Yes, a show.
About apology.
It is interesting and there are lots of thoughts and a long way to go and I do not know the landscape, and it is so exciting and yet at the moment it seems like a trip to the beach with some goats and knife.
I am starting this blog to try and make it take shape.
I am going to use this blog to communicate mainly with my friend Schmem,
so that she can tell me which poems are crap and which ones are salvagable.
If you are reading this, you are about to go blind.
No, actually if you are reading this and have any feedback you would be generous enough to share, I would appreciate it even more than a cup of tea and a shoulder massage.
It is in its own way a sort of refreshment.
This is a poem about a person who wants an apology and is a bit cross.
Toddler in Tesco
You are that toddler in Tesco dragging its feet out the front of the pram, tripping up blind old women, that piece of popcorn that looked like someone I can’t quite figure out who irritating. You are Judus, the bad knight and that guy who stabbed Ceasar, you are that tree that fell through the power line, the reason people wrote all those songs about fuckwits. You are all the problems with all the circuits, all the council tax bills, all the incompetent idiots who make all the crap decisions about debt and politics.
You are getting out of a limo eating ice cream shaking the fists of a long line of enemies and not even knowing that the press want you to sneeze and leave a long line of mucus
from your sleeve to your chin.
You are everything a parent forgets to pack for a holiday, every closed window that a bird thinks is free, every young mothers belief that their foetus will be differently pleasing. You are every scratch on every CD, every landscape ruined by industry, every load of washing drying in the rain. I pity all the trees, all the weeds, all the computer keys, all the cups of tea that you make for acquaintances. You are every crap wedding DJ, every supper ruined by TV, my notebook broke backed floating in a river just out of reach. I hear on the grapevine of a dream that you are dreadfully sorry, and because I think cruelty and you are an interesting combination, I put you on stage in Newcastle United shorts up to your armpits, and no one, no one is laughing.
This is also a poem.
I was wondering what would happen if someone invented a machine that could stop you being sorry. Then I thought about couples and how the complications of the stuff that goes on being in one can sometimes make people not sorry and vindictive and allow all sorts of things to happen by sheer nature of the structure, which is a little bit like a house, la la la. Then I wrote the poem. I think it is twee. A twee poem about murder. Hmmm
Someone’s always dead
Even though they ended and the years bred like guinea pigs
the house of what he/she did still sometimes creaks with mortgage.
Particularly Thursdays in Spring,
presuming the other is not remebering
they mentally stop at the window of yes this is personal, I don’t much want to speak, it is history, I am watching your body language;
to check which props go with which scenes:
the over-padded plan navy sofa
the smirking kitchen cleaver,
the plastic bags pigeoning the driveway.
But none of this remembering can do away with the cold event domino clack which caused them both to flinch their personalities into concrete.
Future partners will inspect the site, be sold the story
of the haunting house that just could not hold all that happening,
but they wont get a glimpse of the head house reality,
or understand why their partner keeps the flat furnished with letters found in bins, why the volumes of apology explanation ordered from the internet are kept in a suitcase labelled misc in a I do not regret it, and am not sorry guilty back bedroom, that the scab hub caps itch in Spring and are slowly healing into maps of I wish I didn’t know the way back to myself.
On Thursdays in Spring
each stops at a window and thinks there should be an auction for the machine,
that they might be rich if only someone had the business sense to sell the recipe which split sorry from sorry from skin.
This is an older poem which I am thinking about including. It is about the enjoyment people get from acting conspiratorally. I think people find confessions of bad things liberating, and so they laugh, and then it becomes a counter culture thing which then makes it cool. When in fact it is people laughing at unkind things, which is wierd. But I do it all the time. What else is David Shrigley and Postsecret and so about if not glamourising guilt, apology and confession.
This is another couple who have been doing wrong things together - hang on, thats a theme!
Disgrace
I’ve checked the lists of all the things we did,
scan read the five year plan for missed ticks or unaccounted columns.
I have to say the best shitty bit
was when you told that ugly girl her soul looked just like Marlene Dietrich.
I see her sometimes,
putting on my lipstick when I pry in other people’s bathroom cabinets.
Those notes we wrote in that old guy’s window steam
‘your head is an egg, your egg is a head, your yolk, bleeding’ was ace.
I think the line you gave me about guilt polstices
summarised precisely how I feel about casual acts of cruelty.
These things need planning.
I’ve never told you but I keep a suitcase of indicating signature pieces.
Sometimes I spread them across my bed
and get in under the sheets. I sleep deeply.
Although recently, I find my eyes pointer stuck
on a grid line of an Excel spreadsheet
and I am writing to say,
I am sorry my love, but I have started giving up train seats.
So, it turns out she was too nice for the mean glamour game. Oh no.
This is about not apologising for having a life outside of work and for being an actual person that gets pissed off and wants to set fire to piles of bureacratic paperwork.
About working in an office
You won’t find the filing cabinets under your desks
they’re on the roof; comment edited with bird shit and ash, and I can tell you
my forearms pulsed with the grey weight of maths.
I thought about going back but my feet got a system on the stairs
and the paper diaohorrea relieved itself into the sky cistern
like tax-back in December.
Double check your crib sheet,
there’s no mark scheme for the things I did last week,
the way I woke up wearing nothing but two eyes dressed like dignitaries.
I high-fived the bin man, made muppets out of mittens
and in a book shop left a kiss
in every copy of ‘self justifications of a prick tease.’
I wrapped spreadsheets round my wrists
and in the evening made out like a data medusa
neon snaking text off each hip.
I placed trust in the fist of a cold hard bitch
sent a small me to a squat party
without a taxi fee back to somebody who knows
how to make a lever arch file close properly.
Truth is, I Iike lists
I like scaring chaos shitless.
So yes, it is about making proper use of your time, and if that is saying sorry to someone that it changes something for than damn well do it.
Mark your calendars
Come gravediggers! Find us something beautiful to mark out and call at morning that this is a yawp, that this is a naming.
Come profiles, sat straining at monitors, do dirt to the dark, mark your calendars in all the wrong ways.
Send your washing to
Collins dictionary, and T-shirt expression normality. Some fixed screen has seen a slicker of your face
as you made beautiful vilifying extraordinary love
to your day.
Surely, you should say, that makes the way you put the rubbish out, seem less angry
that somehow
sense has a pretty massive responsibility to show up and put things straight, if only it knew its way
to your house. Come now bed slats, break like babies, root our feet down into clod land,
let’s feel the ripeness of dates,
the brewing of typists when they wrist rest and take cake leave. Those pillows hold heads,
mind, they are pregnant with dust mites dreaming of clock hands and greasy glass slowly slipping. Make your peace
because there’s space between the trees, waiting for another string of paper doll figurines
and some gravediggers
who wont look up at morning, even if a yawp issues out from the box, someone will just think the morning said co-op.
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