Hot Shot; Grain Wharf across 8 Dock

out here

it’s cold out here

the western winter wind shudders the water across the bay

reflected harbour lights roll and sway

singing songs in the ship canal

songs of cold comfort and material expanse

how the neon ribbons dance!

it’s warm in there

back in the land of the living

the fireside glow unfolds and beckons

giving off a mood of warmth and life

denying the toil and strife

of a difficult day

being back in there!

there’s no other way

should we be bold and ride the cold

and enjoy the brash reality of feeling alive ?

look!

the night heron dive, collect and re-group

sleeping swans bob

salty tidal soup changes every hour by every light

innocuous, inviting by day

ominous by night

it’s cold out here

let’s stay a while longer

let’s watch how distant lights flicker

how a thousand November lives live out their evenings

people hugging through arrivals and kissing out leavings

see how distant townships throw out light-shows that wink in the Pennine breeze

through the immediate pain I sense ease

the ease of civility in motion

feel the freedom of exposure

of nowhere to hide

it’s cold out here

let’s go back inside

Placeholder

Like the entrails of cigarette smoke zigzagging across the bustling intellectual coffee shops of old Oxford, I wrap myself around the chatter drone of Costa 2010.

Easy listening vibes can be misconstrued for more heavy weight undertones as I drift seamlessly into text.

I call it “coffee smoke” and by such means configure my belonging.

I know the Canada geese to a bird.

I recognise their eyes and walks and they reciprocate.

This town is my baseline.

Placeholder.

It’s waterways my garden gate.

Familiar sites evolve in me and I connect.

Not knowing prior that man can connect with buildings, see them like friendly faces.

And mindful of nearby places.

The stacked-up townhouse jumble of Kennedy street in the city next door.

The sheen on the water in the low sun light - a magnificent marble floor.

How long before new becomes home ?

As long as it takes the falling sun to burn the western skies over Cheshire.

As long as the winter months, watching the snow settle on the Pennines, distant to the north over Bolton and Rochdale.

As long as the 5am dawn bursts open my world in the depths of summer, devouring my dreams, pure and magical as being alive.

As long as the houseboat anchors creak, rustle and splash in the canal down below - my every evening lullaby.

As long as crowds of random strangers burst out above me in the Salford skies, conflating the whitest jet trails, gone before my eyes.

Breaking open into golden dots, at once beautiful and fading.

.........

04/10/10

GK

Copyright Protected

word hoard

he was a word-smith

collector of latent nouns

like counterpane and camber

a sifter

adjective hoover

a tense fence


by the water he would sit and read


in his head he'd built a memory palace

an upstanding rural mansion of local quarry stone

leaded windows

in the libraries hung blue silk drapes

large gold-framed mirrors

ornate carvings and artefacts

on marble floors

oak panels and a black skirt finish


and the books.......


mile on imperial mile of identical cloisters

the word hoard


he'd tend to the palace daily

and, knowing the discipline of love,

he'd eek out, re-write, update and contextualise

he'd dummy-run a few layered analogies

and dust down volumes of empirical evidence for future reference

like un-got knowledge banked


filing couldn't be chronological

just logical

colour-coded by truth and weighted for usage

louder colours flagging novelty and popularity

indexed by meaning

not word-meaning but the meaning of life


indexed by happiness


15/06/10 GK.
(copyright)

Topaz Taz

Falling away from the shoreline

Proud on the chattering swell

I'd carve up an arc around Agecroft

Two rings of my bicycle bell


Magenta on violet, blinding

Incendiary sunlight flood

What a dazzling sight

When the noise of light

Rings out like the break of dawn should


She was there in the bleak mid winter

In the shadowless 6 am pitch

She was there at the coming of springtime

Amidst the flickers of the daylight twitch


She was most at home when all was fully grown

When the eights and the singles rowed north

Through the summertime jazz

Old Topaz Taz

Sat gleaming on the Salford wharf



copyright
22/04/10
gknapton

What Do You Want ?

What Do You Want ?

 

 

Back when God was a boy

 

We lived on the earth under great skies

 

We played in the streets and the building sites

 

Demarking our territory with wooden planks and bricks

 

We moulded race tracks for marbles out of mud

 

Fashioned with our bare hands

Filthy up to our elbows 

Extracting mud and meaning from life

 

 

Back before money

 

I would sit in the field where the street ended

 

And I would create whole worlds out of a pile of sand the builders left behind

 

 

And when it got dark I'd carry on

 

Because it wasn't about light it was about those worlds

 

And dark was what they got

 

 

Back before vanity and a sense of lack

 

I'd warm up the telly for my dad

 

Because tellys didn't come on straight away in 1977

 

But it didn't matter

 

 

We were happy because we were using what we had

 

Not wanting what we hadn't got

Life, then, didn't add up to what you owned and how you looked

Rather, it totalled the sum of what you did and what you sought to achieve

Whole numbers

 

 

copyright

 

gknapton 22 feb 1010 

 

Spring - Part 1 (2010)

