It was a combination of things. The idea took shape in 2005 when I finished a critical book, The Poem and the Journey, which itself followed on from my journeys in Tigers in Red Weather. I read every poem as a journey and in The Poem and the Journey I thought about different sorts of journeys, exile, homecoming, exploration, and related them to the movement of different sorts of poem.

I then thought about the difference between the Odyssey and the Aeneid; how one – which was an imaginative touchstone for the 20th century – is a homecoming; but the other is a forced migration to make a new home when the old one has been razed and lost, which is the experience that is tragically charactising a lot of 21st century. And about my father’s grandfather from whom I inherit my name: a musician who studied in Leipzig and came to Britain as a boy.

But the last poem of my collection Voodoo Shop also uses the image of migrating birds: I think the last poems in each collection often point the way to where you are going to go next.

2. In such a complex and multi-layered work, how (in practical terms) did you go about handling your material and planning the structure and concept? How much did the work change during the writing process?

It took years! The whole process was seven years. The structure grew and changed. At first I thought of alternating prose and prose page by page, which was obviously impossible. I did masses of research on birds, masses of hard writing and false starts. Finally my editors called me in and said to send them what I had. They sat down with me, and a high pile of printed out inchoate stuff, which included poems, and notes, and tryout essays. And my editor said, Ruth, just write the poems! then you can add the prose. There was more of that than my editor had expected, but all the facts, and connections seemed to me so beautiful and important. Everything had to lead up to the all-important political section, the immigrations, detention centres, asylum seekers and how they are treated. But I wanted to let the birds, and other creatures, do the work, showing how dangerous and effortful migration is, so the poems about asylum seekers did not have to be message-laden, could be free to be themselves, to be poems, find out their own inner relationships and where they are going.

3. What is it you enjoy about writing?

Discovery. See pattern, below.

4. How conscious are you of ‘writing techniques’ while you are writing? Do you prefer to forget about them in the moment and go back to them in the later editing process once you have written your initial drafts?

I’m not sure I distinguish between technique and anything else. I draft and draft and draft; each time I hope it gets truer. In Maurice Sendak’s children’s book, In the Night Kitchen, the little boy steals dough from bakers in the basement, and kneads it and kneads it, “till it looks ok”. But the illustration shows him making a dough bi-plane, which he hops into and flies around. It’s that process that matters, that feeling of working “till it looks ok.” That’s the drafting, and redrafting. Then you can fly.

5. What do you admire most in other people’s writing? What living or dead writers have been most influential on your own writing?

Freshness – live language, a confident, singular voice that is aware both of language and of the world.

Influences are too many to say: I try and learn from anyone I admire, from Sappho to Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad. I spent a lot of time early on with Greek choral lyic, Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, and also with Gerard Manley Hopkins who wrote a study of them and was influenced by them himself. But I also love Elizabeth Bishop’s directness, her switches from confidentiality to universal insights, to wonderfully crafted description.

6. What is the most difficult part of the writing process for you? What is the easiest part?

Easy? Nothing is. I think it shouldn’t be. But the most difficult part for me is the beginning, the getting into something new. It is also a thrill – but it has to be new, you have to make sure you are not coasting, resting on something you have done before, places you have been before.

7. You mentioned when you spoke to the UEA MA students that pattern is the key thing in writing, that we are all pattern makers trying to make or find a pattern. Could you say a little more about this and how it plays out in your writing?

is it poetry?’

In a Rorschach test, psychologists ask people to say what they see in, or make of, an inkblot. The inkblot is the world, really: poems are what we make of it. The stars are a very ancient Rorschach test: people looked up and saw mythical creatures in them, Orion the Hunter, the Little Bear. Then they saw ellipses, guidance, geometric patterns.

Human beings are hungry for meaning, and find it through pattern. We project our own patterns onto the world: pattern mediates our experience.

All good poets are obsessed with pattern, but differently. Paul Muldoon is a wonderful, very self-aware extreme example: he uses extraordinary patterning to interrogate history, language and experience. I think I’m particularly obsessive about how I pattern vowels.

For me, there is a point in writing a poem, as the poem finds its form, when I try and listen to it, to sense if it wants to be in stanzas or not, because stanzas are a special sort of patterning.

