Lodestone

Quixotic polestar

Far out on the shimmering horizon - yellow white rim

At once my icon and my guide


When I orientate myself to you

The jumble clutter details of my everyman life

Crash like burnout cars


And I am left alone on the parameter of your awe

High and wide

Skirting the sunny side


Dumbstruck

And counting my lucky stars!

You're All Staring at Screens!

A man from 1980 takes a stroll across 2012

Notice how dawn doesn’t rise with daylight ?

Process what you see and ask “Why?”

Try and start a chant on the football terraces

Think about the colour of sky


Pull yourself away from your phones and tablets

Turn from your massive TV

I’m throwing dollar bills on a tramful of commuters

Nobody’s looking at me!


Consider how night rain feels much wetter

When it shows up in the brake-light beams

I’m in awe

All wowed and humbled

You’re all staring at screens


Keep your head down

Don't talk to your neighbors

City life has gotten real mean

You’re techno-fodder in little mini-me tribes

Shades of regression to the mean


What the hell happened to please and thank you ?

Why y’all chatting to yourselves ?

Nothing makes sense

From the nose-tail traffic

To the titles on your magazine shelves


I live mine from the minute I wake up

You need sleep to get dreams

I’m looking out at the world in wonder

You’re all staring at screens!

The Emergence Of Dusk

Summer sewn browns and a slither of canal light

Paint a new colour of quays

Crude arboreta fresh from a lost fight

Swaying in the chattering breeze

In-for-the-night cars lined up all particular

Freezing in the Arctic north

A lonely flock of residents huddled in a dalliance

Arcing down a silhouette wharf


Flooded in a swathe of moon-dust silver

Studded on an indigo sky

Patched and checkered in a quiver of jet-trails

Winter weather systems pass by

Balconies flutter like a million sundays

Echoing a summer long-passed

Neon strips bounce along a circus of media

Making all the ripples pool fast

Steal-away lovers in a whisper-sweet paradise

Longing to be frozen in time

Eights on the water pulling in harmony

Rowing to the far shoreline

Sun-shapes flicker like the slow-dying ditties

Of a blues-funk accordion busk

A melody of houselights tripping off the promenade

Beckons the emergence of dusk

Nothing Doesn't Exist

If your mind is ever critical

And waxing analytical

The tale with a hair pin twist

Will stump you from the offing

It's a story about nothing

Moreover, nothing doesn't exist


If there’s nothing on your mind

There are books you’ll find

Michael Faraday was keen to insist

There’s magnetics everywhere

Even with no light or air

Nothing’s in your head

It doesn’t exist


It took a lot of nerves

Declaring space is full of curves

But you'll get the Einstein-ian jist

It may crank your cranial cavity

That mass informs gravity

So no thing really does not exist


Photon particles zoom

Through your hoover vacuum

There is no place that molecules missed

So why labour in vain

For material gain

When nothing doesn't even exist ?


We're so long into our race

All we're chasing is the chase

Smashing nature with a clenched ham fist

Far too clever just to be

And enjoy everything for free

We built a never ending shopping list


It's an age old riddle

With ourselves stuck in the middle

And our gods in the gathering mist

Think hard like a boffin

And you won't wind up with nothing

Coz you'll know that nothing doesn't exist



You can knock it if you must

But I’m not about to bust

Any gut just because you can’t see

That nothing never started

It’ll leave you broken-hearted

Or dancing in a new born free


I’m cheated. It’s unfair

That nothing’s nowhere

Like my Blarney stone never got kissed

Now I walk around scoffing

Hey, now I’m scared of nothing

And I am - although it doesn’t exist.

about intellect

you can’t expect the unexpected

just like you can’t be predictable sometimes

except you can


you can in that your meaning becomes apparent

yet so does your lack of judgment, propensity to loosely cite, to learn by rote and general intellectual neglect

your audience is affected

yet why does this have an effect ?



if you can’t raise yourself to try and answer the question

don’t you worry about intellect

I Never Met A Londoner

a poem by gary knapton from a collection entitled "another mans shoes"

Ten years this June I left my room

And swiftly headed south

To make my fame and fortune

And to hear the Cockney mouth

I wanted to discover just what makes the world go round

And to meet the famed inhabitants of good old London town.

I trod my feet on Oxford Street

Fenced in by car and cart

The crowded din of accents giving promise to my heart

But all the folk I spoke to were from Kent or further down

They said “We ain’t no Londoners what come from London town.”

