Some Poems

Some Poems

 

  Sections of this book may be photocopied, passed around, posted online, scribbled on, etc…

  However:

  This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/.

  ©Oliver Delgaram-Nejad (2012)

 

  Contents

  Lecture (08:58) 7

  Older 8

  People Watching 9

  Looking 10

  Waiting for Songbirds 11

  Whimsy 12

  Canned Life 13

  A Bachelor’s Tragedy 15

  Insomnia 16

  Nursing Home 17

  Teacher 18

  Melting Man 19

  The Farm 20

  Network 21

  Autumn 22

  Graves 23

  Coffee and Cigarettes 24

  Distant Times 26

  The Life Manifesto 27

  Anon 29

  Collector 30

  Weary 32

  Death 33

  Closed 34

  Time 35

  Age 37

  Ghosts 38

  Early Hours 39

  The Odds 40

  ‘Pick a Spirit’ 41

  Industry 42

  Party (a Beat Poem) 43

  The Grey 50

  Rebel’s Epitaph 52

  Ghosts II 54

  Horizon 55

  Another Tired Epiphany 56

  Confession 57

  Petroleum 58

 

  Lecture

  (08:58)

  A shuffle of breath,

  Fractured coughs,

  A laugh or two,

  All brains turned off.

  Older

  The signs creep,

  Although it sounds cliche,

  The little things:

  The morning shave,

  Feel but a blink...

  A sigh revives

  Any thoughts misplaced

  In memories lost,

  To stress, and age.

  People

  Watching

  Don’t watch the people,

  Watch the patterns.

 

  The habits, the gestures,

  The shared reactions.

  Looking

  To revisit a bench,

  In the park of nonsense -

  Where as children

  We felt colour as drugs:

  A pool of rain, reflects

  Fleeting wings.

  As the moss-oak bench,

  Ages.

  Waiting for

  Songbirds

  A cigarette drips,

  Between fingers and lip,

  As the dark of December,

  Hangs.

  Whimsy

  To recollect

  Fluorescent childhood dreams:

  A stuffed bear,

  Clutched firm in hand

  At the love-torn seams.

  Canned Life

  I was born on a belt in the factory of man,

  Rolled into a home, labeled and stamped.

 

  My life was made honest by ink on a page,

  And my future controlled by a system of wage.

  My whole life thus far, two decades of lame,

  Incompetent bureaucratic, institutional reign

  Has seen us shuffled

  Down the educational lane,

  Where we are unified products

  For unified gain.

  A Bachelor’s

  Tragedy

  When young and stirring from his bed,

  Before hopes and days so bright,

  He weary lifts a cheek of youth,

  And takes to teenage flight.

  And when returned in the half of morn,

  To shades of amber light,

  He scans a home so blankly left:

  His prison cell by night.

  Insomnia

  The spiritual hour:

  The clock,

  Static, stagnant,

  Glowers.

  Nursing Home

  When I am old,

  Give me white walls

  And false family, dressed in green.

  Bring me pills

  To slow my growth,

  And suffocate my dreams.

  Teacher

  Lenses, looking out:

  At the silent body,

  Jostling.

  Melting Man

  Birthed from earth-water

  Gathered with little hands,

  We laboured in the ice-dark dawn

  To mould our image of a man,

  Modeling our fathers’ clothes.

  The Farm

  A jackdaw’s calls

  Ring out the rusted shells of Tractors.

  The grey fog, engulfing, perished to

  Cloud.

  As shadows, linger

  In the twilight.

  Network

  Come join the network with me -

  Watch your friends in the freak tent, see,

  See their pictures when drunk,

  Their reactions when dumped,

  Just sign here to... 'tacitly' agree.

  Autumn

  The pot hums a feral anthem

  As the light at my window dies.

  A candle stagnates on the sill,

  The autumn wind cries.

  Graves

  Broken skin burned by bracken, toil.

  An earth printed palm.

  A shovel, older than memories,

  The slight horizon calm.

  Years of making others’ beds,

  Time spent digging.

  The wind and rain he must endure,

  Whilst waiting for the living.

  Coffee and Cigarettes

  In murky pleasure, fingers rest.

  Cradling a cigarette – hand rolled,

  Wrinkled raw.

  Smouldering.

  Pressed between lip, and the grimace of youth

  As gentle licks of grey

  Obscure his vision’s corner,

  Flickering.

  As new born temporary pleasure,

  Living short its life

  To the car horn muse.

  Soon finds itself in a sunken pit

  Face down,

  Ground in between battlements.

  On nicotine fuelled days

  Where dull, heavy musk hangs malignant.

  He sits.

  And - raising a cup of crude

  To toast the capital bullshit passing

  Peering over near pressed vessel,

  Straining through a blur of steam.

     

  Distant Times

  An envisioned time.

  In which thought itself -

  Perceived a crime.

  A time where rights remain for few,

  Where the masses praise

  Those our fathers slew.

     

  The Life Manifesto

  I am twenty years old today.

  I know nothing.

  I am thirty years old today.  

  I know a bit, but not what I’m doing.

  I am forty years old today.

  What little I thought I knew… turns out it was wrong.

  I am fifty years old today.

  I know more than you sonny.

  I am sixty years old today.