I once read Paul Durcan’s “A Spin in the Rain with Seamus Heaney” to someone who is soaked in 19th century poetry but doesn’t know much contemporary poetry. I was really shocked a week later when he said, ‘Remember that poem you read me: why is it poetry?’

Patterning is one place to start, to answer that.

The first document was redacted. I thought of my toothbacks after three years of twenty a
day: good Marlboro lights that didn’t come cheap.

The second document was all in calculations. The numbers made my head swim so I wrote
them out in words: train tickets to the coast, Tesco Value Malibu and crisps. Condoms.

The third document was diarised. Important lunch appointments and nights spent working
late, with stars next to Sundays that have stayed underlined.

The fourth document was indistinct. A nightclub photo of a face I didn’t recognise. It was a
long time since the mirror had looked at me like that.

The fifth document seemed hopeful: an email that promised clearer skies, more lightening. It
was misspelt, as if composed with one eye glancing backward, surreptitiously.

The sixth document was lying: promising an office block and not salt air; a planned response
to chaos. Contacts for the wrong hotel.

I lost the seventh document. I wonder what it looks like now, stillborn in its envelope:
stamped, addressed, unsent.

The eighth document was forgotten: lodged in a plastic bottle full of ash that never made it
out to sea.

The ninth document was extracted from the stage: a soliloquy on how she never planned to
leave her husband. Offstage, the door closed with the squalling of gulls.

The tenth document was confused: lists of wine recommendations, late nights that looked like
spirals drawn on wet notepaper.

The eleventh document was imaginary. A wedding invitation predicted in a tube station, as a goth
leaned in to a dark haired girl.

The twelfth document was in denial. It described sights it had never seen, words it had never
written. It did not mention regret.

The thirteenth document was whitewashed. As I lit up, looked back, five months later, I’d
used up all my words: turned out the pocket my mind still groped through.

The fourteenth document I threw out with the tide: it was only your phone number, signed of
with your name. Three kisses. Each one took it out of me more than it used to.

The Muse

Think what you do when you do do that when you love the name of anything really love its name. – Gertrude Stein

Blue lightning. Keep timing it. Rip the waves up into peaks. Or do I mean whip, yes you
mean whip, do you, don’t I but

– Stop it. It’ll all blow over. No need for thunderclaps. Not any string of words can make a
poem, but not any poem can make its words string you up

– Have you ever been torn up by a current, stretched on a wire, glowed out? The texture of
its skin

– Some kind of circuitry’s at play here. Do you think we could stop, just once, this makes it
feel like it hurts. This makes the hurt it feels. This makes the feeling

– Quiet. My hands. Your hair.

From Your Mother’s Desk

Excerpt from an apology written to a feminist discussion group by their tutor, who was too late to discuss Angela Carter’s ‘The Bloody Chamber.’

Dear Bloody Chamber girls,

I left Bluebeard half battered by sea air and stole away too late, to meet you, by the library, as
we arranged – book in hand and hopeful     I bled him

every time I stretched my legs, obliterating, bit by bit, the rubies stood in droplets from her
throat, outstretched on the block     I admit I loved him

from first sight, a single dumb ovation as he strode into the dance – though I offered up her
flesh and bone, in recompense for mine.      Will you ostracise me

now? I was once the oldest of you all, your traveller, your treasurer, and yet – the sword
borne in on horseback stove her throat, not his.

Did Angela rewrite a happy end – daughtermother reunited right above that bloody den I
dipped my fingers in?      I never could have damned him

though I yoked my self to your stretched arms, your broken fingers – I admit, I lied, and, yes,
will lie again.     I burnt above the bruises he inscribed

into your backs, cracked the smiles you’d just restored to your unwrinkled mouths.     Though
don’t I wear a skin as well as you, if coarsened by

half the pack of cigarettes hacked up each evening, lungs exposing smoke and tar to the last
light?      I have a heart

as bent as any man’s. Even Angela could not account for every exclamation, each skipped
beat as she left my arms, in white.     I had eyes

only for her groom, propping up the altar with his mist of incense. I could smell the rot
loosening his meat    he had grown old too.

Perhaps that’s why he left me (more or less intact) back on my single bed, before he buried
his bride’s head alone, out by

estuaries he showed to me in words, shyly, while we both spread open on their wedding
sheets – even he was shy of the extremes, when I

read him back, repeating every touch he scored into your spines. I left him raw, returning to
your echoes       recoiling from my walls, gathering dust.

