When Time Stands Still
Have you ever found yourself caught
between not wanting to do anything
and not wanting to do nothing?
Maybe it’s a trap you fall into after
three score years and ten of constant
doing and little time to peruse options.
I’m now gazing out of a café window,
peering abstractly at nothing much,
watching as time slips inexorably by.
Is it time or life I’m opting out of?
These minutes that would once have
struck me as irrevocably, carelessly
lost are drifting by as in a dream.
Or perhaps it’s a nightmare from which
I will awake reborn, reinvigorated?
I will let you know in due course.
Bookshops
They are magnets to the schooled and curious,
harbingers of enlightenment.
Their shelves can be tidily stacked by field
or – the speciality of the dwindling oases
of independents – jumbled in a mad, frenzied
clutter piled tight by staff-only stairways.
To know, I find, is to want to know
more about what one doesn’t know.
But do independents have to compromise
by stocking up with tomes on gardens
and histories of battles and the military?
There’s another odd thing about visiting
by-the-way hordes of half-priced, dog-eared
volumes: I will find something to purchase
that I would never buy in a high street chain.
Odd this: I have thousands of books at home.
The Percipience of Ageing
We live, engaged day by day, with who we are when we are.
Okay, I’ll rephrase that: we are engaged, no absorbed,
in the to-ing and fro-ing of the here-and-now, engaged
through our life-courses, until – here’s the thing – we hit
the buffers of the tail end of the third age or the timid
and finite resignation ushered in by the terminal fourth.
You can’t know what it is to be old until it punches you:
it’s no good protesting that you’ve studied it, thought
it through.
It’s no good insisting you have listened and empathised,
are forewarned.
To be old is to hang on with ever-diminishing powers,
with body systems faltering one-by-one.
But there’s a plus to this negativity, a soothing cream
to apply to its itches.
Like Dylan Thomas you can face down this irreversible
decline by calling it out, obstinately, unambiguously,
proclaiming to self and anyone listening: ‘there’s life
till death closes all doors and shuts all windows’.
Up until all competence goes, all systems collapse,
the blood sneaks in, lending last gasps of oxygen
to muscle and brain cells not yet ‘quite’ ready to die.
Live on.
Live beyond that fatal tremulous bid to disassemble
and diminish to dust.
Scrap to the end.
Incongruence
The body is one thing, the mind quite another
for all that the second piggybacks on the first.
As one stutters, stumbles and prepares to depart
(‘lift your feet up when you walk
and know that you won’t react in time to break
a fall’, I was told)
the other plays devil’s advocate, rejecting
with crazed resolution any bodily intimidation.
That is until tired and bored the body’s brain
whispers to the mind ‘enough’, vanquishing
any last gasp of hope: knowing and reflexivity gone,
a corpse in waiting.
Body and mind are once more reconciled.
Cafes and Sartre
I’m not now sure when it all began, this – well
let’s call a spade a shovel – this addiction to coffee
and cafes. How did it arise? Was it by accident?
It predated the traveling technology of the laptop
because I penned thoughts in an exercise book
with a biro when out-and-about long ago.
I’m inclined to blame Sartre and de Beauvoir’s
writing habits in Paris’ Les Deux Maggots, de Flore,
Le Coupole and their existentialist imaginings;
plus, they put Oxford’s posh huff-and-puff disciples
of language to shame. Ayer es un con, said Sartre.
But a motive more mundane was a hankering
to be a flaneur, to escape my office in Fitzrovia
to roam London’s medley of networked streets,
bars and cafes, and yes, to translate thoughts
into a clutch of sentences to scratch at later.
But back to John-Paul, bane of Oxford’s defunct
liberals, son of Hegel, Marx, Husserl, Nietzsche,
experimenter of being in and of a shifting world,
terrifyingly free, alone among many, powerless
but empowered to act, to challenge, to transform.
So Sartre bequeathed modus vivendi and rationale,
didn’t convert me but led me to the world that is
and might yet be, allowed me to rejoice in choosing
sociology over a philosophy withering in arid soil.
And slowly, as if by painful increments, this solitary
scholar has come out of himself and, if not exactly
sociable, has learned the freedom to solidarity.
Principles
What a nightmare principles are,
irresistible bait for the brave
they send an invitation to bar
bad morals from lives, to shave
all things back to a primal zero.
But this idea of a pristine law
is a dangerous myth, a magnet
for the vulnerable, a trapdoor
to catch the innocent and let
in assorted fundamentalisms.
We start from where we are,
defined by our limited resources
and fit only to ponder as far
as our poor human forces
will permit: maybe a day ahead!
First, let’s deny all invented gods:
yes, I know they afford comfort
and promise against all the odds
to see us through our short
times drifting on our rock in space.
Gods deceive us, rob us of brains
and wills, subjugate and tame us,
turn us into track-bound trains
and convince us not to place trust
in what and who we humans are.