Everything's gone brighter, somehow

Everything's gone brand new

There's a smile in the evening light now

There's a glint in the morning dew

Spring is on the horizon

All but in my sight

Nudging into my consciousness

Drifting into my dreams at night

Bring the birds and the bees on

Spring sprung up from the ground

White-tooth grins without reason

Second chances all round

Spring is nearly in season

Wiping all the slates clean

Spring is coming back home at last

Painting all of earth blue and green

Cast your eyes on the future

Spring is singing her song

Like she's back for the first time

Like she's never been gone

stone acoustics

from a collection entitled "Let's Get Killed" by Gary Knapton

 

In our flats, at the foot of the atrium, there's a pebble garden

And at the corner of each of my weekends I like to find time to play Stone Acoustics

Dropping a coin from the sixth floor directly down onto it makes a sound like cash tills

(the old type) but no patterns

Once, I dispatched my copy of Gullivers' Travels

Besides making a hole in the pebbles the shape of Chile I got the sound of a flying kick from Paul in Tekken 2

Then, last Friday, I found a clothes horse by the chute

Introducing variables I both dropped it and later threw it up ten feet leading into the fall

The Red Sea as it approaches the Gulf of Aden smiled up at me

Though that's water, not a land mass

Does it count more or less?

But with more impact I got India from Hyderabad down to the Maldives, minus Sri Lanka

The sounds were similar on both occasions

A lively assortment of pebble-based cracks and my neighbours yelling

The energy of the human protest complemented the physics

Poetry, like science, is motion

Einstein said gravity informs mass, though in my case, a little longer and my informants would have been altogether less inanimate

This week I aim to invest in a better globe and have a think about more height

I fancy a stab at something wooden at terminal velocity

It's important to think big. 

Think continental.

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Netted

Netted

a milestone introspective from a collection entitled "Cry Me A River" by Gary Knapton

You'll be born in '71 

On a Saturday afternoon

Just as the tannoys are blaring the tune

All through your school years you'll run with the ball

Early on match days you'll wake standing tall

This bliss isn't normal

It's bliss

It won't last forever

It won't last long

Such is the way of the things you'll miss

Life will grab you, lad

And take you on a journey

Away from freedom and towards the gurney

And love, work and families

A life of no time

For dribbling and balance and rhythm and rhyme

Then, in your thirties

Though you can't know it

The clarion call

Steve will go wide and break loose with the ball

He'll know where you'll be and you'll know where you'll go

You'll drop off the full-back and start moving in

He'll cross without looking

The time-honoured line

It sits up and hangs

You're suspended from time

Then the whip-crack and sweet dull thud 

Of true contact

Of leather on proofed leather

The cleanest of drives

Will echo through the heat of a blue summer morning in May 2004

Enjoy it

This is the last goal you will ever score

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perception deficit

Perception Deficit

gknapton 31/01/10

Planet Earth I take it all back

 

Your blue skies are the hope in my blue eyes reflected back

When you shine from your sun

I shine

 

All that I see, you've shown me now, is me

My take on life

Is life

The glow in my lover's eyes is my own need of love reflected

My love of others is that need serviced

Their love of me is only what I perceive it to be, in earnest

My fears are but the pain of being rejected

Planet Earth

You are the canvas onto which I project my map

I am the brush and I stroke out through the inks of my experiences

While I look in the mirror I'll never see what they see

Nor should it be that I can

Embracing life, I accept that

There's a mile between the way I see me and the way I am

copyright

Verdana Ten

Verdana Ten

Days weeks months never used to pass this quick. What have we done? Whole seasons slipping by. Years even.

Professional time wasters. All talk. Not much action. Are we wasting our lives away or are we enjoying them ? Was it always thus ? 

How many more songs and dances ? Who has the book with the answers ?

How do you construct a turning point ? I hear you start with the smallest things and work upwards.

You go from the part to the whole and in this way climb yourself out of the hole you dug. So jump the fence, stand tall and let's commence. Before the pubs open and we get roped into dispensing with all such common sense.

To get the ball rolling you're allowed to change anything you want. So I'm starting with my font. You shouldn't underestimate your typeface. Allowing it to stagnate is the slippery slope to disgrace.

No change is too trivial. Too insignificant. Any positive action, pushing out however slow, amounts to you standing up and having a go. Great oaks from little acorns grow.

It's time to separate the boys from the men. I'm opting for Verdana Ten.

Times New Roman Twelve was good for a time. But I've spent the last six months delving through the annals of my free roaming mind and for what ? For the dust to settle and the truth to emerge that I'm stuck in a rut. I'm behind with the bills and my hair needs a cut.

Tomorrow I will etch the campaign a little further forward. I'll clean my shoes and launder some clothes and post letters to the people I love most. And I really should look for work and earn some money. Life's a game but losing never feels funny.

But tomorrow's tomorrow. Tonight I am safe in the knowledge that I made a start. I've put the horse back in front of the cart. You may laugh and that's fine. But there come's a time in the affairs of men. I have thrown down my sword and picked up my pen.

I've opted for Verdana Ten.