Out of this wood do not desire to go. Here is where enchantment starts. Here is where confusion begins. Here rulers of different realms assume masks of faun, ass, wall, moon and lion.

Out of fallen beeches creep the ghosts of time. The wood is full of ghosts. Of burned leaves if nothing else. Then they disappear and then the trees are burned.

It is a strain talking on several levels like this. Wood is not wood. Ass is not ass. Wall is not wall. Enchantment is not enchantment. Talking like this is just talking.  It is like being stripped naked.

The naked are enchanted. That is where we begin. That is a faun. That is a lion. The ghosts of time enter the wall. We don’t talk of ghosts in walls. The wood is the ghost. The word is a ghost.

Here is where the confusion begins. It is a strain talking. Like this. Like that. What will they do with all that grey wood? Wood is not wood. Ass is not ass. It is like being stripped naked.

The Immigrant at Port Selda

I got off at Port Selda and looked out for the harbour

but it was quiet, nothing smelled of the sea,

all I saw was a station by a well-kept arbour

with a notice pinned to a tree.

It said: Welcome to Port Selda, you who will never be

our collective unconscious nor of our race.

This is the one true genealogical tree

and this the notice you will not deface.

It was beautiful there. It was Friday in late

autumn and all the birds of the county sang

their hearts out. I noted down the date.

The sun was shining and the church-bells rang.

from Minimenta: Postcards to Anselm Kiefer

2. Wind, Cloud, Drilling

How often have we watched trees

move against dark cloud, their frail

armature part collapsed, part thrust

against the wind, the leaf-sail

of each bud billowing to squeeze

light from dark, energy from dust?

*

Unrest. The un-ness of things. Twig

like a broken No. Concrete steps.

A drill. A bulldozer. The cold lips

of November pursed for a kiss

that is more like a blow and all this

far too late, too troubled and too big.

*

Everywhere the human voice. How can

we help but hear it in grass and air?

Even a wall is only a tall noise with brick

syntax. High clouds whisper human

non-sequiturs that turn to rain. Where

can we hide? Why this sense of panic?

*

A man and woman in a field. The rain

starts and they take shelter. The grass

runs all one way. They embrace. They hold

each other as if they could not do so ever again.

Above them leaves fold and unfold

in the downpour that will quickly pass.

*

The construction site constructing.

The square empty but for machinery.

The cafeteria with its litter of trays.

Everywhere institutions. The lost days.

All this will be broken up, everything.

There will be no drama, only scenery.

*

And then he turned to her and ran

the back of his hand against her cheek

very lightly. It was as if wind had stroked any

surface whatsoever. He was an old man

or a young man, and she could not speak

or find words because there were too many.

–Bad Machine is published by Bloodaxe Books on 24 January, 2013 (£9.95).

Midsummer Loop

now in the stillness, the two still hours
between this meeting and that,
hours of silence in which the angel of conversation deserts us
to beat her wings above another gathering,
another long room, magnificent table and solemn pronouncement
made to the detriment of everybody else
and the glorification of the subject,
now we are abandoned to our own resources
on this one original summer’s day
and two hours fill like stones with the heat of the afternoon,
two flat stones placed on the stomach to steady
the heartbeat and the breathing,
a number of rabbits
emerge from their secret holes hidden about campus,
hidden but not undiscoverable holes
down in the beginnings of dry holly-bushes out of season
and the naked wooden roots of rhododendrons
from which the rabbits hop forward one hop at a time, one a minute,
a hundred little clepsydras
all set to different schedules, forward
on to the grass, where they balance, weightless as empty pelts
on the points of the blades, like martial artists
who lie unharmed on beds of nails
conducting their spiritual business, with two hot stones
weighing down their bodies, lightly, painlessly,
rabbits fanning out
across the sweeps of grass that sustain them,
across the blades that do not bend beneath them,
and they eat with steady hunger and enormous concentration,
clipping flat the sharp tips
precisely with ordinary, curved, discoloured teeth
again and again, masticating the strands
as they cross and re-cross the blocks of dark gold sun
laid across the lawns like golden doors
they pass through unharmed, through which we cannot pass,
both ears laid flat like banked canoes
and their great hind legs quiet and relaxed,
white scuts bobbing
gently across the campus, which is also their campus,
attached as rabbits are attached to their shadows
to a vast university invisible underground, the one ours mirrors,
intricate halls of residence and studios
round which the rabbits conduct themselves
in absolute darkness, by touch and smell alone, the wordless
sensitivities of their whiskers
brushing the walls and other warm bodies
or thrilling to an offensive discharge of fear in the air
undetectable to humans,
to the human who feels so pleased to have spotted
two rabbit-holes, there, at the foot of that blossoming tree,
now in the stillness, the two still hours
between this meeting and that

