Introduction to Poetry By Len Webster

Tricks of Memory

HIATUS

After the sudden surge
came a dry June, with the sea glaring;
nothing written on but frustration.
Then July broke in, bringing my birthday
like fertilizing rains
pounding on gardens at Hampton Court
pictured on the television screen,
reminding me of the time I met her there,
an arranged reunion of friends.
How could we - so close in background -
allow the squabbles of a faraway place
to sever the artery of friendship
that had bound us like brother and sister
for a decade or more?
Perhaps friendship, like lust, at last
becomes a chore to be slaved over.

OLD DOG, SAME OLD TRICKS

At fifty-five, he's in love again.
It should have been at fifty-two:
He just didn't recognize the symptoms,
Thought of it as a fantasy that would fade.
When she is near, he avoids her eye,
Finds he stumbles, mutters foolish words,
Avoids the compliment that would reveal his hand.
And so it goes: the cards deftly hidden
From the hand he urges himself not to play,
Aware that - had his life branched at twenty-one -
She could have been the product of his loins,
Not the object of his dotage.

PRECAUTIONS

Since when did caution
become a term of abuse,
to be spat vindictively
at those who would prevent disaster
striking without real cause?

Renegade politicians throw it to the winds
(having, behind the scenes, decided cautiously
whether the public mood is right).
The young, ever at risk, are urged to take it,
then criticised for lacking spirit
until, heads spinning, hearts turning,
they find it is too late to show it.

And HE writes words about it,
hoping by that to assuage his guilt
for having been cautious for so long
that any chance of love has been dissipated
by fear of confrontation, by fear that
she would accuse him of manipulation,
of cheating in the great game
they play so cautiously -
until the turning of the unsuspected wild card
reveals the fatal shard
that murders caution.

PIERCED & BARBECUED

'someone nice,' says she,
trying noncommittally
to reply to the question,
'who skewered the kebabs?'

'someone nice,' says she,
a word I was taught to avoid
for fear of recrimination
for vagueness

her obfuscation is deliberate
someone nice to her
is someone to envy
for his youth and position

though in this country
he has no official place
except as a number to be reduced
like fat rendered over a fire

someone nice has secured her
taken her, body and soul,
his ritualized presence
grafted upon her

their time together uncertain
a token eternity
subject to the whim of a bureaucrat
roasting the skewered meat
clandestinely

PROBLEM FOR A PAPERBACK WRITER

Why must I fall in love
with my heroines?
Each fig I carefully place,
logically, coherently,
So why must I love?

Is it that my dream must
become a reality
And the only reality a flood
of words?

When she returns to the sun-drenched,
ice-cold north lands,
Should I feel any the worse?

I still have the dreams in my head,
The words in my pocket,
easily at hand.

If dreams and words are all
that is needed,
Why must I fall in love with
my heroines?

Well: I've decided.
Once and for all, I've decided
this one is different -
I'll kill her in the first act,
Kill her now and done with it.

Then perhaps I can set about
the uneasy process
Of loving her.

GLIMPSES OF A PERSONAL HISTORY

Who are these people I see in my photographs?
Their names have gone and were only briefly with me.
Yet here they smile at me,
The pleasures of bygone summers in their eyes.
Some gave me an address,
Some exchanged a card at Christmas
Before oblivion swallowed them and clouds descended
To hide the beauty of our encounter.

From across the world they came, these faces,
To be tourists in a fantasy of sun and light
Captured and fixed in a moment
That has receded with the years
Now threatening to haunt me with question marks,
The only certainty the impossibility
That any of us can know another.

MUCHLOVED

The town of Muchloved is no-man's town;
it lies robust within forgotten dreams
over sandstone lost to past seas.
Split asunder, it left holes in shadows;
memories of salt-water dried in crevices,
running free over old crock pipes.
Children played on slag heaps
thrusting darkness onto wondergreen
overlying all.
Cloth-capped workmen, my smithy-grandfather, too,
walked to work on dusty roads
feet firm in horse-tracks.
We in Muchloved have lost all this -
we have progressed
and now live on concrete, pure and white.

YOUNGER WRITERS

I sat opposite Christopher Isherwood in the
Santa Monica home
where he lived with his artist-friend, Don,
wondering aloud what good, young writers were
coming along.
He mentioned Richard Brautigan.

They died within a couple of years of each other,
when Isherwood was an older writer,
Brautigan a younger writer
and me just totally unknown.

It's not much comfort to know
that in a hundred years
we'll all be equal.

(c) Len Webster 2004

"Muchloved" was first published in the collection 'Behind the Painted Veil' (Outposts Publications).

"Younger Writers" previously appeared in 'Open Forum' magazine (Birmingham).

E-mail contact: lenspoems@yahoo.ie

Introduction to Poetry By Len Webster

OLD BEFORE MY TIME

Entertainers & Others

Tricks of Memory

Some Links