I USED TO BE SOMEONE
With nobody about or carrying cash I came across this rather sad and soggy note on Bristol's Pero footbridge, traditionally a place where love-padlocks are left. I was struck by the isolation and quiet desperation of it, especially on a bridge celebrated by symbols of romance and happiness and a large banner declaring "A Better World is Possible".
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PLEASE JOIN ME IN ETERNITY
Whilst walking at dawn I mused on the popular astronomer Michio Kaku lamenting in the TV series (The Universe) that many poets write of the sun but fail to mention the sun's mothers, the original stellar giants that gave us the dust that created our present star. On my walk I passed every morning a washer pressed into the tarmac and on seeing another loose one nearby, united them with the seed of the following whimsical verse which although not mentioning our sun's mothers, is a love poem to her possible children.
Please join me in eternity
Now day has chased
The darkened sky
Come sink here still
In summer's heat
So soft beside me by and by
Then let's hold true on barren tip
Together one for countless years
We'll live in rock
Our makers gone
Their lives consumed
in feckless tears
As rusted fossils we will bind
Till bloated sun makes us its pyre
When molten streams
Will end our rest
Consumed by roiling seas of fire
Yet on in maelstrom blazing blue
A furnace cwic we’ll stay as twain
Till fusion dies
And we to iron
Will make our new star swiftly wane
And see what bright new nova flies
To crush us into finest gold
The memory of
The day we met
Forgotten in the lifeless cold.
Now as a mote of glitter bright
We drift towards another cloud
Where kindred dust
Will join as one
To make a new eternal shroud
Now day has chased
The darkened sky
Come sink here still
In summer's heat
So soft beside me by and by
Then let's hold true on barren tip
Together one for countless years
We'll live in rock
Our makers gone
Their lives consumed
in feckless tears
As rusted fossils we will bind
Till bloated sun makes us its pyre
When molten streams
Will end our rest
Consumed by roiling seas of fire
Yet on in maelstrom blazing blue
A furnace cwic we’ll stay as twain
Till fusion dies
And we to iron
Will make our new star swiftly wane
And see what bright new nova flies
To crush us into finest gold
The memory of
The day we met
Forgotten in the lifeless cold.
Now as a mote of glitter bright
We drift towards another cloud
Where kindred dust
Will join as one
To make a new eternal shroud
TWAT---->
Just after Colston's statue was taken down, ignorant "tit for tat" aggressions started to appear on other statues, as if every figure in bronze in Bristol must have been a slave owner. This one was sprayed onto my college associate Steve Joyce's statue of John Cabot by the Arnolfini. Like the scratch marks of Colston's statue past the Watershed, this was cleaned quickly and so it's a bit of collector's item! As I walked around the docks I composed a poem as seen in the short video.
THE BUSY TURNKEY
For about a week in Lockdown this barrier at Llodys Bank was twitching away and reminded me of the neurotic toaster in Red Dwarf, some comic sentient robot condemned by habit to nervous movement for want of any "customers" to service.
OTHER POEMS
Such is the thirst for branded goods in Japan that young girls have been known to sell "services" for sex to pay for these items. This is euphemistically known as "Compensated Dating". I have always wondered what systemic forces create such a desperate deficit of identity.