This poem was commissioned from the poet by Writers’ Centre Norwich as part of it annual Worlds International Literary Salon.

The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want
for much.  He maketh me to lie down
on the chalky grass of Finsbury Park, the skatepark
distant; he leadeth me beside the canal’s still waters,
curtained barges settling, resettling,

underneath them sediment thick enough to spread on sandwiches.
He restoreth my soul until it is gold like the straps
of the sandals in Krishna’s Shoes, shiny
like the sunglasses of the young.

He leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name’s sake
(though I shuffle with the others
at the crossing, waiting for the good green man).

Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,
or stand in the mirrored kebab shack alone at three a.m.,
or pass my father resurrected in the eyes of an aged junkie
and wish myself his daughter, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me;
thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.

Thou preparest a table before me in the presence
of mine enemies – who may be numerous, though I seek
to drown them in love. Thou annointest my head with oil, as I shampoo

the baby’s hair, splashing my hand for her delight as outside
a deluge dashes the panes.  My cup runneth over.

Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days
of my life; on channel ferries and through the aisles of antique markets;
in the sallow closed-off rooms of the sick; in playgrounds,
family resorts, and in precincts where the elderly collect.

And after the bungalow, the care-home, whatever awaits,
I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.

Heartsongs         

The feathery hearts of the ill-at-ease
Murmuring – startled – eager to please

The choux-light hearts of the oh-so-holy
Filled with cream from a distant dairy

The twiggy hearts of the always-left
Breaking stick by stick like nests

The wire grilled hearts of the ne’er do well
How to get near them? Who can tell

The battered satin hearts of the sad
Little empty evening bags

The heave-ho hearts of the undeterred –
Rowing, rowing, never a word

What I Did in My Summer Holidays

Never ask for an ice-cream confidently or menacingly or using any other adverb.  And if you’re in pain, show me where it hurts and how.  Love is an abstract noun.  Dialogue gives the effect of real speech but with all the boring rubbish taken out.  Every thought you’ve ever had has been thought better and by someone else.  Does anyone have any questions?  We talked last week about the stanza, you might think of stanzas as little rooms: what are you going to do in yours – are you going to just lie there watching light reinvent itself?  The second line doesn’t scan.  Yes, flair is better.  For homework, sit in a soft chair and describe the exact experience, no, don’t do that, write down a conversation you hear on a bus; go out in the rain and open your mouth; make a list of everything in your bathroom cabinet.  Try not to break your line on an article.  The first person you have to please is yourself, but if nobody else is pleased you have a problem.  Fill out the form and give it back to me: te-dum te-dum te-dum te-dum te-dum.  Notice that beautiful line where the widow’s hands are likened to a dead bird.  Less is more, but sometimes less is less. What do librarians get paid? I’ve never seen that particular noun used as a verb.  But it’s too late now to get to grips with the Dewey Decimal System.  Did anyone else have a problem with the turnip metaphor?

Kathryn Simmonds,  2012

extracts from the  The Voice Project Choir‘s Singing the City, a Writers’ Centre Norwich co-commission with the Norfolk and Norwich Festival, 2012

The French Weavers’ Lullaby

Dormir, dormir, petite enfant,
Petite enfant, dormir
Dormer, dormir, petite enfant,
Petite enfant, dormir

The cattle out on the marshes low
As the night settles in
We climb into our little boat
Set sail for a new morning

(chorus)

The elm tree whispers softly to you
Sleep in my arms safe and sound
That old tree knows what to do
To return you back to the ground

(chorus)

A fire sweeps the city tonight
It glows on the edge of your sleep
All the birds have taken to flight
While pales from the well all weep.

