Hello, and thank you for subscribing to my newsletter. I hope you have enjoyed the articles and fiction so far. This is my first Poetry post, and it contains work from my first collection, which will be published in 2022.
Interestingly the title poem of the collection was written in 2021, six years after I began the collection in 2015. I waited all this time to write it, as it’s the final piece of the puzzle. So unless you’ve tuned into various Manchester radio stations and podcasts in the last few weeks, you won’t have heard this one before.
“I hate most poetry. But I love this.” - Instagram fan
You can pre-order this collection here.
FALSE VACUUM
I’m a big fan of this one. I’ve read it on the radio a few times now, which is not just because it’s one of precious few “clean” poems but because it encapsulates the alien energy I intend to exert upon the world.
time-drenched and weary, the new stone rolls downhill
to violence, to crashing waves and moss-took, mistook
for something worth having:
Crystal/Coin/Thing/Love
(evermore nebulous)
and uphill the silence
where blood-drip, captured by fabric
is silenced. My arteries
the barrel. The gunshot spitting of
rain-blood-language
into tautened sleeves and soil
[some timeline tautology again & again]
and it’s always rolling
[a dizziness brings a universe to its knees]
and it’s always flowing
in perpetuity, into those same three tributaries
and fates beyond faith
[a body crumples halfway into water]
so, it’s neither here nor there
the spin uncertain
the arrow blurred
it’s been collapsing all this time
folding unfolding, sitting in ditches
before flowing on again
finding a new pocket to rest in
before the prologue is rewritten
Geodesic iii
I’ll be reading this at the BBC soon, which is fun. It’s the sequel to another two poems which were born from just one poem that I cut in half. It’s a whole narrative about a couple meeting each other at the wrong time, rushing to catch up with themselves, and failing.
and what’s that? A looming sense of dread
you never hear about in the rom coms?
a cartoonish moment in my head
the idea of rolling out of your bed and still rolling
and not stopping, slowing only in ditches
and false hopes and vacuums
and now the ghost of me appears behind my own living head
as I eat breakfast, and he looks at you as my younger self
once did, but he’s busy staring idly at rapidly cooling beans on toast
and my ghost tells you
“it’s metastable, this metanarrative
and there’s no time to explain so listen
I could be your spin[e]less particle
I could roll around unseen
I could be your geodesic
or I could cause a scene
there’s a void in this circular table
where longing hands can’t go
this whole place is too heavy
no wonder it went too slow”
and at that precise moment my younger self, future-deaf
and ignorant, will say
“could you pass the sauce?”
and my future ghost will vanish like foreshadowing
or the lingering smoke at your front door, his style snuffed out
before it starts, his return to rhyme a fleeting embrace of nostalgia
at a bus station, a dimly remembered fondness ten years hence
and it’s over before it starts
the time traveller falls back home
the alien falls out of love[1]
[1] To play it all again, flip back to GEODESIC
There is a footnote here in the book, leading the reader to another poem as the record of the story skips. I play a lot with time and space in my writing, as you will know if you have already got Who Built The Humans?
ENDING
This was the last poem I wrote the night before finishing university in 2017. It was a time in which I realised, quite suddenly, that I had nothing to return to. I had defined myself by my academic achievements, but the nature of our assignments meant I very rarely had the opportunity or time to finish something. I was also in the process of falling out of love, both with myself and the world and people around me. I had at least managed to chisel a novel together by bending and breaking cross-subject assignment rules (working on parts of the novel across various classes, rather than starting new projects for each) but I was also noticing a desire within myself to self-publish, not to bow down to whatever the big publishing houses might want from my novel.
So in short, I was very alone. I still am today, but I have a tribe and I shall meet some of its members in 2022. Also, substack has messed with the format. The chasm is supposed to be straight, but that’s okay.
ENDING
if I go back now I’ll lose it all
leave my hands on blank paper
elbows on the bar
shoulders under ghost weight
head against your wooden ribs
tongue before an audience
nose to open fields
skin on leather sofas
eyes in all your books
ears to these old walls
if I go home now I’ll fall apart
leave my hips in the turnstile
break my wrists against the doors
lose my knees on the bus
abandon feet on yellow lines
crossed legs on platform five
cold ears against the glass
tired eyes rolling away
heart left in some room somewhere
mind fighting to go back
crossed timelines on the train line
And that’s it. If you have the time to comment and offer your thoughts, even if they are positive ones, I would appreciate it. Sometimes it feels I am yelping into a vacuum, but this substack is helping with that.