'Poetry', he says 'holds body and soul together, which has not always been the case.' The poem he is reading here today is about words, an appropriate subject for a poet, but which here take on strange Hitchcockian significance, almost a malevolence. A poet in the stasis of lockdown surrounded, as ever, by a persistent swarms of words.
Don’t get me wrong,
some of my best friends
are words,
especially my own.
There are more of them about
than there used to be:
they stick to your face
and drop to the ground
with odd numbers of legs
protesting at the air.
They don’t string together
on the page and stay there:
like birds on the wire
they abandon you, autumn
can come any time.
There’s no knowing whither
they’ll be bound: perhaps
to the forgotten crossroads
where an adult’s words
manhandled you aside
as you tried
to describe the thunder.
There’s no ceiling to belief
in their power: what they say
goes before they wither.
There is so much hurt in words,
there are not enough
eyes in the world
to flinch from it,
those eyes lit up
that are looking hungrily
for words to do justice to them.
The words are greater in number
than the maggot or the starling,
than the sum of meaning.
Friends tell me, sit and listen
to what’s there where none
penetrate, but they do,
through cracks and keyholes
and channelled down the wind
in the grass where I lie.
It's a wise man
who can turn away from them.
Even as I look up the clouds are
His Author's page at Silverwood Books:
A Video poem Sequence: Late Late Love:
