I Recapture The Castle

Something didn’t drop down out of the gaily heavens 
All cotton-bud creasy and perfumed with angels and wrapped up swell: just for me
It was more heavy-laden and started like a guilty thing 
Peppering my soles with old heat from the dark hearths of Hell that bequeath the city street 
Consuming the ground beneath my feet
It was eerily aligned and personally designed 
With a bin chute of malice intention
From this height things look half alright 
At cloud level even the dodgy parts of Broughton are a cute jumble of orange triangle roofs with eaves 
Can I hear horses hooves?
Those leaves
And garden fences snuck into a dense green belt of tall English trees 
Swaying in an evergreen breeze 
Elevated elegant seas
You can’t see the street level state 
It’s all tree tops and slate 
And the upshot is a tidy sideline in the reverse calumny of a calm that doesn’t exist 
Yet I’m looking at it 
From here, open-handed 
Down there, a clenched fist 
It only makes sense when the colours all run: it’s sewn into the storm-blown sun 
You’re drilled like a tool
A copycat fool 
We all are 
We hardly ever write hard onto the pad or type deep into the screen devoid of the sheen of fear and the hum-drumming relentless concern to do well
What is that? 
What if it were to just go straight to the tyre swings in the forthcoming dell or the Hell that came up at the start?
What happens when we ditch the cart and ride on? 
Well, for one you won’t be bleaching your heart with societal acquiescence 
Cheap addicts 
Easily bought 
Loyalty persisting 
So caught up in the need to impress that we don’t catch on to the fact we are caught 
Talk about perishing the thought or, heaven forbid, the untaught unsaught adjunct thought that we should not have been bought like we ought 
Just keep your voice down and solemnly raise your cup
At this rate we’ll wake ourselves up
Quiet writers 
Crite and righteous 
Not quite riotous
Disconcertingly difficult to assemble more than eleven of us eating into any one space at one pace 
The low darting dog is chasing its neverwhere tail 
And the yellow cross box painted wide and large across the tarmac collecting rush-hour queuing cars under racks of pulsing tricolour lights is where I start and you end and my mind is a place I can point to and all curves bend 
Hackneyed on the A to Z 
Malfunction Junction
Once, I captured the castle
I’d lay flat-bellied above the main gatehouse and listen through the murder holes for portcullis gossip
I’d swim the moat after dark without drawing the bridge before counting the stars in the silky grey Milky Way ridge by slow-strolling the south-facing battlements
I’d sing love songs up the garderobe to make the closet smell of rose-petals
And I’d steal father’s loudest rock n roll amp to blast pops and jazzes and ragtimes and heavy metals
All down the motte from the base of the bailey
Hardly ever when I was writing
But when guests were present and usually in the days leading up to a full moon, daily
Since those distant lessons in love, I learnt something about purpose 
If it’s gone you can’t go get it back: you have to go get it forth
Even if until recently you lived with a focus and direction and intuitively creative connection of a qualitative depth and breadth that had hitherto set you and everything you touch alight 
Ablaze 
Huxley’s antic hays 
And Phil’s long lion days that start with white haze 
It’s OK
It’s just the laws of base alchemy
It’s Chilean pine valley nature and her monkey puzzle ways 
You cannot rekindle the fire 
You have to go back to the wire 
Sometimes with purpose, you have to go get a new one 
The old one’s not taking a time-out 
It’s gone 
It’s not coming back and it’s not for rehire 
It doesn't matter what your purpose is 
It matters that you have it 
It doesn’t matter if you achieve the targets and goals that are set out within the terms of your purpose
Failure to achieve is succeeding as long as you walk the path that, looking back from the end point and only much later, you will call failure – that you do so walking tall, clip-heeled and spring-stepping and decked out in the decadent velvet garments of authentic objective, bellows-proud values and real freewheeling feeling
Mission-fuelled 
Walking toward something 
Buildings for canvas 
Michelangelo perched under the ceiling
I didn’t paint the thing because I needed to, wanted to or had to 
I only painted it because I tried, he cried 
But to run around just going through the motions when things don’t make sense anymore
When the exact same fruit that gave your life so much contentment and fulfilment at root is not enough anymore
To put up with that and just hope that things get back on track? 
That’s not even dreaming
That’s demeaning
Times are when an old purpose shuffles surreptitiously aside 
Still breathing just needing a companion, or needing leading
Bowing from mainstage and falling into the wings
Commanding you to take charge of things
Your job now is to apply rich viscous brush-strokes of bright gloss over what formerly depicted the finished matt ceiling of the Sistine but now functions as the regulation beige undercoat in an SME reception area with an OUT OF ORDER vending machine on an industrial park brownfield site off a B road somewhere just outside Swindon
A primer 
Reinjecting purpose with colour to make it fuller by giving it cohorts 
And demoting what once was brightest to duller
What task could be finer?
I broke out of my thoughts
I locked myself away for five days and nights 
I wasn’t depressed or down 
More like a marathon meditation
A mission
Staying home to get out of the town of my looping cognition
I’d sleep from about midnight to midday and on the Tuesday I didn’t get out of bed until 4pm 
I’d been awake since mid-morning with all the windows yawning wide open enjoying the biggest pulmonary vertical tower summer barnstorming bars of rolling blue thunder and bolts of electric lightning and deep-rinse fingering sheets of rain 
Laying in bed looking up at the low sepia-print ceiling which is so sepia-thin-ply you can hear birds walking on the roof of this old sepia highrise tower that stands on a creepier hill that felt creepier still and the hill and the tower even higher in the pneumatic shrill of the acquatic drill that fell finer than millstone flour with Newton’s gravity downpour power 
Now my castle had shaken awake to more than a gentle merrily-down-the-stream row-your-boat swaying like a ship going around the Horn in a sightless forlorn type of scorn
Right at the top 
Twenty-four floors and I’m king of the castle and in the firing line of the lightning bolts that now come through my windows horizontally 
Angry gods with twitchy purple laser guns
I loved every second of it
And after the storm, an empty rectangular box of off-white calm, radio-tuned and long-wave frequenting a dial-in beguilance;
 
