We Poets

We poets, not many of us left, are left to starve while they give all the means of life to footballers and pop stars and other soulless idiots.
All the energy, all the value, and all the time, given away for free to atrocious, selfish, privileged, witless bastards, who want to reach "the top", whatever that is. When you get there, you realise it's nothing. A hollow wind echoing in an empty chamber, a diamond made out of glass, a paper tiger with no teeth, a Hollywood western saloon with a blank wall behind it.
People don't go mad you know. Something happens to them. A thing called life. That's all. They aren't mad, or sad, or bad. They've just lived, that's all. And it's enough to fucking break your heart, life, to break it.
The poet is the human paradigm. In him is seen all, all the failures of homo sapiens, all the failures and all the hopes, and all the weakness, and I'll tell you the insight he has gained therein: Love is important. That's all. He thinks it might even be the meaning of life.
Whenever I wake up, I am infinitely disgusted and disappointed to find myself still in existence.
A sad story, bittersweet.  The last act of the oldest human drama; heartbreak. I've written the same lines over and over, and still I can write no other. I've written, in my heart's blood, my last words, a farewell to mother earth, who loved me imperfectly. (Good idea for a poem).

Real Life

Real life, real life, real life! How many times do we have to wake up and be resigned to it! How grand is what goes unseen, what is never known, the private trundlings around undertaken by us all in solitude, the long spaces of silence, the little turnings-round to breathe some incidental stutter of comment and then rise and depart to go in some other room and live out your life forever there, unwatched, uncommanded, in life which is a kind of freedom in itself.
Maybe they talk over trivia and happiness inside, mouths full of food, slurping, spending all night in front of TV, such an upright, healthy, respectable thing for the old to do. Interrupt each other with melodious, mumbling gossips, interrupted too by the resoundant electronic voice of the television, eternally private and unseen in the halts and honesties of real life, sighing for themselves.
Softness, desertion, the horrible reality of an empty room.

His grandparents 2

Gosh and groan for this real place, these real spectres in their homes of bricks and mortar, hush in their home, the creak of wooden floorboards on carpeted stairs, brown benevolence in pasty-plated meals in the happy kitchen, shh and watch it darken down inside when no-one's there, this maison mordant in blue homeliness, careful in boring midnights, pillared with slimy slate and strong beams of oak reinforcing the musty loft, of home, this soft and bounteous home, with clashing doors and pittering steps and boxed-in, bricked in rooms holding borrowed, calamitous desire. Kitchen sinks, clattery devilish pipes, artifices of faucet and silvery h20s plashing enamel, the people inside inwardly collectivising in the drear, snoring, lumping, living out their lives till they die.
Hush, pshaw, pluf, the vagaries of breath are what constitute life inside. Utterly soft in breath, eyeballs quickly roaming up and down and round room, expurging like a bellows the puffs of rolling phew, slowly creeping, the cells and hairs of the body, metabolising, reinventing particles for fuel-like growth and thoughts of sleep.
Sigh now, humph in your righteousness, creak up from your chair, roam stiffly through to kitchen breathing from nostrils, all softly, achingly alive, amidst perpetual rolls of memory, and though their lives are more or less over, the old, still they're at the centre with their souls not yet withered, but ripe, bright with superior understanding, all full of a perfect, still love.
And yet now, in their eyes, see them, they're all full of hush, a kind of hushing sorrow, especially when asleep they are already dead in a warm, embittered hibernation. All the crags of their skin, the endless, duplicitous wrinkles, the tired-out old skin of knuckly hands, enwrapped and mummified, prepared already, in the heart of life, for death. They are as if turned to stone, statues of grief already in their age. Awaiting with sour, bedevilled courage the imminent grave. Hush now they're asleep.

His grandparents

An old lady his grandmother, respectable in proud livingrooms, and grandfather too when he was alive, the kin of happy old couple you'd find anywhere, frosted whitehair, glasses perhaps, content and weary with muddled livingroom shrewdness and TV, dressing sadly in grey dreary sweaters and maybe respectable slacks, old gran, with furry cat reclining drowsily on sofa cushions, and she herself, travailing pickily from putting kettle on in kitchen to livingroom again, has occasion to laugh sometimes at the memory of the fact that she's lived so long and can see the folly of life for what it is, can see the wheel of life and death in a wistful, almost despairing, yet comfortable way. Folding hands on lap as she peers at TV to tut at news with grave undertones of tradition.
And she in her dun sepulchral hall with its flowery, respectable ornamentations or faded workingclass wallpapers, has a dim plastic telephone sitting on a little utility table.
Crude and muttering she may use it sometimes to chat, all in grim-mouthed straightness, on the horrors of the modern world or perhaps joys of it, standing folding arms and musing, the phone maybe is an off-white old lady kind with a dial still and not even buttons, and with an old crackened number implanted safely in it since some forgotten night in the 70s. It's the channel through which flows all the trivialities of eternity and family and gossip and where the heart of soft remembrance remains. A token of modernity in respectable scented homes. 

