New Poem: Frown

I was waiting for the dentist and the receptionist said,

‘Why the frown?’ I said I didn’t really know and it was

something I started doing when I was about ten. People

noticed it even then. Maybe I thought it looked serious

and I wanted to be as serious as my brother or my father.

Don’t we often want to be more than we are? I said, the

plus side being that it helps us carry on, but the down side

being that we are always unsatisfied, but then, that doesn’t

spring up as if by magic from inside, our desire is manufactured,

teams of people sit in towers of steel and glass figuring out

how they can get us to want stuff and even if we can’t afford it,

we still yearn for it, and isn’t it this the reason why we stick

with the system, eh, we’d rather have what we can’t have, than

change the fact that we can’t have it? She said she was

just wondering if I was bothered about the time of the next

appointment.

New Poem: Dogs

My friend said, ‘Don’t buy a dog from a pet shop.’

I said, ‘OK.’

He said, ‘Good one.’

I said, ‘Actually I wasn’t thinking of buying a dog.’

A few days later I thought I wasn’t thinking of buying

a dog but if I was thinking of buying a dog, where

would I go if I was?’

My friend had gone to see his relatives in Germany

but I was in the queue at the post office when I

heard a conversation behind me. It was two women.

One of them had a dog.

‘I got him at a refuge.’

‘Is he clean?’

‘Not really.’

I found the address of a dog refuge. It was in the

woods off the motorway. The dogs were in cages.

As I walked past, they came up to the fence and

looked at me. One of them seemed to be laughing

at me. I stopped at another one and looked very

closely at it. Some kind of mongrel. A bit sheepdog.

A bit labrador. It said, ‘There’s not much point in

getting me. I won’t come.’

‘Do you get a choice in the matter?’ I said.

‘Try me,’ it said.

‘No, no,’ I said, ‘I’m really not into forcing anyone to

do anything. I’m not even sure I want a dog.’

‘Really? It’s not our job to help you work out your

hang-ups about dogs, you know,’ it said.

‘Yes. No. That’s right. I wasn’t working out anything.’

It went on looking at me very closely.

‘Are you that poet who does the Waitrose adverts?’

‘No,’ I said, ‘that’s not me.’

‘Out of interest,’ I said, ‘why wouldn’t you come with

me, if I really wanted you to be my dog?’

‘You said it just there,’ it said, ’in here I’m part of

something bigger than me. All you can talk about

is “me and my dog”...”my dog and me”...”what I want,

what I don’t want”.’

‘I could make it bigger than that. When I walk through

the park in the morning, there’s a meet-up place where

dog people all get together with their dogs.’

‘Same old crap,’ it said, ‘“we only meet because the

people want to meet”.’

‘Not good?’ I said.

‘In here, we have a strong sense of being in something

together.’

‘You are. You’re in here together,’ I said.

I had a feeling that that wasn’t the right thing to say. The

dog turned round and walked off to the back of the cage.

New Poem: Doughnut

I was having something to eat with a friend of mine.

He took a doughnut out of his bag and started to

eat it. I wanted to know how many people in the world

were biting a doughnut. They would have to be real

doughnuts not doughnut-like things, like you get in

France and Germany. I thought two and a half

million. My friend said maybe ten million, bearing in

mind it was daytime in the USA. I used to like

doughnuts. I haven’t eaten one for twenty years.

My friend ate his doughnut, scrumpled up the paper

bag and asked me if I had a tissue to wipe his mouth.

I said, ‘I always have a tissue somewhere on me but I

haven’t used a tissue for wiping my mouth after eating

a doughnut for more than twenty years.’

He said, ‘Really?’

New Poem: Noise

We were indoors when we heard a noise. My flatmate

said, ‘Can you hear that?’

I said, ‘What?’

He said, ‘Listen.’

I said, ‘I am listening.’

‘No,’ he said, ‘shuttup and then you’ll hear it.’

I stood absolutely still.

‘I can hear you breathing,’ I said.

‘No, not that, ‘he said, ‘that.’

‘That’s the point,’ I said, ‘everytime you say, ‘that’ I

don’t know the ‘that’ you mean.’

‘There,’ he said.

‘Just because you change the ‘that’ to ‘there’ doesn’t

make it any easier.’’

‘That,’ he said.

‘Ah, you’ve switched back.’ I said.

‘Listen,’ he said.

‘Aeroplane,’ I said.

‘That’s not an aeroplane,’ he said.

