Biography

Writer.

I'll be appearing as John The Baptist on Friday 29th Jan at the Tudor House, Wigan.

I am one third of John The Baptist and The Second Coming:
www.myspace.com/johntogher
Listen to the audio file at the top of the page


Literature Co-ordinator of NXNW Arts Festival
www.nxnwfestival.co.uk

Book of poetry with illustrations by Anna Smith out now, called 'The Importance of Magic in the Void', available from The Novel House, Royal Arcade, Wigan or email for more details...

I run monthly events at the Tudor House Hotel, Wigan.
2nd Thursday: Write Out Loud Open Mic
3rd saturday: The Arty Types Show (music, poetry, art, film)

Professional Guinness drinker.

Samples

The Synaesthetic Hour Starts With

Learning the alphabet again,
but this time with Richard of York.
Smelling the onion in your name,
seeing the personality
in your hair, with it’s dense wave of chestnut.

Static from the vinyl throws a
hundred tiny stars in my eyes.
Overwhelming, the white flashes
taste a little like fresh monk fish
and I drown in the noise of our new start.

You say to take a minute but
as I sit and count to sixty
I hear a symphony start up
and I can’t sit still so I take
your hand in mine and we dance till noon’s song.






Ungalet

Lashings of rain. We see a foetal beggar outside,
forehead touching the rain-soaked cobbles of Prague,
his bald patch tipping a copper plate,
humble to the chink-chink of pennies.

More lashings. We use yesterday’s Times
as an umbrella of information.
Golem underfoot chases us to Ungalet.
Stumbling, we enter with ink, black ink

stained on our hands and sodden paper on our shoulders.
A fog hits our eyes and we squint at little fi res
held, in warm fi ngers, glowing, lighting
faceless shapes. We blink and we blink.

Then the noise, seemingly chaotic,
frenzied shakes, tinkles and toots, the pull of a long trombone,
a skipping beat, looseness in the wrists, the gravity
defying notes willing us to think and to think.

We’re off ered dark froth in glasses
and dumplings on plates, so we sit in scotch-red seating.
An electric-haired enthusiast
in the front row takes a drink, takes a drink.

His partner yawns, black caterpillars
framing her eyes, as he nods
and applauds hypnotically, robotically. I stare
at the kink, that maddening kink

In the eyes of the players.
A bearded man approaches in an almost-clean
white shirt, tells us, “You two should have been
here an hour and five minutes ago.”
We look at each other, eyebrows raised.
The trumpets pipe down, the piano plays
Morse code, and the lights, the hue,
glows pink, glows pink.






The Importance Of Magic In Th e Void

The ironblack eyebrow of Hughes
raises an inch as I arrive
and like a sad A Minor Chord
Kundera sits in his corner
as I walk through this place, the void.

I’m offered a whiskey tumbler;
taste my soul in its afterbreath.
Virginia Woolf, the curve of her
intelligent nose running through
her prose, gives a toasts to the void.

JD Salinger pours red wine,
so that men, women and Gods can
line their parallel hearts again.
But the gloom continues, persists.
I fear I’ll be lost in the void.

I try to forget the fizzing
cortex of regret, of the holes
in our memory that are random
and guilty, of the journey I
have taken to reach here, the void.

In this room full of drunk writers
we wait for the magic, that spark
of inspiration, whether from
absinthe or lovers, the devil
or God, we need to leave the void.

Then it happens, Herman Hesse,
steering his canoe offers an
escape through the canyon of dreams
and we ride, ride on those rafters
thinking through it all of
the importance of magic in the void.






Piccadilly

I meet you
at the statue
on the hour
and think of
the drowning grip
I have on your face.
Your onion seed
eyes are ablaze.
I sigh, watch
the feathered clouds

disconnect above us.
You give a tug
on my sleeve,
“We’re a clumsy version
of a good idea,
like pterodactyls.”
I freeze-frame,
see you entwined
in bringing defeat,
deaf to my melancholy.
I stare at the chip
in your front tooth.






A Tribute To The Stray

It was just beginning to hit me
how lonely everybody is
when a woman with extraordinarily
tweezed eyebrows, like birds seen in flight
from miles away,
bumped into me and told me I
resembled a friend of hers from high school.

She reminded me of my Mother,
who struck up conversations
with strangers on luminous
Spring evenings when the clouds
smudged the sky.

The woman with the two birds
winged away and I stared
at the onion flowers spangled
out across the grass and breathed in.
The air was fresh and tight,
like rain.
Sounds of laughter blew down
the street showing the distance
between them and me.

I pictured the only time I saw my Father cry.
It was ugly and limp.
I ran to him and put my hand
on his and guided the phone back to its
cradle. His voice sounded
the way it gets when he hears a song he loves
sung perfectly.
I placed him in his sad bed
and told him not to worry.

Then I forgot all that and moved
my thoughts to another town.
One where I rage against
the heated winds and act
like the son they wanted.







A Chance Meeting After A Ten Year Absence

She holds a rosary in her hand
yet keeps the devil up her skirt.
She picks the hours of least interruption
to dip her feet in the colours of the earth.

He thought himself a king,
holding a secret royalty in his chest;
with the depth of his heart a kingdom
and the curls on his head a crown.

She sees him walking towards her one day,
and a faint recognition ignites.
He hasn’t a clue but is drawn to her eyes.

She calls out, “If you are who I think you are,
I’ve always wanted to make love to you.”
“Well, who do you think I am?” he replies,
remembering his social chameleon tendencies.





Watching You Masturbate In The Style Of The Old Testament

I admire your capacity of lung,
the way you take in a breath,
slyly fondle a breast
and tickle a nipple
into a nub of submission,
while the blood of an ox trickles
across your chest with the
ease and fl ow of a biblical river.

The lungs of a sacrifi cial ox lie
mangled, entwined with your body,
off ered up to some God of Fetish.

Your red lipstick puckers as a
finger slips into a dark pubic place.

Plenty, the juices of pleasure
that drip into the void of barren
dreamscapes, as the urban night
terrors chase you to a place
you find a guilty comfort.

I watch as you writhe
in blood, sinew and flesh,
twisting your features
through the ecstasy of a wicked soul,
lost in a fantasy, alone,
forever hiding your love
in a desolate sanguine room of lust
and perversion.






How Great It Was To Make Love to Aretha Franklin Circa 1970

Travelling to meet at some motel along
Route 66, or Highway 51.
Passing children throwing stones
at empty glass bottles,
a satisfying tish every now and then.

Arriving at the deepest hour,
smelling the cedar-wood foundations,
as some black cat pours itself
from a fence to a path.

Slipping in, like a delicate, dreamy fish,
amberlamps glowing and leopard-skin prints.
A baroque clock on the wall melts
into the fuchsia patterned paper
and the throat of the wind chokes outside.

Seeing her gnaw on the wing of a chicken in bed,
greasy fingers and lips; her nightdress,
corners her curves, a silken red.

Moving hands across her sand-coffee skin,
kissing her rose of a smile and unfolding,
until we build to that moment -
the only purest present.
That moment,
that moment,
that moment -
of absolute orgasm…

Collapsing, with the birds
whistling outside, duped into daylight.

All poems are copyright of the originating author. Permission must be obtained before using or performing others' poems.

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