I crossed Green Park and I could see

The palace guards at noon

“As London as it gets!” I thought

My spirits in a boon

I told them of my plight

But they were laughing all too soon

“We are fae bonnie Scotland, lad. We are the Royal Dragoon.”

I ambled Hatton Garden where a Goldsmith played his hand

J. Rosenblat from Israel

He missed The Holy Land

I showed him my sum total and his furrow broke a frown

Still, he’s not a Londoner who comes from London town.

I dined with Turks in Walthamstow

And Asians in Brick Lane

I made a friend in Greek Street who said

“Please come back again!.”

I stamped my dues in Petty France

As Customs men came down

And I thought of all the Londoners who come from London town.

I drowned in noise as Geordie boys

In building sites abound

Hung from a rope in clouds of smoke

Ten storeys from the ground

I skirted flanks of timber planks and shouted “Don’t Look Down!”

But I never met a Londoner who came from London town.

I met the fighting Irish in the taverns of N1

In Brixton the Jamaican Yardies said I need a gun

Parades of Hare Krsna hummed their mantra

In their gowns

And Southall Sikhs said “Wishing you a thousand London towns.”

The Aussie folk of Earls Court made my skin look pale and starch

I smelt the Arab billions just south of Marble Arch

A million chefs in China Town said I could take my pick

I bartered with the Bangladeshis up in Hackney Wick

I Hansom cabbed Jamaica road down through the Surrey Docks

Where Kingdom-Brunel’s tunnel-men came down with sewer pox

My driver said indeed this was a local haunt before

  

But each and every Londoner got de-mobbed in the war.

So ten years passed until at last

This place became my home

I’ve trodden every alley way

I’ve up-turned every stone

I’ve met ten thousand goodly men of yellow black and brown

But I never met a Londoner who came from London Town.

(copyright)

Cadmium Light

I fell through the escape hatch of Manchester Terminal 1

And landed on my feet

My real life, with her issues and incessant songs of demand

Her cat-calls of curation

Did whine and howl and grope and snatch yet not one thread of me could catch

My air-bound abdication

 

Without routine

Free from my name

Obliged to play a giddy game

My timeless self did bellow

Not so much that I was here

Nor that my days were mine to steer

My brushstrokes were Chrome Yellow

 

I found myself and too found you

I pulled us into Cobalt Blue

Not that my ruse was winning

Go to work

Kill yourself

Catch your train in the morning rain

Somewhere else the weekend is just beginning

Bring Me Down; or Pull Me Up To Your Love

Bring Me Down (“Pull me up to your love”)

From a collection by Gary Knapton entitled “Semantic Dissonance; or The Echelon Rink”



Cry my news from your minaret grandstands

Everything never got worse

My brain is very clever so you’re gonna have to watch me

Bring me down to earth


Shout my name from the top of your ‘thedrals

Give my ego birth

Cover my skin in humility’s ransom

Bring me down to earth


Walk my walk

See but through my eyes

Love my body for worth

Let not a waking second pass me by

Lord, bring me down to earth


Steal my gold and make me sleep outdoors

Wash my life in dearth

Talk my words and pronounce every syllable

Bring me down to earth


What was I doing before I found you ?

Songs don’t play without verse

Now I’m tone-riddled and dancing all your melodies

Bring me down to earth


I’ve never been so happy and you’re every single part of it

All that I have is from you

I’m human, I’m an idiot

Taking things for granted

Bend my knees at your pew


Slow me down and make me see daylight

Bounce me along on your dreams

Paint my life as a vellum gold tapestry

Pull me apart at the seams


I’m swollen in your love

You are living inside me

Colouring the path of my search

Six numbers in a row

And it didn’t cost me anything

Bring me down to your church


Life is rich

We are all little miracles

Moving to hysteria’s beat

Bring me down from vanity’s pedestal

Bow me down at your feet


Zen is my colour and I’m giddy like children

All of my dreams are above

Bring me down from life’s illusion

Pull me up to your love

The Colour of Water

When you first try water you won't like it

Yet take it just as the skies take rain and reign over us

Get to know her

The crisp depths of ice around her pallor

The cool sated sheen

The rinsed quiver

The non-fragrance of life-giving valour


Run to meet her where she glistens

And dance under her bountiful cascades

Her glorious bursts

When she pours she listens

For the sunrise of your choking thirsts


Not for one moment wonder of her provenance

Her days of thunder

Your life would be non-existent

Not just duller

You are what she tastes like

You are her colour

Stick River Lake

(from a collection entitled Life Without Buildings)

