These poems were written between 1999 and 2000. Most are available in small press publications at the Poetry Library, South Bank Centre, London.
Call 2
The conversation click
Switch has been swung
There goes the button
Pressed to the lung
Whatever we say
Draws us away
Whoever speaks now
Has ended the play
That two cents worth
Of mercurial claim
No emotional profit
To levels the plain
But sit the phone down
The broken clique
And feel the shame.
Tender Graffiti
Under the M1 bridges
I don’t know where
Somewhere between London
And Birmingham
A sign is crawled
In loopy white paint
No, not scrawled
Written upside down
The paint running.
It is tender graffiti and
For a while
I drive and read
‘Give me Inspiration’
Have you seen it?
Millions have
Under the M1 bridges
I don't know where
Give me Inspiration.
Reunion
I stepped into the garden
And there they all were
My friends from university
(And my best friends)
Leaning in deck chairs
Funny sight
A soothing weekend
Walks in the valley
Hot Shropshire sun
Bottled wine
Canned bitter
Barbecue and bonfire
Remember?
I think you will have been to one.
So there they all were
As I stepped into the garden
My friends from university
(And my best friends)
Resting on the grass
Slightly uptight.
Not Very Far
Calling Bath
Gave awareness
Of the distance
Between us
You were breezy
With voices
Behind you
And between us
Click
Sometimes when people
Are far
It spreads comfort
Like water showered
From the sprung tap
On the hard tiled floor
And sounds of places leap
Like gas sparks
Those tender crackling telephone spits
From the unwilling hob
On the quick-beating
Chest of the caller.
Tradition
Wasting talent
The English way
With newspapers, books.
(The occasional play.)
Build him up tall
Let her be proud
Knock them down quick
Feed the fresh crowd
Recycle our talent
The English way
Red tape, white papers.
(The occasional gay).
Keep the sharks baited
Let them not care
Just flick the blood
And millions stare
Oh!
Where is the talent?
Braindrained away
No comment, no culprit.
(The English way).
2-4-6-8
Toll gates
On the M62
Hull
To Liverpool?
Toll gates
On the M1
London
To Leeds?
Why not
Six lanes
And unprivatise
The trains?
Sail by plane
Fly by ship
Forget your brain
Or sod the trip?
I say
Ban freights
No waits
Economic laws
Up yours!
Ubiquitous strife
Capital life
Great Bill Gates
United States.
Wandsworth Town, London Town
Standing at the corner 
Under the unblossomed tree
I wait for you
To dash from the door
With a bag under your arm
And your half smile on the corner
To see if the bus is waiting.
I sit in the pub seeing traffic
Until people leave your building
Five o’clock and they hurry past
The bookmakers and shops
With the motorbikes and rush
Through the raining street.
Standing at the corner
Under the unblossomed tree
I wait for you
To dash from the door
With a bag under your arm
And your half smile on the corner
To see if the bus is waiting.
Job Seeker, Please
Warmth presses the air and the sky reaches down like a cone
Covering the wide expanse of the plain beneath while I sit
Closed in the house, knees up to the computer screen,
Turning my growing nails over and over and thinking
Of the cut of the phone call and the job
I more than needed, I wanted.
Holy Mascot
He sits at the computer edge
Between the screen and the humming drive
Smiling as wide as the sky
Six inches high with dots for eyes
A round face with fat orange fingers
Arms outstretched at his sides
All day grinning while I think and type
Indifferent to failure and success
A miniature brown cuddly monkey
He sits at the computer edge
Between the screen and the humming drive
Smiling as wide as the sky
Judging all I write with soothing dark eyes.
The Great and the Global
I’ve started to read a third of a book
Then give up, a hundred or so pages in
And discover something more stirring or shorter
With nicer pages or a livelier picture on the cover
Today I will shelve Anna Karenin
For Heart of Darkness or The Pearl
Or any other book to change the soft closing
Characters, set-up, scene, action, plot, end
Beginnings fascinate me, nothing more
Like living the recycled hunt along a faraway shore
A sexy adolescent affair, an undiscovered country
The wood at the bar
A half finished novel in a draw by the bed.
The Wonderful World of White-Out
I have come to learn Tipp-Ex does not work on printer paper
The paper is too thin and my little container is always too old
The bristles are worn and stiff like the dry matted hair of a cononut
The liquid is hard and has long crusted over where the lid is unlevel
And there is always a hair which drags over the paper and pulls
The whiteness away in a thin spirralled snake
Then held high at a nearby window
The light silhouettes along the darkened ink marks
Shows me the drying liquid becoming a relic of school books
Unsuitable for computers and their promised perfection
And in a blinding white inspiration without illusion or dent or streak
I learn not to white-out paper cuts any more.
Heavy Autumn Air
I can’t say if my head is clear enough for a piece of prose today
Far easier I’m sure you’ll agree are idle poems from you to me.
Correct Me If I'm Wrong (I Think I'm Right)
Shorter poems are surely best
Verses on places and people
Unscaling the page with their neatness
Their impatience and greatness
They can be funny or sharp or bleak
They don’t look so ugly in ink
And right at the end they just end
Without taking long to have read.
Once Upon a Lady Margaret Hall Afternoon
Many of those times when the air was warm
And the summer had fallen through the window
I heard your knock and before the door had closed
We were singing a random track off the long-awaited
EP from the McNamara brothers band and their
Special brand of beautiful three chord
Slow-burning amateur rock.
Printed in a collapsing stream from the Internet
My guitar holding papers and you clapping your hands
We would play the music unreleased in the shops
And record our bluesy racket through the roof and
Far out over the sunny college lawns to where the
Clock-bell would be tolling and the people passing quietly
From the quad to their rooms.
I still play those tunes and for a while
Think back to the strap circling my neck
Where I stood near the window beside your Brit-Pop pose
With your feet spread wide and your chin up
With the strain and the delicacy and the sheer raucous volume of
All those notes that swung in our heads
Only days from exams.
Too soon it is all so distant
Become merely a sound and image
Of youth unspiralling.
Betjeman Will Make Me Sad
I learned last night how to write poems
Reading Betjeman from the edge of my bed
Then standing at the fridge in the kitchen
And lying down on the lounge settee:
The fresh freeing air of those cliffs
And the sardonic slant
And wallpaper cracks
Of all his genteel seaside towns
Breathe in sleep
Like uncovered memories
Beyond thinner minds
His unburdened delight
Precise low-key tenderness
And eyebrow surprise
The first bud of spring
Far sadder than the rest
Only he could create.
| This page was last modified by Matt Fullerty on October 13, 2006 |