Meditations On Gentrification

a very loose ghazal, imperfect and improper

Shoreditch pixies have died or gone away
See their wings trapped under painted sprays.

I just hope they find somewhere new to play.
Our homes got tighter than whalebone corset stays.

Shoreditch pixies in black and blue and grey
with your opal eyes and brows all rearranged.

Can you dance still, amidst the crimson fray
of flatulent, didactic dames so prearranged?

Will you mock them? Incite a gay parade?
That would just delight them. Demand another stage.

Our homes belch, moan, simper and crave
something more snappish than this posh grave.

My hidden corpuscles call you home today
our blood mixed could splash this place quite fey.

Pronouncements About Santa

and other recent musings by Winston

“Call the police officers to come and take away La Luna and bring my day back!”
- upon being forced to leave the Tate Modern and after any good day

+ + +

Our flat does not have a fireplace or a mantle.
The media insists
Santa comes down the chimney
and out of the fireplace.

I suggested he’d just hop down
from the roof and in the porch door.
This was not acceptable.

After a night of sleep,
in which all mysteries are revealed
Winston announces that
Santa will be coming
out of the oven.

This is the logic of 3 year olds.
Castle people used fireplaces to cook food.
Santa prefers to enter buildings
through places which are used to cook food and are hot.


+ + +

“Some people can taste the sky. I can not.
- upon careful study of the heavy layer of fog.

Healthy Boy Bleeds

(after a photograph by Tom Wichelow)

that this is ......... true

growth ......... ......is this

wide blue pair ....staring

out from ......... ... head

........torrential....vermillion

......... ......... ......... knowledge

here is where the changes flow

......... ......... ......... blood

rewards. ......... ...cleanses.

changes. ......... ....body

......... ......... ..........frees

necessary soul

......... .....expansion.

rumbling ......... thought

philtrum ......... .tingling

crimson ......... tintinnabulation

that groovy ..growth question. life full. filled.



NOTE: Tom Wichelow is the photographer/artist with whom I've been paired for my next session at the Tower Of London. We've been experimenting with text and image. He's been sending me photos and I've been writing poems. Now, I'm sending poems and hoping that he'll be sending photos. I'll ask if I can upload this lovely picture of a boy having a nosebleed.

Boy Throws Rock To Sea

after a photo by Tom Wichelow


Take me in.
Let me go.
This is the happiest song I know.
For she is testiest when we see
How absolutely
free we be.

perhaps that rock was

crepe paper sand
worn like that shocking
touch ....... the first time young
hands help a hard wrinkled woman
toilet;

pock marked transient cringing
witness ...... puppet /
tool to crush bow back
teenaged adulteress in black;

soft like the fear
of cradling a newborn
wobbling head;

ridged barnacle valleys vibrating
intoning some mysterious ditty

or sun hot black weight tugging

his open palm
closed. the arm
thrust. the ocean’s song.
a dancing stone.

let go.

Poet Or Madwoman?

The experience of being a parent may be something like people challenged with being bipolar live with daily.

One moment you are immersed in the effervescent iridescent ebullience of observing an ant carry something 8 times its weight.

The next moment - you scream on a planet whilst wind, sleet and fire snaps your body back during the whooshing approach of a black hole.

That first moment is today’s feeling. On her myspace profile, my daughter who is “no longer a poet” writes

of herself:

I am a social chameleon.
I can dance with a cup on my head.
I think poetry is literary masturbation.

I am convinced
I was meant to be
a tragic Victorian heroine.
I am bipolar.

I want to work in arts management, but
for some reason I am a psych major.

I had a stroke when I was eighteen years old and
now have blood clots in my lungs.
I want to marry

the kind of person that I can communicate with
entirely in song lyrics and obscure movie quotes.
Sometimes,

I listen to songs that I really like several times in a row
just because I can't bear the fact that they eventually
have to come to an end.

Who does she think she’s kidding? Not a poet? Ha! Poetry is just obsessive observance of the power of life's language and an awkward submission to discipline. In her case, it’s just the submission to discipline which could use improvement.