A Giro

Unemployed Robert. Gets up on certain days out of sluggish bed to yawn, slams door behind to step lightly onto his next errand, travels here n thereabouts with love and hate struggling for supremacy in his mind.
Or they sends him a little scrap o paper stuck through his letterbox and he opens it with wearisome hate at government like we all have, surveys the stern departmental exhortations, the black n white scrawly print, signs his quick name on the form saying "I am actively seeking work and am entitled to this money" and clumps to post it off again. That big, grey department, shady in their rooms, humble with power and pretensions of being public servants, sitting around at desks in front of computer screens clickety-clicking, ordinary men and ladies with ordinary dumb homes, receive it like a row of facts and figures and registrations and numbers to click it nearly on their windowscreen computery file, caring absolutely nothing for it in their efficiency, and then plumf! Three days later he gets girocheque through letterbox, ordered there by the shady lady secretaries and government misanthropes and he goes, cashes it, takes home bundles of paper and so on, ad nauseam... Grotesque unemployment benefit, he hates it, makes him sick.

His Parents

And his mommy and daddy, respectable themselves in the burdened responsibilities of home and job and children, yet happy with it, grim in married intercomplexities and the joy of home, the vast joke of it all, the sly Saturday afternoon mumblings and redhaired once-youthful football wisdoms of his father, and commonplace perhaps joky mother, horrible in workingclass complicity, harassed and enjoying with vast blankness their kids and even the semi-serious realisation of son Robert upstairs.
Ah there they are, hopeful with TVs in dusk, warm in marriage and the pain of love, the family, domineering, wise, indomitable downstairs. Cooking and running the household and cleaning up and settling down, controlling finances with sometimes strict eyes on stuff and even the emptiness of partial white trash despair. See their tight, hallowed hearts, their sad dingy histories of 60s and 70s, the feelings they have as parents and begetters, middleaged softness having brought up kids and worked all the time only to be left abandoned in this horrible suburbia.
And the vengeful, despicable way he considers them, himself suddenly having a great, huffy, giving-up contempt. A real dark and fatalistic disappointment he had for his parents which is the same grand, almost grievingly angry disappointment he had for others. Him upstairs in independent silence or happy calm-mouthed minding his own business, lounging with disgust upstairs, mild resignation as he considers the dumbness of his peers.
And after cashing giro the scrappy twists of note and paltry coin he's left with, after giving a chunk of it away for rent. Till suddenly he cheaply thinks of economy sometimes and worries again to wonder about sighs connected with only one note left in jacket pocket to last him two weeks, or having to finger together and peer over the silver coins or even evil-smelling brown coppers to meagre his way into saving up again. Lack of money, perilous scrapings together, having to plumb the depth of your pocket only to gouge up a bunch of coins and scrappy pompous notes like so much dross.

A land 2

In this pisspoor region, which has for centuries, from time immemorial, been nothing but the poor angsty relation of big proud lowland cities, the abode of fishery fools in hamlets, a thousand damp squib copses of grand tree, no more really than a big draughty swamp or forest and with simple sad little hills (not even respectable or brave enough to have mountains). A great tragic place full still of that half-remembered familial crackjawed embrace of quick dialects, respectable cleancut cultures all full of dull football and grey jokes of alcohol and dialect.
Sodden wet all over which makes the lush grass bloom in endless dew-wet hedgerows and makes the streets of the big towns look depressing with a secret fatigue.
All this looming, belly swell of a backwater, all these dark misers here transfixed, suspicioning and crafting nameless whispers to each other in popculture livingrooms, a fat sleepy Pseudo-America, suburban windows in the black dusk, big electric widescreens with dumb uptight families gathered round, nosey neighbours or skinny secretaries, ugly people or beautiful savage girls, big TV wires stretched over green countrysides, dumb rave kids with skinny gaunt faces and never-fulfilled hopes, violent little teenyboppers who fall pregnant and are dumb with TV in rooms, pissed on by rain. Kingdoms of Celts, some bitter and dark and mysterious breathing "fucks" into the air, some shiny and blond and giddy with some awful knowledge, in some bloodthirsty sacrament of their own.
Walk across a wet grass, go and curse your neighbour in a fatuous beery joke, go and watch TV, fall asleep.

A land

Here is a land, utterly low and strange-seeming, completely steadfast and common, bitter with stringy television wires, wet with last week's grey rain under leaden skies, forever musing with respectable, sad complacency on browns and greys and must of midnight roots.
The natives here are maybe (some of them) proud of the place, maybe craggy old dudes stuffing their noble pipes proudly are fond of it, fond of say this hillock or that backstreet, misty-eyed about some family or other back here and all connections and memories thereof.
Who constructed this place, who strung despair in this valley? Flagging industrial pirates, soulless coal exploiters, murderous dwarfs cuddling in barely-lit latrines. The very sadness of the fact that anyone can be bothered to construct such very anxiously dull, brownbrick, dead buildings everywhere and to a uniform relentless pattern too. Dreamy, hopeless village of disappointments sleeping brownly in pastoral workingclass smokestacks.