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.

copyright

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

copyright