The dial-in beguiling violin silence of slighting 
Violence a heart-string 
Violet the sighting 
And soon the stinging truth doth swoon the sleuth
The vilest siren made off with the light in a sling of soothing
Stolen
Smiling
Unmoving
But then she was back in a whip-crack and all at once frightening
Lips blood-red and eyes whitening from bold cobalt blue bolts of lightning 
When the storm had gone for good, finally
Me too 
I had
It brought what was left instead of me back into the room
And the space where I had been illuminated with grace and sheen
Ever so slightly but forever
I stood on the threshold of my perception gate 
Back in the liminal space 
And I knew it at once 
There was no once 
It was askew and raw and out of time like a sing-along wartime rhyme 
Pack up your troubles in your old kit bag and smile, boys, that’s the style
I was not so much somebody else as one body else entirely 
Lifted and gifted and excited with the potential of a new project 
All ready
No longer looking ruefully and sheepishly at their projects 
Your stuff
Jolted with that lick-o-paint fresh anticipation of one’s own new youth
Here now newly appointed
Name. Badge. Station 
I’d been sulking like children about not having children for about five years 
All victimised and stampy like a baby without candy 
Singularly failing to focus on the fewness of my wants in favour of the cheap extent of my possessions
Stupider still, refusing to see Cupid on the sill like a whirling dervish with her posse and their portable, potable take-away ditties of possibilities
When you receive, you are alive 
But only when you are giving: then and only then are you really living 
Five years 
Off-kilter
Refusing the possibility of love and misinterpreting have not for cannot 
A miniscule huge perspective swing 
Looking out
Neglecting in
And that’s only consciously 
Probably longer 
Maybe forever in the deeper chasms of truth that weave and embed me 
In the damp oily garage where under parking ramps they had cobbled me together 
Or the orange heat of the coals of the ovens of creation where I got baked
Not so much a problem as a slow-beat dread
It’s a first-world problem
I’m not hungry or shaking with fright or dying tonight
I solved it by recalibrating the lens 
And the best bit: the I that did it? 
I’m dead
My subtle shift of vision from the haves to the have-nots had stolen upon me some dark night and groping like a stealthy changeling had nudged my world-view out of focus, therein executing a transformational task 
The socially-distanced terrorist bomber, hands clean, safe space, no mask 
On some down-and-out mid-week slow-blues cheap booze no-news bound-along nondescript day 
My devilish muse with a ruse had etched over my blue skies with an attempt at a permanent grey
It certainly hadn’t felt like a hassle
Breezily facile 
Yet, out to the east where the yellow birds feast
And higher still, at the top of the hill, by the astle
I had lost sight of my castle
From this height things look half alright
Out north, some townships take me back
To orchard fields and cobbled streets
There, Lancashire with Yorkshire meets
Where Mossley milltown Dovestone greets
And Uppermill’s
Tame Pennine beats
I think of long-lost childhood seats
In Bagshaw dell for summer treats
Her Pollyanna browbeat bowers
We are the current of attraction
I am the emptiness
My body the vassal
And when I re-flood my soul with purpose
Which bull-horns the fuel pipe for the ignition stamp
Returning a discharged concoction of nitrogen gas to the rotating lighthouse lamp
And so projecting that dull persistent reliable stationary detectable old-fashioned flash
Of hope and a coil of long rope and a dash of dystopian brash to all the long-lost salty sailors out there on the black high seas
Who can not cope
Hitherto sinking
At them, winking
Replenishing purpose
Washing their mouths out with warm hopey water
Defying the fear they are surplus
Then even before I re-open my eyes
And with every fibre of my being unwise
Before even the very next breath I take
Or the release of the one I am holding
I am the emptiness
My body the vassal
I recapture the castle








