Note: The last poem was a result of mowing the lawn; this one was the direct result of hanging the laundry a year or so ago. I do have a giant dark green hoodie, although I do not wear it any more; I think that the comparison between style and method and execution are probably quite interesting. Also, I am tired.

It rises ( Read more... )

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Note: This is a poem that has taken me almost a year to write. It was born almost a year ago, on the last day of my trip to Israel, on the day before the ceasefire, and I finished it last night (or more properly this morning, at about two thirty). It was the last day of a four week tour with lots of running around and not really so much sleep, and ( Read more... )

Note: (I'm not so sure I like this one.)

This poem was not the poem that I expected it to be. The poem I expected it to be was somewhat longer, and less minimalist, and was less spaced out. The lines were longer. The syntax made slightly more sense. It was less pretentious - in a way - and more down to earth and conversational, and funnier.

The title ( Read more... )

Note: This is one of the few poems that I can pretty much pinpoint; if I was pressed and had enough time I could probably find out not only exactly where it was written, but also the date to within a couple of days. During the summer of 2006 I went, with a youth group, on a four-week whistle-stop tour of Israel, which unfortunately happened to ( Read more... )

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Note: this poem is chiefly the product the snippet of dialogue rendered in a horribly stylistic manner at the begining of the poem (blame reading too much Iain M Banks). It was originally spoken by myself and my grandmother:I was an over-inquisitive grandson, and her mild rebuke never ceased to perplex, frustrate and delight me. This poem is ( Read more... )

Note: This was begun on Wednesday, and finished today, which is Sunday. There's not that much I can say about this one - there was no particular poetic effect that I was aiming for, no poet whose style I was attempting to emulate. I realised once I'd added the last line (which took a while to find, as it happens) that I was probably channelling a ( Read more... )

They could say anything, those words.
Upstrokes of arcane glyphs drip
downwards, Dali-like, across a flannelled knee,
captured on the compact-format paper
but still remaining somehow innocent;
the consonants and vowels, the crest
of some great wave not yet to
break; white spaces, a horizon.
Then he turns the page: a complex rustling
of concertinaed air ( Read more... )