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

 

 

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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

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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 

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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.

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