(chorus)

*

Gathered Round the Parish Pump

Brom’s tracking stars to improve his humours
Peter’s spending time bloodletting with the leeches
Oscar’s down the barbers for a spot of trepanning
Margo’s swimming in the river to cure her impetigo

Pull the bucket up boys!
Pull it up to hide me so!

Mary’s under blankets fighting off the ague
John’s taken off a lump with a sacred bit of flint
Joan’s smeared in pigeon dung and honey for her kidney stones
Kelvin has a weeping sore tickled by the sage

Pull the bucket up boys!
Pull it up to hide me so!

Bridie holds a candle close to her tooth
Alice has a cross shaved into her hair
Robin has a pin going in for the cataract
Poor old crying Thomas is tethered to a pew

Pull the bucket up boys!
Pull it up to hide me so!

Pull the bucket up boys!
Pull it up and hide me so!

*

Whisper Game for an Alleyway
to be spoken by a large group with laughter, whistles, echoes,
squeals and a mix of quieter and louder parts as the individuals see fit.

Come back. Follow follow follow        fall
back follow. In the light rain, in the light
rain.                  Fall back. Fall back. Seven
years of floating back to the heart of it. In
the light rain I will fall back.    Suddenly this
light seems to ask me   sudden and sad
stared. Lucie Rie came down to see me at
the little jetty. Lucy ran to palmers street
and fell in with the city.                            The
river ran down the street and ran the
children blind. Come back, come back.
Follow follow follow. Let’s slow dance in
the light rain. Harriet says the captain’s sick,
the hill is awash with pain.  See ship follow
ship worship me in the rain, in the lightest
rain.      Can you hear the cats mewing in the
merchants hall? Can you pop over to
Muspole street and talk to the pool? Can
you follow me back through the streets?
Alvo with the night sweats       Alvo in the
hall. Alvo wants the weasel, follow follow
fall.
_____Target see target, pull the tiger’s tail
Take the tart to the tar and tie her little
tallow. Follow follow follow.    The rivers
buried deep, deep beneath our feet.
Cuckoo spit and cow parsley
The seconds raise their heads again
See you leave it long enough
And all changes anyway.         Pies, pies,
pies and beer.     In the light rain.
In the light rain. Dig boys dig. The
river’s buried deep.           Fall back. Follow
me.        The captain’s sick. Sad captain sea
sick sad. It’s not gonna go away. The tallow
weasel spins.  See that you leave it long
enough.              Leave it long enough.
___________Follow follow
___________Follow follow
___________Follow follow me.

an extract from The Voice Project Choir‘s Singing the City, a Writers’ Centre Norwich co-commission with the Norfolk and Norwich Festival, 2012

____

Architecture is Frozen Music

All:
Like a building blazing with life
Like buildings that join hands across a street
Like voices linked in the air in fancy knots
Like a tug of rope in the throat
Like chains, like chimes we sing

Left:
Feet pattering up the street, I swallow them.

Right:
Eyes flickering over doors, I offer myself to them.

Left:
Who’s looking?

Right:
What’s cooking?

Left:
When she left the house it was dark in the morning.

Right:
When they returned it was dark in the evening.

Left:
And he rose from his chair and slammed the door tight.

Right:
And the radio came on with the sound of breath.

All breath-whistling.

Left:
And they rose on a gust as if through the chimney.

Right:
So the eldest poked the ashes while the youngest was dreaming

Left:
The police called round, they beat at the door.

Right:
Three blind mice ran across the floor.

All:
Three blind mice. Three blind mice.

Left:
The owl in the shop blinked. I was alone.

Right:
The books and coins in the window, the marquetry of the pavement.

Left:
The dead are out shopping. They’ve gone to the market.

Right:
Jenny is expecting her third. Rose her fifth.

Left:
You have to watch the river behind you. It’s always at your back.

Right:
You watch the river at night when it is glittering and black.

All:
We are the river, the stream under the water.
We are the bricks and the flint in our bones.
We are the voice that breaks in the air when the birds sing.
We are the street and the river, the blood in our veins.
We’re pumped through the body by the heart in your possession.
We emerge from your mouths like breathing aloud.
We are the street and the river, the noise in the lungs.
We are passing away as we all do in passing.
We are street and river and voice.
We are passing.