Thanks for reading!
we are one

Two moments

When the high of normal

The drunkenness of sobriety

The up of the down

Kicks in

Like this cold-weather front 

Breaking the baking heat with one

Tablespoon serving of fresh English rain

Before the heat haze fires up again

Gable-ending my summer of sin

I’d like to take a moment to think about

How life is passing by much quicker than I thought

Or it ought

The time-keeper, decoupled from our version of golden riches

Cannot be bought

And one more moment, I’ll take

To commit to submit to Him that His might, through me, makes me stronger

Then back to the now

All time-outs can only be two moments

No longer

gK

Locomotive Emptiness: or, Now Here at The Monton Tap

Under blister-pack clouds of fanfare

I headed to the middle of nowhere

Skirting the floundering ‘hood I limbered up down Seedly

And passed through the stone arch pillars of a rambling English Victorian boulevard

Where dogs and two more runners and a coven of kids at play

Lit up in the leaves with a fleeting light

That broke through the eaves of the cheated night

And bounced off the safe-play swings just right

At least for this time of day

On Edward Avenue dawn announced herself in earnest

And a light breeze skiffed and skewered my descent

Past Innings Court and The old Weaste Hotel

At Tootal where on a right turn I got amongst the bus stops and workmen and road cones 

And dads mowing lawns to where that sideroad meets the listing bend of Eccles Old Road

Vehicles whooshed past me like deadlines apart from those line-queueing for traffic light systems

A lolly-pop lady shepherding the school horde

Doing everything she can

Giggle-pitch screams from a gaggle of teens 

Hot-boxing in a Vauxhall van

I waited for a gap in the cars and buses and made it across to the tall slanting willows outside the old folks home where a bank of Elm trees inspired someone to call the place ElmBank

The opposite kerb

Next door a pair of nurses, having made the crossing in time with me, headed into a loose-knit pile of student flats that used to stand as a merchant manse when horses carried in-crowds askance and folks did a Mayday Morris dance

Beneath me now, my first sample of good footing

Wide, regular paving for three hundred yards on an eloquent, beckoning undulation 

That dipped and rose and crested and fell softly and weaved around and tilted

Which, when combined with the breeze provided me with the 

Fastening sensation of fairground rides

My mind was already pulling away from my body

The long run came upon me, again

Just three blocks shy of Half Edge Lane

I sunk into the curve of the hill and skeltered up it

Nestled like a puppet and bounding past Ivy Mount, Oak Mount and Clarendon Cottage Prep School

Mental placeholders I bond with a little more each day, may be representing the growth I sought

Allendsby House. Monica Court. 

