Twenty eight poems about love, music, nature, travel, meditation and the end of the world. This dazzling debut collection manages to be both haunting and hilarious.
As you sit
As you sit thinking of nothing,
Staring into the middle distance,
A glass of water walks past,
Sipping on another glass of water.
Your car keys float past your face
In a convincing impersonation of a crane fly.
Your cactus plays tag with your yucca,
A chair changes colour.
Outside, insects write advertising slogans in the soil
In a variety of languages.
A flagstone leaps into the air,
Flips itself over and lands slap-bang
In its rectangular gap.
These are all commonplace occurrences,
As you sit thinking of nothing,
Staring into the middle distance.
My gran
My gran goes out clubbing on Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays.
She loves her dubstep, her grime and her old-skool D n’B.
She can rave all night.
At six in the morning, she’ll be standing on a table
While I sit at home, watching Poirot repeats, looking after her cats,
Thinking how times have changed.
Exercise:
Create an artistic representation of the end of the world.
Points to consider:
What does the end of the world look like?
What does the end of the world taste / sound / smell like?
What colour is the end of the world?
If the world ends and no one is around to see it, has it really happened?
Is the world going to end at all,
Or will it continue ad nauseum?
How soon will these events take place?
Within our lifetimes or our children’s?
Consider the end of the world not from some death-and destruction perspective,
But as a vision of rebirth and rejuvenation,
The old world ending and being replaced by something entirely different,
Governed by a different set of rules,
Something unimaginable.
If it were possible to imagine something unimaginable,
What would that look like?