Ghost town. Tumbleweed. Ain’t
got no home. Ain’t got no home.
But an echo. A stutter. The land
like magic shit. Behold the
dustbowl. That Damn-ward sun.
Big as your fist. Sit on Plymouth
Rock. I’ll sit below. Con-
templating West. Forget-me-not.

Notes from the Dustbowl #2

Sat in the perilous seat. Served
green eggs and ham. Not what
I’d expected. A case of mistaken
identity. Nothing new under the
sun. Always did what I was
told. Right foot on the black hole.
Left hand on Elaine. The quest-
ion remained. Un-answered. Jesus
raised his hands. You know the score.
Bodies inside bodies. Fingers on
Orion’s belt. After the magical
stutter. Galahad was born.

Notes from the Dustbowl #3

The dustbowl loomed. A book that
could not be opened. The bastard
son remembered a sword. This is my
body. All those angry lambs. Crows
go round and round. Ain’t got no
home. A barn beneath the sand.
Here today. Gone tomorrow. Waiting
for the storm to pass. A little boy fell
in a well. I am the darkness closing in.

A sharp change in altitude. Your eardrums throb so the airhostess offers you sweets to suck and eat and encourages you to chew and swallow. Carriage by carriage, the train zooms by a monstrous tower-block remembered from the deposit of several thick overnight snowfalls. A giant mountain range formed by metamorphic rocks, reigning over the January horizon. Its concrete storeys randomly collaged. Strata of snow. Are there such things? Snowbound streets and courtyards rising like dough with the hour. Or like an air balloon, bursting into your room through the window, a gigantic puffed face. The left sleeve of your winter coat lifts itself. Your face melts into the gloss of the hoar frosty glass. You breathe in and out. All at once it blurs. Because of that sharp puff on the glass. You blow all the leaves off the magnolia tree. They scatter like black and brown Indian Runner Ducks in the snow.  You reiterate the names of towns from the very last carriage of the train.  For another fading face, another forest to be erased with transparent ink from the landscape and then forgotten. The last thing you would want is to freeze thirty thousand feet above sea level. Above cloud-level. You drop your woolly hat into the abyss of the courtyard. Then your compass. Then your torch. For how much longer will you sleep-hike? Pass me that old tube of oil pastel, tempera, chalk, a handful of snow, a pot of transparent ink. You adjust to the direction of the train inching away from Siula Grande. Look, there, the end of the rope, cut with a hiss. Is that a kite or you flapping on the other end of it, your flimsy figure fluttering in white frost? Throwing your papery body upwards, you parachute, like the sleeve of a winter coat. This one will be a controlled descent with semi-rigid wings, you think. Is there a difference between narcolepsy and insomnia in the end? Between cloud-level and sea-level? The North Wind creeps in and out through your nostrils. A gentle tap on your shoulder. An azure-eyed, slender inspector murmurs into your ears as the train, window by window, reels in to your final destination. Is this the place you were looking for? he asks. You pull your red suitcase after your shadow rolling it through a puddle of last year’s sleet. Fiddling with a cocoon in your pocket, with the dry skin of a Capuchin monk, with twenty-four talismans of friendship. These paper-thin sentences always give you hope. The parched body of a moth you picked up the other day from the floor mistaking it for a brooch, is in your thoughts. A handful of soft soil leaking from your palms. A line of white geese in the snow, a necklace crafted from white-gold resting against skin. A line of black crows pecking the frosty earth. One effaces the other. Illuminates and then eliminates.

from Rememberer, published in 2011 by Egg Box Publishing.

