Ode to Nowhere 26.02.12

Hi guys!

Thanks to the lovely Kate Lynn-Devere, my poem PSP Man is going to be broadcast on the delicious Ode to Nowhere poetry radio show this afternoon at 4pm.

Do give it a listen :-)

Thanks!

http://gashouseradio.com/2012/02/ode-to-nowhere-poetry-show/

#snowday

Sugar, dust:
a freshly whipped dream;
elderly handfuls of branches
bow
under too many crows
to count my superstition.
Hushed are the cries of
children, praying their school is closed,
and pairs of feet
wriggle in bed,
planning to call in sick.
Outdoors, silence:
slamming through the morning and
clogging up the internet instead.
SNOW DAY! we ‘like’, and
#snowday we trend, as
managers collectively sigh,
scraping their windshields with an
American Express.
Cars slide in side roads, as
a thousand thermostats are tinkered with.
The over 60s clear their driveways,
wishing everyone else
would do the same.
It makes the front pages when
other news isn’t good enough,
and TK Maxx sell out of moon boots
in record time.

The death of Kodak

"When was the last time you looked at a photo album?"
the news reporter asks,
a trembling teenage boy conjuring up a childhood memory.
"It has to be six or seven years ago," he says,
and we cut to a piece about the death of Kodak.
We just take and store our photos in a different way,
they're saying,
and my bookshelf panics
wondering if it will be cleared in favour of a machine.
For those nights when there's nothing on the telly,
or afternoons that call for a pot of tea,
or when you're trying to remember who came to that party,
I like to go through my albums of printed
yes, printed photographs.
How novel, it seems, that these archaic albums exist, now
that we have the opportunity to
watch our memories on a slideshow,
tagged with the attendees,
on another screen.
We have become a world of screen junkies:
why read a book when you can have a baby screen;
it's just like the real thing,
look,
you can turn the pages and everything.
It looks just like the pages of a real book!
Except, well, it's not.
And what happens if you want to lend your book to a friend, or
you drop it in the bath, or
you'd like a reading session that
isn't dependent on battery life.
I don't know about you,
but I spend at least eight hours a day
a slave to the screen,
so the thought of curling up with
another humming LED display of an evening
fills me with dread.
I remember when at gigs,
it would be a sea of lighters,
a romantic fan's tribute to how much they love the song.
Then it was mobile phones held aloft,
so your loved one would listen to it too.
It then became a photo on a mobile phone,
then a video on a mobile phone,
and now it's an iPad held proudly.
Picture an intimate gig,
and the dickhead next to you is
watching the entire thing through an iPad,
his arms wobbling with the endurance,
his mind already forgetting what he's seen.
I want to argue over an over-folded Ordnance Survey map,
lend you my dog-eared Raymond Carver, well-loved,
be asked to sit down and look through your
physical,
actual,
tangible,
real-life photo album
(even if it's pictures of you at Disneyland, or
swimming with dolphins).
Don't put my address book into a memory chip,
that at one strike could be obliterated;
don't ruin a pub debate over who co-starred with
Meryl Streep in The River Wild by
looking it up on fucking IMDB;
I don't want to know,
I want to get there myself,
without you,
and your guest wifi,
and your shiny palm buddy,
a touch-screen conversation-killer;
I want us to wait for the photos to be developed;
a four-day limbo - a lesson in patience,
without deciding we look shit in that photo you've just shown us
on the display screen,
so could you take it again?

christmas-on-sea

take me up the high street and buy me
oversized gingerbread hearts
from european vendors with
cold fingers and
kind, crinkled eyes.
buy me a praline latte from a
corporate coffee chain and
we will talk about how christmassy we feel.
there is a tree,
outside the odeon,
that towers and sways with poor baubles;
decorations that look like someone has thrown them
from street level
and hoped for the best.
a sudden ice rink happens,
just shy of nando’s,
where small children risk severed hands and
broken ankles to the
blare of slade on repeat.
walk me under the railway bridge,
past ann summers’ festive display,
past the 99p shop bragging its slashed prices,
past mcdonalds and its flashing, police-like blue lights,
and take me past the doors of M&S,
where a hot breath of cinnamon and
middle class panic buying
pours out of the doors, up up and away.
let’s talk about how neverneverland used to have
the first christmas lights of the year,
and how creepy it was before it was bulldozed.
remind me of how many times I thought
I wanted to move away before realising that actually,
this is home,
this vagrant town,
this beautiful mess of cheap shops and aspiration;
this is, for two months of the year,
christmas on sea.

A Winter's Tale

Well, it's been a week now since NaNoWriMo finished… I didn't submit my word count to them in the end, because I kind of felt like I didn't need to: so no certificate for me, and in their eyes I am probably not a winner, but I'm still walking with the glow of knowing I got 51,355 words down in 30 days. PHEW.

Well done to everyone else who completed it!

I'm still working on it now, adding bits, completing backstory, and taking out the trite nonsense I bashed into it on off-days. I've given myself the deadline of 31 January to have it all tied up, and then I might just start sending it out. If I'm feeling particularly brave, I might post a preview of it on here…

In other news I mentioned that I was going to be published in the Railroad Poetry Project, so here it is! Big thanks to the gorgeous folk at Railroad for the lovely opportunity and early Christmas present :-)

Hope you're all well and starting to put up fairy lights and write your Christmas cards and generally Be Festive.

Have a great Christmas and see you for more poems in 2012…

Ray x

Nanos and railroads

Hi everyone,

I hope you're all well and digging the frosty mornings and stocking up on hot chocolate like me. I've not done much on the poetry front lately, but have completed my first ever collection, titled This is a Coastal Town, which is hopefully going to be turned into an exciting project, so watch this space.

I'm also doing NaNoWriMo - writing a 50,000 word novel in one month. I'm almost halfway through, and really enjoying the challenge. It came at the same time of starting a new job, which is pretty ridiculous timing, but the commute has proved invaluable as I attempt to tap-tap-tap my 1,600 words a day.

I have some poetic news... the lovely Railroad Poetry Project are publishing two of my poems in their second issue, due out later in November. It is a brilliant publication so I'm truly honoured to have not one but two poems in!

I'll post up a link once they're published, but for now I'll leave you to look out of your window and get excited about Christmas.

Much love

Ray x

15.09.11

the platform is a pebble’s width from the sand,
a wash of frothy sea my morning sound.
I smell salt, and
broken shells – ripe, bursting seaweed
and
newspaper print.

the train slicks into view,
a gleaming rocket,
pregnant
with station-bought coffees and
station-bought toast in
damp paper bags.

the city is erupting;
drills shake my feet and
charity buckets shake themselves
and
the street smells like
someone has blown out a birthday candle.
Sweet:
coffee shops with morning pastries,
and pavement dust, and sour:
cigarette smoke blown into faces.

a craving for rain
to wash it all clean,
and a craving for home,
for air you can breathe.