When life got too loud - money men came knocking, food was low, ill feelings hung in the air or negative vibes dominated the energy fields -

We'd head off up to the highland ox-bow hidden from the vale towns by a ramshackle ridge of low slung thickets and the sycamore we called Old Man's Watch

We'd sit in untidy shapes on the eastern banks - the 'shoreline' and blow tunes into the skies or bleat long-fallen and diluted weary tales of made up situations

Marney was best at that

We'd never get bored and sometimes, usually when the clouds sat low enough to breath against, ghost stories would gather and make sounds that felt real

Real enough to scare our giggles into shrills of disbelief and tickle our insides with dead people 

Tree shadows grew on the western climbs so that by late evening, backed by a cold brown sun, they'd look like enemy armies 

Once we all heard singing coming from the gardeners cottage over at Wendell Heights even though we all agreed it was impossible

That old turreted pile was once an Edwardian gentry house and hadn't seen life since it took a V2 from Hitler in the forties

It had no floor boards or roof

How could anyone be in amongst all that ?

But we heard them and they sang freely and in the style of old beauty

A tune from another time

It made me think of stain glass windows, cast iron radiators and flecks of dust that just sit timeless and bolt upright in shafts of morning sunlight channelled through filthy panes

A collection of the very last remnants of dying eras

Paul's older brother and Dyson Shankhouse were show-offs and used to hike over the prairie steps as far as the estuary 

They carved out this tidy niche in daredevil capers until they came up close on a troop of thin hungry humans, some with green hair, who came bowling out of one of the ship wrecked hulls where mum said sniffers went to kill their brains and remove the life from behind their eyes

They scarpered all the way back shaking and we caught them dead white faced, Dyson crying and missing a shoe, long balls of snot on his collar

That was the end of courage

We never laughed as much

Hard and serious and violent as the northern storms

We were young and back before money or fear we would look without thinking and listen without judging

Poor as beggars and wealthy as kings, we had nothing yet we had it all

What price to live just one day like that again ?

If you could steal memories the best felons on earth would have long since made off with my days up on Stick River Lake

Only If You Listen

The sky, enamoured and beguiling, articulates in bits of sentence - all adjectives and no nouns

You fill in the gaps according to the light and your situation

The voice of sky; it's function as dictat; gets everywhere yet is rarely mentioned 

People are too wrapped up in the colour of it's chatter

The pastels and topaz and azure

Mother-of-pearl

Crimson furl

I mean, they're all fine but it's not like I can hear sunsets and dawns

Their sounds and scrapes ring mute to my ears

They don't tell me anything

Not literally


Once, ankle deep in rainstorms, I looked up and was promptly told to "be"

Don't escape the deluge; you are the deluge

Just like that

Clean as a whistle down a rainbow sheen

I'll never forget

I was half way down Park Lane, Trafford quays, on the way to the pool above the soccer dome

But that's not the best bit

The best bit is that when I somehow obeyed without effort

All time stopped dead, the water dried up yet fell harder, it's cold tilted into a warm hug

And I couldn't walk slow enough

I couldn't get enough of that

Of course, it seems obvious now

But I was simply learning that escape isn't made by running

It's too without

Liberation is within

Run with your brain

Not from the rain


Ever since, cold winter mornings send invites the night prior

Enveloped in smiles and sealed in known belonging

So I hit the pillow with ease

Ready for the cold warm breeze

Which holds me tight yet makes you sneeze


Rain is an army of dry

I should know

I was told by the sky

Throw-away objects can be diamonds that glisten

Either I need locking up

Or, when looking up, you don't listen

None of the Books Have Time

from a collection entitled "Life Without Buildings"


None of the books have ever tracked how through this life this poet goes

None of the books have ever shown me how to write decent prose

None of the books have ever dealt me good strong verse with a break-beat rhyme

None of the books have ever taught me

None of the books have time


None of the books have ever had me work my pen to a fresh idea

None of the books endorsed my thinking

None of the books got near

None of the books not once did drill me to spot good grammar from syntax crime

None of the books have ever helped me

None of the books have time


None of the books have ever asked me how I am feeling day to day

None of the books addressed my questions

None of the books could say

None of the books contain my life despite my quest for the tell tale sign

None of the books have ever loved me

None of the books have time