Treble and Tenor at an Early Summer Dinner Table in Crookes

Do you notice how light the evenings have become, each weighing less than a thousand grams? Past nine the night that’s circular like inside an enormous bronze bell. Inside a round room of a thought, rimmed by Crookes’s undulating hills. Those first summer evenings always turn into never darkening ones, weighty frequencies of conversations evaporate into insubstantial silence and early suppers multiply after one single course of numerous unfinished courses leaving light bulbs to flicker, taps to drip, bell clappers to swing and the night to levitate between dusk and dawn so that we can never go to sleep.  In Crookes days become nightless and turn into some quiet solipsistic sobbing. More so then, they sob and gulp and swing so that the neighbours on each side will wonder what day it actually might be. These oval tables invite only a few selected guests into the hollow of our louvered windows. Or creatures of any kind. Owls from Nether Edge for example twitching their huge round heads. It is so bright we’d better close the shutters. They carry on blinking with heavy eyelids while you’re on retreat, always already eternal. They would sit at the table waiting for your return. How did they get trapped inside? The quiet Yorkshire nurse and her teacher husband would wonder, those two large feathery bodies. The two Papillons and the tiny baby in the pushchair, puzzled too. Why don’t I just turn the tap off and pull the ropes of bells, they would wonder, and announce that someone has gone missing in the blinding brightness of early summer nights? These taps often flood the aura of the kitchen letting the dishwater trickle outside saturating the tiny mossy square of the backyards of Crookes. And it is all because I wanted you to cross the borders of this city, its impalpable venations, invisible thresholds running a few hundred metres underground. To be a courier carrying no news, trespassing borders of numb utterances. Horizontovertical margins. Those disparate districts of one’s circular mind. And start it all over again, the remembering of everyone, over there, wherever, somewhere else, the same. The forgetting them. Is it like plugging the hole of undraining bath tubs? Unpluggable seas. Pulling changing rings. And being pulled by them. Everyone has his or her own cord. But bells are not pendulums. In the moment when I am up in the air you are not stuck on the frozen ground. And each cord has its own attachments. Treble will not negate tenor’s mind. Have you ever wondered what the world would be like if you cut all cables and lines? If all cup-shaped cast metal resonators of the world fell silent? Look, those owls, twitching their heads again. Calling up, then calling down. Three to treble. Five to two. Three to lead. Always those damned changes of keys in the end. The necessity to separate blurred contours. Whose. Your outline. From mine. Those clear cut colourations. Harmony is not one’s goal. We are duplicated inside the womb of a bell. What they mean I think is they wonder who said the farewell first. Whether it was written down in an email or a text or if you were homing dead pigeons as messengers. Or if these messages were sent via giant seagulls who’d led your way to the thousand year old cathedral built of cream coloured Caen limestone. Swooping up and down above your hair. You, the tower. Around it their circulating flights: paper pellets creased with no news of no time.. You once said soul knells should be re-introduced. The urgency of recording last sighs. To leave as a host, then to return as a vagabond again. Some kind of a drifting carrillonneur. To stand upright, like a pendulum. Calling up, then calling down. Who will you be when you have returned, when my feet reach the ground. Will I be lost inside a heavy bronze bell, tongueless, numb? What I mean is who will return when you have returned to the table. What I mean is who will be the last one to remember anything at all. And after all, who will take care of you when you are dying. There are guests who prefer dining always only once. Little would they know that they sat at magic tables, that they could have asked for the most daring combination of Morse codes on command. What an extravaganza. They’d say. It’s always already too late. Late. One can’t step inside the same bell twice. One can’t pull two cords at the same time.  Pour yourself another see-through Pinot Noir; make some proper sense and stutter senseless signs. Pick a tightly clustered dark purple pine cone-shaped bunch of grapes for the journey. Hold one under your tongue. For the taxi ride in the middle of tarmac midnight. Those glasses are tarred at the bottom, they say in the end. Why won’t black cabs stop in this street? Is this the way to Rome, the tunnel down to the South? Is this the labyrinthine route back to the pale yellow city? Have you shipped your red suitcase across the ocean to unknown peninsulas? Swimming across underground continents. Within the realm of hundred tons of metal. When you go make sure you don’t leave that gigantic metal body in the middle of the room. On your back, how else? But you think the earth is shrinking nonetheless and one day in the end all distinct silhouettes, outlines of hieroglyphs, days, seasons, topographies, shadows, contours of iron bells, their chords, colourations and continents, in fact all cacophonies will merge into one singular harmony. Look in the bottom of the bottle, into the ceiling of the iron bell, what one owns has already become very blurred. Blurred is good. Or what I mean is you always confuse the typography of those two verbs and end up being lost or in debt. You are meant to stay and write an alternative map of this city. It will be an impromptu composition. Who says, the tenor owls. Trembling church towers of Crookes. On the rims of Nether Edge bells. Come and dine in this unknown nook, the owls shudder, in our large brown byzantine presence. Have salmon and try the white wine instead, underground. In the dark everything is painted naught. And there is a pitch black backyard where you can have a puff. Have you heard of the ghost trains over the Wicker arches? And then you can vanish too with an intermittent chuff into the valley of no-man’s land. With no outlines of locomotives nor silhouettes of cast iron bells. The structure, the discipline, the constancy. Who have you been talking to all this time. Planets don’t overlap. These bodies are heavy and immobile. Try something else; the five gloves of garlic, the cacophony, the noon bells. Did you know that buying an anonymous object from the charity shop is equivalent to re-opening the gates of a long-forgotten zoo boarded up a long time ago? How about adopting a bizarre creature from the shelter, one with three or four legs, or one which stretches the fourth one backwards to look like a tail, one which could sing and guard the threshold. One as large as a wolf. Some kind of a lycanthrope, with both eyebrows meeting at the bridge of their nose, curved fingernails, low ears and swinging stride, one which can strip off its old skin when the winter comes and hanging it on old trees disappear when your face flames up like a torch. But there is no threshold in this city, only invisible rivers. There is a difference between howling and music, did you know? Between dripping and sobbing, treble and tenor. Music is what makes one sob. Howling is just annoying. They howl at the full Moon or the Midsummer Sun as a response to late night sirens. Another house’s on fire. Ring baptism of bells. Whose table will we have dined at in the very end. For whom are you ordering a cab. One without a siren, one which drives from the middle of the thousand and one tarred nights. Out of the starry nowhere. Of pitch black ginnels. A cab without making any irritating noise. Call for a vacuum of absolute silence? just after past midnight with a driver whose lips are sewn together so he cannot say a word, is that what you want. To leave the table with the vocabulary of nothing in your mind.