Dodging entanglements with branch overhangs, or so I thought

I wound under, free, at Wendover Court

Before Monks Hall Grove had me trooping down past the cricket ground and into the village on the verge of a beckoning dell

Via a conspiracy of leafy middle class crescents named after the landed gentry

Knee-deep in dukedoms and earls and the good King George himself

Consorts and Marquis and lords and great families

From Clarendon to Claremont to Cavendish to Cholmondeley

I pondered Viscount Malpas in his Cheshire castle, glumly 

On these quaint seats before digesting estates worthy of investing

My locked down, distant social eyes

Took a slice out of Sandwich

At Westminster I stared at “this house” feeling like the opposition on a motion and noted Ellesmere and Stafford and Normanton and Snowdon

Oh Lord!

The latter a surprise

Yet even stretches of Antony Armstrong-Jones euphoria

Simply could not topple the ubiquitous Victoria

Park, Street, Road, benches

That Queen and her waiting wenches 

Were out to be seen as I reached the church green

And took refuge from a fresh belt of hail in the Old Man’s Shelter

A rarified rowdy bunch, all walking sticks and tongues were getting their morning chats worth at Devonshire 

No going back now - I could never readjust to the old me - swept over my soul when Georgian glass-leaded bays crept into view as I leapt upon Algernon Avenue

And the clubhouse at the end of the golf course was rinsed in jaded racing greens:

The principal effect of leeward light bouncing off the chaste steeple 

Corrugate beams

I stamped in puddles on purpose and then shimmied off the path

Under blossom trees

My footprints leaving a trail of wet white petals on the lawn grass thereafter

Where I rejoined the suggested pedestrian route 

And in no time took a sharp right up the banks of a dramatic landscaped levee

Past pretty rockeries and tendered flower beds and a pair of stone seats fitted into the gradient shelf that was presently occupied by a couple wearing kagools and wide grins

Until this moment many were taking the air and enjoying the view

But then darkness fell and the rain belted without compromise yet still I was taken aback

By the sheer speed at which everyone simply disappeared

I’ll not gainsay it

The weather was on my side as I hit the old loop line where the railway once began

Disused station platforms rose on either side of me a mile or two in and I ran through a cutting tunnel 

Propelled by nothing at all, no less

This locomotive emptiness 

Later, scamping through the woods like a lad

I stretched out on a log where dense trees gave way to a copse of sorts

Down by the old Warke Dam opposite the bird house

And I nodded and smiled at local families, fellow runners and dog walkers 

All newly emergent since the sun took charge of the sky once more

Behind the Nailmaker’s Shop I skipped the alphabet bridge

And opened up along the towpath of the red canal from the Barton Arms 

Rejoining the road after Duke's Drive near The Bluebell and retracing earlier steps I had time

And energy to take in the shop signs

Baffoon frontages: the post-modern sluts of artisan;

Six Penny Diner, Blacksticks, Playfoots, The Urban Village Eatery, Twig

Twisted Elegance, The Blind Pig

Village Ambience,

Leo’s

The Naz

And an unassuming small quadratic bar next to a dry cleaners, more to my taste that was called The Monton Tap

Which, amidst the weekend bustling crowds stood empty as an upwardly mobile outlier

Like the girl with the harelip that no one wants to kiss, said Philip

I pulled up, went in and ordered a beer

And headed to the middle of now here

gK

Getting Ready To Go Out

 

I’m at the bottom of the world making my way up.

People think you’re at the left side of the page and you’re travelling on a line that heads off to the right. Westerners. 

But you’re not.

Life is a road trip and each day all you have to do is make it to the beginning. The starting line is always where you’re headed. You are making preparations to go somewhere. You’re calling them days. 

People think that life is proof that the journey is already underway and that you’re trying to make it through to the end. 

But it isn’t and you’re not. 

In the end, you’re always trying to make it to the beginning.

Look at the children. How old they’ve become. And the senior citizens wobbling right on the edge. Arms flapping. Making cooing noises. Like babies.

Some say, as time runs its course, we get older. Try and avoid such heresy. The truth is that we grow into youth. And everyone can see that climate change and loneliness align. That as it gets hotter we get colder. 