  I’m tired of knowing.

  I am seventy years old today.

  I never appreciated people.

  Anon

  In the midd
le of the minutes

  Between nine and ten,

  An unknown walked in,

  Grasping a pen.

  He scribbled a face on the whiteboard wall,

  It was a face from the internet:

  So we’re brothers after all.

  Collector

  I’m a bit of a collector, me.

  (I like discographies, personally)

  Why I collect?

  (It’s funny you ask.)

  I never gave thought to obsession,

  (Too busy obsessing.)

  These are in order of release.

  Those are alphabetical.

  (Don’t touch them.)

  I haven’t gotten round to those.

  (Subsequently, I can’t look at them.)

  Weary

  Fear, has worn thin:

  And misinformation, therein.

  Death

  A great wall of slate.

  Too tall, too wide -

  To climb, to strafe:

  A firm divide.

  Closed

  A sign.

  Typical of a time, now snatching at its last,

  An ebbing breath.

  Branded bright with offset colours

  Telling of better days,

  Sweetshop-styled, screaming all is fine

  With the unshaken dignity

  Of older ways.

  Time

  I fell out of the night

  And in to the day.

  Got up from the morning,

  Struggled into the bathroom of afternoon.

  Stared into the mirror of mid-day gone,

  And shuffled down the stairwell into evening.

  As I found a seat amidst the lonely aisles,

  Settled into worry,

  A look at the clock,

  No sooner to realise,

  I had fallen back into the night.

  Age

  A man of age,

  Decades rinsed his mudded fingers.

  Raises a wet-dog brow in the face of rain,

  His life half lived, half lingered.

  Ghosts

  I sat there in the rain,

  On the cracking pavement.

  I watched them walk with apathy,

  But a step before enslavement.

  Early Hours

  A seagull grooms.

  The harbour sleeps.

  The sky a-stir,

  Responsibility creeps.

  The Odds

  I will not die regretful,

  Nor dissatisfied,

  For I raced against the millions

  To call this life my prize.

  ‘Pick a Spirit’

  The night strays

  Into a dream,

  A retreat:

  A wall,

  On which I lean

  When under throws

  Of volleyed wants and drowned woe,

  To stolen escapes,

  Beneath the wet.

  To smoke,

  To dwell.

  To taste regret.

  Industry

  A tower stood before me,

  Of at least a thousand feet.

  It took my right to light away,

  And sold me back its heat.

  I stood submerged in the shade and cold

  Of broken bricks, stones of old,

  And in a fleeting moment learned

  The world is not a gift,

  But yearned.

  Party (a Beat Poem)

  So it’s about half ten

  And my then friend, Ben

  Is walking with me to the shops.

  We chat shit about lit

  As we’re acquainted through college.

  So together we’re relatively

  Secure in the knowledge

  That at least we can agree

  On poetry.

  As I flip my wrist

  To look at my watch

  I turn back to notice

  That Ben has stopped.

  He’s gazing amazed at

  An open front door

  That’s bustling with boozers

  And music that soars.

  “Let’s crash it!” Ben demands

  Like the house party fascist that he is,

  But I have to admit that

  My state was, somewhat unfit

  To be called ‘responsibly sober.’

  So with a heavy eyed grin

  I say “OK, let’s go in”

  And together we both wander over.

  As we move through the ranks

  Of the bodies that flank us,

  Past the guy with a guitar,

  That we could hear from afar,

  And the girl who sits just there by the wall,

  Twirls her hair whilst absently staring

  Into a beer,

  We stumble upon the kitchen.

  Here the music is nearer

  And after an hour passes,

  Along with some clear glasses

  Of spirits and wine,

  We think we’re fine

  But then, it suddenly hits me.

  We’re crashers, I remember

  And as if our agenda was destined to fail,

  We would now have to bail,

  As just when we make a mission

  Out of appearing exempt from suspicion

  As if by intuition, some bloke asks casually:

  “So how do you guys know Dave then?”

  Ben decides to aid by looking artfully away

  Whilst scratching his balls,

  So it seems to me

  That the responsibility falls…

  “Dave!” I say, looking absently away,

  “We go way back make man,

  Holidays in Cornwall and that,

  Y’know, caravans?”

  The bloke goes away,

  Presumably in search

  Of the mysterious Dave,

  And so I turn to Ben and say “Go mate!

  We’ve been made!”

  We bolt for the door past the prep lads,

  The muso and a chap on the floor,

  Ben’s grabbing bottles and fags as he goes,

  When a voice asks aloud

  “Hey Dave do you know those two?”

  Hiding our faces we pick up the pace,

  Pushing our way to a tidy escape.

  We burst out the door and onto the street,

  Finding it hard to stay firm on our feet.

  Despite getting myself caught on the garden gate,

  It has to be said,

  …Best party to date.

     

  The Grey

  On slow-light morns

  I meet the grey,

  An absent sky,

  It’s light, afraid.

  It heralds the bleak

  The tired, mundane,

  Most loathsome, most

  Despairing of days.

  And yet this day, though bleak,

  Though vision frayed

  And blue sky strangled

  By the 'gulfing grey,

  After a shower and an eye-shut shave

  The bleakest day,

  Is realised.

  I am awake.