultimately (by which I mean in the end) they are one in the same thing. When my dad died there were two books on his bedside table: Beowulf (Seamus Heaney’s translation of the unknown poet) and the bible.
The patron saint of paint
He spoke to me in a dream on the road to Santiago The pilgrim father. Ochre boots. Lamp black hair. “Any path can be a Camino. “Just start walking. You’ll know when you get there.” Now forgive me if I refer to the map. It’s long since I saw the legend - turned the key. Winsor and Newton artists’ oils. Humbrol enamels. Sable brushes. Airfix toils. Sunday school. St James the Apostle. Follow me… Back. Past the pond. Iced over. Goldfish. Koi. Shubunkin. Locked in Scarlet lake and silver slowly sparkling Right at the tar-trunked pole. Under gunmetal transformer. Beneath blood red risk-of-death label and verdigris cable. Arc-ing… To the garden shed Drab olive door stuck in its dark oak jamb. Dull zinc hasp. Chrome padlock bright. Entrance to the relic of the saint Fly-stained glass. Webbed light. Burnt umber urn. Penumbra of paint. Gloss. Emulsion. Undercoat with a crust. Cans made of plastic and tins turned to rust. A screw top. Hand sized. Kilner-like. Scratchy thread. Preservative of the dead And transfigurative. The Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela. Inside now. Muted. Hushed. Pewter. But every colour there ever was shouting: “Son, you’ll know when you get there.”
Night farming
Furrows the Plough ‘cross the field of night.
Bellows Canis at the owls out of sight.
Callow Orion unbelted his might,
Shallow-breathed Virgo sowed without fight.
Sorrows the brow, Cassiopeia the queen.
Mellow the music of Lyra, unseen.
Hero Perseus his sword broad and keen.
Hallow’d Aquila surveying the scene.
Meadows by daytime all scattered with red.
Billow the poppies no sign of the dead.
Fallow the ground it was all in my head.
Fallow the woman beside me in bed.
Footprints in the snow
Eastern ashes astir aglow As new moon lips mouth morning’s breeze The arc then melts like springtime snow Unshackling Earth from night-time's freeze. Nocturnal creatures can’t be caught By hieroglyphs to leaf-lined lairs Their secrets safe in shadows short Billowing steam in sunbeam snares. By eve the hearth coals shrink and cool What was blunt is keen to sharpen Penumbra from the blacksmiths tool Hammer gripped and sinews stiffen. The western foundry’s gutt’ring flame Is sparking stars for night again.
At night the stars leave tracks in the sky and animals leave tracks on the ground. By day they disappear. Only to reappear as the sun sets and the moon rises. This poem was written as an exercise in sonnet form (ABABCDCDEFEFGG). According to convention each line ought to have ten syllables (the five “boom BOOM” heartbeats of iambic pentameter). This has only eight per line (the 2 x 4 of iambic tetrameter). I’ll let you, the reader, decide whether this disqualifies the piece as a sonnet.
Nature’s fountain pen
For most of the year the field is like a sheet of writing paper covered with invisible ink. Words indivisible from the page. Blank every morning save for brown-blot molehills. But the overnight snow has rendered the lines for all to see. All at once. An animal track heat map, only cold. Footsteps frozen in time and place.
Much is indecipherable. Unknowable. But some is observable. Or deducible.
The ink is barely dry on the sheep paths. Close up, the freshest, once-trodden tracks are, in fact, two closely-spaced furrows with a distinct ridge in between right and left ploughshare hooves. No such distinction in the oft-trodden lamblines where the front leg dots and hind leg dashes have worn through to the grass beneath. Feint blue becoming bright green.
Other writers have left strings of single letter words and flown. The Y Y Y of bird feet. Serif here. Sans serif there. Upper case. Lower case. Bold buzzard prints. (I know they were left by a buzzard because I saw it fan down from its perch in the snow-shadowed oak – gracious in flight, but grounded, stamping cold feet like an angry child in oversize wellies). Italicised wagtrails. Barely more than scratches on the crusted surface of the snow. Spokes leading to the stock feeder hub. Hay for the sheep. A meagre harvest of flies for the birds who’ve been forced down from their usual haunt on the clay tiles of the barn roof.
By the brook where the flood water has congealed then dropped to leave a glass dance floor, there are the arrowheads of a pheasant. Pointing back from where it came. And ending abruptly. Mid sentence. With a tail-dragging smudge and a silent squawk. Only to start again somewhere else. In another field. The other side of the stream. On another page.
The writing paper field.
Freed from the conventions of verse form, I find prose poetry easier to compose. So it’s my go-to style. That said I hope this latest piece in the Field series still has poetic qualities in its use of imagery, metaphors and symbols.
Mother’s Day
Dear Mum
You didn’t like people making a fuss of you. So you weren’t a big fan of Mother’s Day.
Before it all became what you disdainfully called Americanised, I do remember me and my sister bringing you breakfast in bed. Dad was in on the annual conspiracy and I’m sure you knew what was happening from the clatter in the kitchen. But you always feigned surprise when Joanne carried in the tray and I, her younger brother, theatrically threw open the curtains to let the morning shine on Kellogg’s Cornflakes, a boiled egg and toast (which left crumbs on the sheet we could feel through our pajamas when we were allowed to snuggle up next to you). Thank you for your indulgent smile that morning and every morning.
You still have it. Dementia may be emptying your mind. But it’s not draining your face. I’m picturing it now. It’s your gift to me this day (because mothers everywhere give far more than they can ever receive).
Life.