Principles are never absolute,
never above critique and tweaking,
principles are a way to parachute
meaning into living without leaking
into conflict and irresolution.
So let’s confront our human state
and reconcile ourselves to liberty
without instruction or constraint,
let loose to forge with probity
principles to live in abiding peace.
Full Minds
Have you ever met the phenomenon of a mind
full to the brim with – what to call it? – ‘stuff’?
I’m with my laptop in a local café pondering
how to sift a bewildering topsy-turvy plenitude
of half-digested thoughts, a pile of ‘might be’
stimuli to reassemble into something to write.
There are constraints, temptations to avoid:
for instance, I don’t want to repeat myself,
but – and there is a ‘but’ – nor can I assume
people have read what I’ve already written,
so, its paraphrase and risk self-plagiarism
or hope neophytes can ponder and catch up.
Okay, poems are rather different, exercises in
spontaneous invention, mannequins of thoughts,
dreams, pleas and fancies, each one more
or less carefully dressed up in verbal finery.
My poems are modest accomplishments,
fleeting excursions into a sphere belonging
to immured craft-persons accustomed
to lonely lives, to painful slowness and neglect.
So this is a brief interlude, and a short one,
after which I shall resume scribbling ideas
about who we are, why, and how we might
live together without murdering each other.
Trees
The dead tree’s arms fan out to the sky,
tired but sharp they make you wonder why
there’s so much life left in this spiky husk,
so much to haunt the creeping of the dusk.
Statuesque and brittle it defies the axeman,
sets its chiselled face against any plan
to chop and splinter its limbs into piles
of tinder to donate fire to human wiles.
It is a skeleton of defiance, growing brittle
with the passing of the years, caring little
for those who pass beneath failing boughs
unwary of the risk of arboreal showers.
Pubs
Punctuating times writing in café hubs
are those spent – well, writing – in pubs.
I sit back to a wall facing a panorama
of lives lived with alcohol induced karma.
An unusual patron, I gaze flaneur-like
on the chilled disco bustle as I write.
My usual tipple is a large white wine
and in many a London haunt of mine
a full glass would as if by magic appear
even before I’d made my request clear.
Pubs can be oases in urban deserts,
refuges from a thousand pressing hurts,
pubs can host brief overdue time-outs
even as they invite irreverent bouts
of excess, of an hour or two misspent
in fortuitous meandering, of time lent
to a brief vacation, to a mental clear-out
occasioned perhaps by a managerial shout.
But I digress: pubs for me are venues,
home from home, habitats, as I told you,
to think and write amidst the confusion
of ordinary day-to-day popular fusion.
Sport
I struggle to comprehend my love of sport,
not for any reason to be judged rational,
but because there is embedded in my thought
a fundamental incongruity, an unexceptional –
I’m sure – sense that I personally fell short.
By some criteria I did well: I played rugby
for Sussex schoolboys and was the fastest
county sprinter in my age group: my bugbear
is what might have been, a belated test
that accords with my own halting confession;
I can now openly acknowledge my limitations:
I was not especially skilled, lacked any ambition
to shine, my shyness inhibiting preparations
for victory over defeat and the honing of skills
to press home contributions to school teams
visiting tournaments or meets, to fit the bill
as house and school captain, to realise dreams
others held more dear, their commitments clear.
So while I follow sports avidly and hark back
to tries scored, sprints won and the odd beer
I do so in full awareness of the memories I lack.
Autumn
The Ash gently rains unwanted boughs
and a superfluity of yellowed leaves
as Autumn insinuates itself, showers
our mats of grass with untidy sheaves
of detritus, dying to live again in Spring.
All is ochred, etched sharp in chilled air,
arms and fingers stretched and brittle
in the gathering frosts, alert and aware
of nature’s ineluctable grip and a little
wary of easy promises of resurrection.
In defiance, the apples are giving birth
and the medlars too, as if to protest
seasonal closure, affirming their worth
in a final forlorn testament for the rest
against the active decay of the Ash.
I love the disputed closure of Autumn,
the scabrous tension of life and death,
feel it through my bones and won’t shun
each hard-won random gaseous breath
as I step slowly up and down our garden.
Never Again
As Autumn fades and my biography nears Winter
I am confronted with mounting ‘never agains’,
adventures, episodes, experiences, moments
destined to become mere shadows, to be buried
in an ailing memory bank, hidden treasures.
I will never again know what it is to sprint on grass
or even to jog up our rural hillside, nor to smash
shuttlecocks in feigned anger on Mondays at 8pm;
but the vanishing past bites deeper than this, delving
into territories I judged more immune from ageing.
My body creaks now and walking fast, let alone
scuttling across traffic, a talent acquired in London
over half a century, is a challenge or risk too far.
I commute to Waterloo only rarely now, to revisit
colleagues or old cafes and bars, fading familiars.
I lecture occasionally, paying renewed attention
to any feedback, reluctantly ready to call it a day;
and I read, mull over thoughts, and I still write,
eschewing high-impact journals now for the books
that have always held a special appeal for me.