12/05/04

gknapton 

copyright

Nothing Around Got Dark

Nothing Around Got Dark

g knapton

On Easter Day I kneel and pray

Before the church’s clerk

And afterwards collect my thoughts

Whilst idling through the park

The sun fell through the western skies

Off shore the gulls did lark

The night came back

The sky turned black

But nothing around got dark

The headland lights of Shoreham bay

Weave round me in an arc

And through the streets the Bedlam beats

Of Whitehawk dogs do bark

Not one ship set a-sail

At least, no sea-bound lights did spark

My vision fell

And night did dwell

But nothing around got dark

I searched for coins between the groynes

Where smugglers disembark

Where untold wealth awaited men

More stealthy than the shark

I strolled the Palace gardens

Where the King’s men once did hark

I heard a clock strike midnight’s hour

But nothing around got dark

I skimmed ten pebbles off Hove beach

As if to make my mark

Each aim – to clear the old West Pier’s wrought iron

Standing stark

I made for home still all alone

As nascent dawn did nark

Today becoming yesterday

When nothing around got dark*

*Easter is on the first full moon after the Spring Equinox, lighting the sky for Christians to pilgrimage at night. It moves for Jesus. Easter is the moveable feast. Nothing around gets dark.

(copyright)

Idolater

Idolater

gknapton

His totem self.  He stood. Revolving.

Me, non-glib. The ictus plain.

Dark spells cast. Defences folding.

Me feeling more again.

His saurian stealth. Pure blood. Involving.

Base emotion-paths get lain

Bark fells mastered. Sawyers scolding.

Running from the woods in pain.

His youth-swept health. Resounding. Solving.

Destination: runaway train.

In love fast. And tightly holding

Onto the dream in vain.

(copyright)

End of Days

End of Days

gknapton

Hundreds of lives have been saved, the TV said.

The newsreader was talking about blood donors but later firemen and after that new speed cameras on the M20.

Hundreds of lives, I thought.

All milling around having just been saved.

Not knowing they shouldn't be here now.

Wow! What a saving.

Save fifty percent on your next car insurance premium and home contents too, the radio said.

All these extra incentives for new customers.

All those Dolby stereos and bass bins and windscreens and handbags in the glove box.

All those Wii's and HDTV's and pictures of gran before the accident.

Previously sitting targets. Now sitting to be saved.

It said so on the radio.

Incredible best-ever savings now available on cars with new plates from the first day of next month.

See your local dealer now!

That's what the front page of the local mart rag said.

I saw it when I went for milk at the Asian man's shop downstairs.

Unreal, I thought, as I passed over the money. 

All that free road tax and air con and heated seats and sat nav so nobody ever gets lost again.

Alloys too probably.

Save save save.

Save one month's rental and get unlimited texts and fifty pounds cold hard cash back on the N97 and other selected Nokias.

This is what the billboard really said. It really did say this.

Throwing savings indiscriminately at the all and sundry who pass by as they go about their days.

The temptation to save like it was the end of days.

There is no tomorrow. 

Get your savings in now.

But what happens to all these savings ? I got to thinking.

And why can't you round them all up ?

Get all those hundreds of saved lives and put them safely inside their fully comp homes so they can chat away safely on all the years of free call time that I just saw being given away twenty feet above the entrance to Tesco.

The saved now the savers.

Never again relying on speed cameras and failing that, firemen and paramedics and blood donors.

Forget the M20 and your car's top speed of 140 and the temptation to text back before pulling over.

Just staying in and saving ourselves.

Saving all of our lives.

Because that's what it says everywhere these days isn't it ?

Save save save ?

Actually, no.

Save is a con. It means spend and besides I saw another message today.

On the back of GQ.

For skin cream and shampoo. Or jeans.

It's hard to tell.

It said "life is for living".

And live it we will.

Until the end of days.

(copyright)

Panjandrum

Panjandrum

I dig the light that dies for later

Felled at last for night time's stack

Equalising alma maters 

Enemies look back

I dig how unknown levels bait us

Filling the bread-less bred-well gap

Demonising those that hate us

Laying the fear-fresh trap

I dig panjandrum's swelled hiatus

Mocking the makeshift classless fact

Revenge is sweet as sweet potatoes

Keep all my wars in tact

gknapton copyright 

salford perspectives: MSC

salford perspectives;

Down by the Manchester Ship Canal 

Where Heron's wade and tyres splayed and bob and old graffiti's fade 

We crossed through gates and slowly made our way to where the waters bade

And felt the ghosts of men who made a kingdom from the cotton trade

And almost heard again the dins of hulls awash with fears allayed 

Salfordian men and women paid

A million tonnes of fresh Canadian wools and grains and riches

All laid out

Oh how Mancunians played 

The coming of the age relayed yet here I stand on wharfs decayed

Weeds trampled where wild dogs have strayed

Pollution slicks, a litter glade where mills once stood

Where things got made

Now, lock and swing bridge unobeyed

All left to die and sink and fade

A silent water palace 

Like an empty church where once they prayed

A massive man-made icon left unburied

Did a midnight raid rob life and limb from all displayed ?

I walked home with a heavy heart

On promenades of moss-strewn jade

A member of a race in shame

A race that didn't make the grade

..............

26/05/09

G Knapton