I would like to ruin your life
let it not be said I lack the necessary
imagination to be jealous
I would ask you to tell no-one about us
and if you tell no-one about us
I’ll fight hard to hide my disappointment
I would like you to renounce your past
as quite a big mistake
it will mean something although I
will never completely forgive you
I think you represent
the possibility in my life of renewal
I would like people to say
“she came back a different person”
we will appear at the weddings
of people we don’t care about
our faces radiant from fucking

HELP YOURSELF

Help Yourself from Grave Berries on Vimeo.

THE PINCH

It never ceases to astonish or offend me
seeing the couples circulate the otherwise
dead town centre like leaves in a big ashtray
in a sort of drugged calm they’re dreamy I guess
linked limply they don’t see where the other looks
& the sun doesn’t bother to lift its head from the table
but is leaking torpid ‘honeyed’ light from behind clouds
imagine it living for years and years with the same person

BUFFERING 15%

you aren’t thinking clearly as you enter the bank
on the day leslie nielson dies
the coldest december ‘in living memory’
mark’s badge reads
‘have a good time all the time’
maybe you should think about getting a motto
maybe you should think about painting the fridge blue again
maybe then you’d feel less like the shape of a person
suggested by the fall of light on a bookcase
you find you’re thinking a lot about your friend the monk
who won’t share with you his secret
to be sure he is a very complex gentleman
but hardly deep even if he can burn leaves
with nothing but the power of his mind
he is a remorseless self-publicist
maybe that’s his secret
or his secret is he doesn’t have one
he claims to remember where he buried
a live beetle in a matchbox
but afflicted as you are with awful memories
you’re not sure you believe him
filling out the paying-in slip is difficult
maybe you should stop growing your fingernails
“shhh” he went this morning
pretending to be listening

AND THERE THE RESEMBLANCE ENDS

what can I suggest we do instead
I’m not saying anyone should stop
give up and find a job every day
I lug my ache around the cemetery
it seems I learnt this slump I had
to not think it being born not guilty
and preferring certain polluted fruits
you’re not supposed to like it
but it could make you feel ‘quaint’
the alternative is beyond words
bad though no-one will force you
to wear a theft square on your face
if I sense you’re struggling that’s
because it doesn’t rhyme with you
in any way today I didn’t look
in anyone’s eyes so *what* debts
I didn’t see you there we haven’t
met is it unbearable to read
the names on graves as titles
it’s all material the monumental
there’s no telling and well if you
want what’s stopping you nothing