living poems: some new and alll original work



 STORIES

 

          My own memory is without me

                   I do not feature in it

          Just a lot of regurgitated stories

                   That may have a crumb of truth

 

          When passed on they survive

                         But ever fainter, in another’s failing                                           memory

          But collect them: not for hoarding but dispersal

                   If they’re not told now

                             They never will be


 RETURN PLUS ONE

 

              From the city to the country

              I’ll drive you through grey                             secrets  to the sunlight.

              But it won’t start quite so easy

With staccato conversation

As the keyboards and the                                 numbers

Hurtle all in chaos

Disappearing into recent history

And fading into kaleidoscopic                         tarmac.

 

With each mile the knots                               untighten

As the just-gone past slips further

The long-nursed and practised                       words

Get closer to each other.

 

We’ll go to and through the                               country

And I’ll ask you to join the                                 searching

For pre-historic pictures

Of my half-invented childhood –

With its creased and faded                              memories

Of a pined and acred mansion,

And truants on wet autumn                                     leaves,

And the chase across the                                       railways,

And an orchard, snakes and giant                           gardeners.

 

To find nothing would not matter

If you listened to my well-digested                           stories.

 

As in dreams there is no journey

When you move from one scene                             to another,

So we now are near the river,

Past the pleasant ordered                                       platitudes

Known as suburbia and you’ll                                 wonder

But have doubts that cool before                             the melting

And then freeze before the kissing

Sends them shattering forever.

On through once virile dockland

That had green-black crumbling                            jetties;

Where merchants’ quayside                   houses and Victorian alleys

Mingled with decaying                                atmospheric slums,

But now are uniformly turned from                     warehouse

To the boring blocks of docklands                    without docks.

Ignoring these and lightly on to                        where

The banks are opened to the                   white-columned symmetry 

Of classic grandeur backed by the first               green hill downstream.

 

Adult and pre-childhood memories                              interlock:

Pepys, Nelson, clippers, stars and kingly                    kingly meetings.

All worthy background to                                                              another story

If you let me take you,

                        by the river.


Remembered?

 

Is memory just another recitation of a tale?

and your childhood stories, wrong and rose-tinted,

the replay of last year’s recounting?

Nothing original, nothing from long distance;

the deepened highlights and the heightened                      depths,

        told on from year to year:

flash recitals of the last repeat.

 

Think once and it’s an early videoed image.

Think twice and there’s a photo on a screen                     within a screen.

Once more and a hundred reflections are                 mirrored in a never-ending hall,

       but walking past, not one the same.

        Deceived, you close your eyes.

 

Be frugal with your memories,

                        you may use them up.

   shrinking and fading each time

                        you reminisce.

 

        Suppose you change each time you tell                           them

        but the memories stay the same like                               Dorian Gray?

Then the worlds of image and reality cannot be                      told apart,

and everything we know is deleted 

              from the start.