Culture is coming

The Iron Men                                        (The Writer's Eye 2007)

Moses came to Merseyside (www.poem800.com 2007)

The Keeper 

Birdsong Tinnitus                                  (Iota 2003)

The nights that you remember              (The Ugly Tree 2006)

The other person knows you are waiting (Iota 2006)

The Silence Museum                     (Aberrant Dreams 2005)

So many things I should be doing (Contemporary Rhyme 2007)

Wierd Week                                              (In the Red 2007)

My Mum and the Beatles

She heard the music

but still she walked past

the Cavern in those heady early days

before the sixties came swinging in,

intent on shopping – her bottom drawer

full of linen, not vinyl.

Come with us!  Her friends chattering

in the Cotton Exchange typing pool,

then the tap… tap… tap

of her heels on polished floors

and pavements down to Lewis’s,

blushing below the naked statue –

all that to come – her mother measuring

her twenty one inch waist, the snip

of pinking sheers through satin

those last Waterloo evenings,

Her friends still hummed

with pop and possibilities:

These four are fab! Come with us!

But she never did go.

All she needed was love

Love, she said, is all you need.

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Culture is coming

On January 1st, 2008

on the stroke of midnight we’ll open  the gates

to expectant Europe , tense with awe

for a new and magical mystery tour.

Sir Paul, who’ll then be 67

(along with the youthful ghost of Lennon)

will lead daily tours through the city’s sights

streets now clean of litter and shite

to St Georges Hall, with its floor licked clean

by some local teenagers on a scheme,

and lead a series of cultured talks

on us learning to eat with knives and forks.

As an encore, footy fans will lurch

through every pub from the bombed out church

to the Pier Head, and back again

in a heady mix of beer and phlegm.

As the council announces some new edicts:

all scousers must carry tickling sticks

and know 4 verses of ‘Liverpool Home’

and no-one can ever walk alone,

Then with song and dance, with mime and rap

we'll all paint Liverpool back on the map

and poets, to celebrate the city’s culture

will struggle for rhymes (other than vulture)

- though it must be said that the money due

might wing its way to the usual few

who’ll retire down south when it’s getting late

on 31st December 2008.

Birdsong

Tweet, tweet, tweet.

All the bloody time.

She was lucky, they said, to have

birdsong tinnitus. It was quite rare.

Others had bombs and guns – the

artillery kind. 

So everywhere

was like a summer meadow, her head

rang with twittering which no-one else could hear

(except her cat, which perked a psychic ear

towards that invisible chirping, tweeting, peeping,

keeping two inscrutable eyes on her -

waiting for feathers.)

She’d always hated birds – nasty

little heads and beady eyes, always

watching and pecking and crapping.

In all weathers and seasons each dawn

welcomed her with a cheerful chorus

that went on all day and all night

until the next dawn and the next one

repeating an endless anthem of joy and hope,

a fresh and innocent soundtrack to accompany

all the bad things that happened to her.

As her life grew bleak the birds still sang

their dainty cage inside her head,

immune from all her rage

 - right up until she pulled the trigger

on some kind of hunting rifle

to silence those damned birds.

Home 

The Silence Museum

Outside it is always noisy

but within these walls, more than a metre thick,

we hold, insulated, the history

and lost examples of silence.

Visitors are ushered, whispering

through padded cubicles, astounded.

Turn off you phones and music,

speak only in whispers.

We Curators live in silence.

It is our vocation – chosen

from the quietest children

we were trained to listen.

It is like a religion.

The first floor is devoted

to the silence before a sound

with perfect specimens of the pregnant pause:

the counted silence between flash and thunder

that measures your distance from a storm,

the animal quiet of the dog that will be first to bite,

the charged stillness of a held breath

between the last tick and the explosion,

and, the prize of our collection,

the last natural recording of a pin about to drop.

Beautiful isn’t it?

On other floors we preserve

examples of the silence after a sound –

the straining, listening silence after

the bump in the night,

the sullen tongue-holding of the instructed silence,

one minute’s silences filled with awkward sorrow,

and rare samples from ground zero

those twin silences of  shock and awe.

Our interactive exhibit invites you to consider:

the silence of the crowd at the call for volunteers,

the silence of a majority who oppose without speaking

– the silence that is mistaken for complicity,

the silence that is suffered in.

Listen for a moment…

Our researchers amass and list examples

that measure silence – its depth and width

from the silence of mutual understanding

which needs no vocabulary

to the dumb silence of incomprehension,

from an argument seen through triple-glazed windows

to the last wilderness on a windless day.

Many silences are near extinction.

But we can manufacture them

using the exact wavelengths and frequencies

that echo the weighty absence of sound in space,

and we are close to containing

that final silence

when your own music stops,

and your body ceases whispering

its rhythmic commentary.

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