I have asked myself why I opt to write books,
after all they are generally more demanding;
maybe it’s because they are visible on shelves
and provide indisputable evidence of effort,
or maybe it’s because they will survive me.
Is it vanity to ponder a library life after death?
Is it self-centred or small-minded to consider
that life online will survive my earthy demise?
I don’t overrate my writings, whether online
or lodged in Popper’s World 3 as intelligibilia.
But when I’m all said and done, all’s not gone.
Absent While Present
There are those who can be seen but no longer see,
not because their eyes have given up the ghost
but because of their world’s shrinkage to hit-and-miss
neurones that fire intermittently, and randomly.
They have retreated into Plato’s cave of shadows,
ever trying in vain to make it to the open sunlight
rays of Forms that comprise the worlds of you and I,
everyday worlds that were once as familiar to them.
Family and friends left me even as they remained,
seated close by but hidden, camouflaged in bodies
contriving to appear present and normal, covering
for what they too saw as insidious conquerors
of everything that made them who they once were.
How disconcerting it is to see a foggy blankness
across the face of a friend whose mental sharpness
you used to celebrate and share platforms with,
how sad to read behind vacant eyes an emptied
cellar of so many, so varied, so piquant memories;
how wretched that such rich souls have fled.
Remembering War
Every year our local choir has a remembrance concert
when solemn poppy-wearing villagers pack in church
to gaze for an hour on the ugly obscenity of killing,
and I find myself increasingly, obstinately, unwilling
to dwell on defeating Hitler’s Germans and quietly lurch
into thoughts of poppied politicians, suited and inert
even as they plan to rearm and dispatch others to die.
Let’s forget Remembrance Sunday and concentrate
our thoughts, such as they are, on ending all wars;
conflicts are devices to bulge the pockets of the rich
who move we citizen pawns on a board game which
is invented, patented, produced and retailed at stores
on every high street, its task to convince you and me
that mass slaughter is a game played with counters.
Just a Slight Fade
Who is that man who …
oh you know, it’s on the tip of my tongue,
we saw him the other evening on tv,
he was very good,
Tim something or other, or Tony;
It’s no good!
It’ll come back to me,
probably when I’m washing up.
What were you saying?
Pausing
My dad used quite often to take himself
apart, stand quiet, put everything on hold;
he’d be still, a statue, time in obeisance.
Now, in my seventies I’m imitating him.
If he was then like I am now, his mind
emptied of anything resembling thought,
idling in neutral while people and things
sidled by without impinging or troubling.
A brain untrammelled is recharging,
no queries to be answered or puzzles
to be solved: the senses are at play,
at liberty to say something or nothing.
Alone but in company with myself
I drift, stimuli wafting silently by,
utterly undemanding unless it be
to invite me to experience life itself.
I’m Not Ready Yet
If I were to go mid-book I’d be fairly pissed off,
partly because it would be a wasted commitment,
but also because I would have miscalculated.
In my late seventies I read, think and write for fun,
no longer overly concerned with reviews
and not at all with today’s assessment by metrics.
I could paint poorly or help by volunteering
for this or that, diversionary or noble respectively,
but my instinct says do what you do best.
The outstanding issue is when not to start
on a novel venture, because I can no longer
think, it’s tiring or stressful, or I’m fading out.
Statuesque
I could howl like a wolf to the night sky
with barely a clue as to wonder why,
and I could hold the universe at bay
as I pause to the soil to bow and stay
… what?
Where does inebriation lie in this scheme
as I try to rehabilitate a reluctant dream
that interrupts repose and asks me how
the meaning of things does skit and bow
… what?
In a fusion of possibilities time stutters
to a halt and erects sunproof shutters
that plunge my inner world to black
so all that shows are symptoms of lack
… what?
Nothingness is the terminal absence
of fire and warmth, a wordless sense
nestling in a vacuum of possibilities
of a life regained in brand new realities.
From A to B in Politics
Here and now, let’s call it ‘A’,
is no good, a death trap,
we need to hasten to something
better, let’s designate that ‘B’.
So, how to get from A to B?
Is there an easy route: motorway
or at least A roads for a while?
No! Okay, what about B roads
or maybe rural byways or tracks
that end up at destination B?
Hmm! we’ll have to hack our way
through a resistant undergrowth
of sharp and poisonous barbs
with wills to impede, obstacles,
forces for order and stability.
The winners in A are mounting
a fire-armed counter-offensive,
resisting fair for foul, buckling
down, pulling up the ladder
behind them, erecting barricades.
But B hovers in our imaginations
and against intimidating odds
holds out a promise of relief,
even of lives worth rebuilding
for our children, grandchildren.
Resist accommodating A if you’re
comfortable, dozing by the fire,
face down the self-serving bastards
protecting their privileges in A,
embrace the risk-taking risks of risk.