An aeroplane passed overhead.

‘That’s an aeroplane,’ I said.

‘I know that’s an aeroplane,’ he said, ‘I meant the noise.’

‘The aeroplane is making a noise,’ I said.

‘I don’t mean the aeroplane noise,’ he said.

I listened really hard.

‘Do you think it’s an animal?’ I said.

‘I think it’s industrial,’ he said.

‘There’s no industry left round here,’ I said.

‘It’s something with an industrial sound,’ he said.

‘Animals can make industrial sounds,’ I said, ‘the cats

make a kind of dvvvvvv sound sometimes when they’re

sleeping.’

‘There!’ he said.

‘That’s someone’s fridge,’ I said.

‘No one’s fridge is that loud,’ he said.

‘Wrong,’ I said, ‘people are buying ancient fridges these days,

Some of them make that noise.’

‘How ancient?’

‘I don’t know, fridges from the 1950s. I’ve seen them,’ I said.

‘It’s a drill,’ he said.

‘Or a sander,’ I said.

‘Who would be sanding at this time?’

‘Or a cement mixer.’

‘Yes, it does sound like a cement mixer,’ he said.

‘No I meant, ‘who would be using a cement mixer at this

time?’’ I said.

‘But it does really sound like a cement mixer,’ he said.

‘There goes another aeroplane,’ I said.

New Poem: Jacket

The guy next to me on the bus did his jacket up

and said to me, ‘When I was a kid, we didn’t have

velcro.’

‘No,’ I said, ‘same for me. No velcro.’

‘Funny, isn’t it?’ he said, ‘we got along fine with

zips and buttons.’

‘Yep,’ I said.

‘Mind you, not many people know that zips had

to be invented,’ he said.

‘If you asked them, ‘Were zips

invented?’, I think most people would say that they

were,’ I said.

‘What about buttons?’

‘I like buttons,’ I said, ‘my mum had a button box.’

‘Do you think most people would know that buttons

were invented?’

‘I think so,’ I said.

He said, ‘I’m not so sure. People take buttons for

granted, these days.’

‘The zip on my jacket isn’t working,’ I said.

He said, ‘The thing about velcro is the amount of

time it saves.’

‘Really?’ I said.

‘You bloody bet it does,’ he said, ‘every time I

velcro up this jacket, I save about three or four

seconds. Imagine what that is across a lifetime.’

‘Well, it wouldn’t be a lifetime for you, though,’ I

said, ‘because velcro only came in later, didn’t

it?’

‘That’s right,’ he said, ‘but think about it from the

kids’ point of view. They’re saving hours and hours

already. It’s why I feel so good about the future,’ he

said. ‘These kids are going to do so much more

than people of my generation.’

‘I think that’s what my grandparents thought when

the zip came in.’

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘My grandmother lived for about ten years in

America,’ I said, ‘and she really liked zips.’

‘Listen,’ he said and pulled the jacket open very

quickly, ‘every time I do that, I think, it was only

a few years ago, you would never have heard

that. I can’t imagine a world without the sound of

velcro.’

‘That’s not what Paul Simon sang was it?’ I said.

‘Sang what?’ he said.

‘No, nothing, ‘The Sound of Silence’, you know.’

‘No,’ he said. ‘No I don’t know about that.’

New poem: Falafel

I was thinking about the indeterminacy of being,

and the uncertainty principle. I was wondering

how many times approximation falls short of the

precise point and where or how this intersects

with the universal tendency towards entropy. I

saw people in the street around me burdened

with a sense of inexactitude, people who displace

disappointment on to postponement and alongside

the road was a light box with the flashing sign

‘Delays possible’. I went into a cafe and bought

a falafel wrap, without the chili sauce.

New Poem: Dress

I was watching a channel that I didn’t know existed

and a man was explaining that they had been doing

visual research on street clothes and they had picked

up on the meme of the ragged dress. The ragged

dress, he said, spoke as much of absence as presence

and that modernity asks us to represent the binary.

There were some stills of people sleeping rough and

some moving footage of refugees resting. The man

pointed at the clothes and said that there were gaps,

‘aporia’ through which we see the body. The body he

explained is never ‘innocent’ but is always constructed

in time and space and whether we inflict damage on it,

or enclose it, or restrict its movements or eroticize it,

these are choices. The man then opened another file

and showed the designs he had made for “The Ragged

Dress”. I was watching a channel that I didn't know

existed.