People think the past came before the present and the future comes after that but it didn’t and it doesn’t.

The future always comes before the past. It’s out in front. That’s why they call it the future. Everything starts off in the future, rains down on you as now and then weaves and bends along the echo of an arc called yesterday. Seemingly graceful and getting smaller and disappearing and all. 

Historians. Teachers. The news readers. Diarists. They all read everything backwards. They make it sound like the past came first. 

People could really use a crash course in the nature of the past. For Christ’s sake! It came last. It’s a footnote and the footnotes come at the end. She’s always last. That’s why they call her the past. 

We’d stand in a brace on Saddleworth tops or Castle Hill or Blackstone Edge and hold hands and look up into the stars and Alice-Anne (pronounced Alison) would say stuff like “Out there in the universe…” and I’d listen for a bit, watching her voice fall off in numbers against the soft shape of her nose. Then I’d look deep into her so-called outside sky and declare “No such thing. There is no out there.” and she’d gimme the big thirty-twos and she’d qualify with “Yeah alright. I know we are part of the thing” and I’d tilt my head and say “Not quite, Cuz. Nothing is out. The universe is in us.”

She’d disagree and make a low noise like something switching on. Something in a cupboard on a timer. I’d argue and she’d parry. On Mastermind her second-round specialist subject would be Disagreeing With Gary. 

And down below us, the trembling neon of a whole city high in the mountains shimmered and gaped and winked and was grinning. The way of things. It was all made out like laundry that your mother laid out. The answers right there to read if you’d care to still your breath from fogging your vision and commit to the deed;

That the more we lose the more we are winning. 

That all this time we’ve been reading time backwards.

That life is a road trip and in the end all you have to do is make it to the beginning. And even when the sun goes down there are no surprises.

Because at the end of the day it rises. 

...

gK

...

The Mermaid Tavern

 

Are they smitten?

They all ask how poetry should be written

When they’re through

Ask: what can it do? 

Do you beseech;

“What are my understandings of the rhythms of speech?”

While they’re busy reading you - goo-eyed, patient, empathetic

Construct your vision of industrial aesthetic

For whom do you write?

Are you privy to the information that comes at night?

Can words heal?

Is poetry reparative?

Therein, what are the possibilities of narrative? 

Do you think you’re so popular

That your prose could instigate fighting?

Then, how come you’re so careful in your writing?

Quit trying to reach the hearts of men and women

You are the heart

Your blood the ink

Your veins the pen

Blood thinning

Sail out

Once more unto the breach

Splash not in the foamy shallows

Of what they tried ever to teach

This craft on which you float

Is more than a license to roam

The decoy is this poem, those screenplays

That tome

Her gift will lift you and sift through the clotted blossom 

Of your gilded fleeting dream

Like an heirloom comb

Such that the farther you drift out

The closer you are to home

...

Storm Chaser

 

I had a dream about you:

You lived with your family way out in the country

Rich green grass stretched out in square textured patches to the blue horizon

An American quilt of English lawns

We were having dinner outside

After, we were playing with a tennis ball

And then I was over-arm bowling at you with a table-tennis ball

Cricket style

It was summer

Dusk fell lightly on us 

We conversed as dining people do

Relaxed on the whole, if a little affected, by our roles in the civil occasion

A fourth adult was present 

A man 

Possibly a friend of yours

At some point I accidentally threw the ball beyond Matthew

And I ran up behind your row of buildings to the back gardens

To retrieve it

Here I found a series of narrowboat locks

Glimmering surrealism like sunken fish tanks in a Dali frame

The ball bobbing gingerly on the surface of one

The water: astronomy blue like mystic dates

I made as if to scoop it out at which point your husband made a sound like 

“Don’t! I’ll do it. You’ll annoy the neighbours. They're our mates."

They say all dreams are wish fulfillment

It makes sense

I wasn’t even trying to retrieve what we’ve lost

What I’ve lost : all dreams are egoic

Nor was I trying to resolve the thing

I was transporting us to a time and place where resolution had cleared the weather for

Another shot at that clear-sky thing we did

To a version of me who had stopped chasing storms

Those fields were so green! 

I know

It was all just a silly dream

...