Experimental

Pome

Maybe it’s why I never truly identified

With all those songs about trains that chime

In my ears as I top this small slope and

Emerge fully into the day’s light,

And everything the light touches is yours.

As the monolithic stacks and crumbled thoughts erode

Tom Waits sings a song for the lonely;

I’ll never kiss your lips again or break

Your heart. 

And me? I’m flat on my back

Beneath the imaginary blue plaque

In the spot where so much had been discovered

So many gains made, to society and the individual

So many hours devoted to dope-addled debate

The sharpening and blunting of young minds.

Oh we thought we were just like the Beats

And I suppose we were: Polyrhythmic melodies like

Many clocks the way the ticks can mimic a tattoo,

A kind of music of mechanised coincidence.

Our picnics became localised affairs.

Jumpers, Coke, sweet Mary Jane,

Talking simply on the government, girls, futures,

And music, always music; it was Eels from the car stereo

On the night Richard Kelly changed our lives.

And we return.   On vacations, on weekends,

In sunny afternoons, together, alone.

Even in Amsterdam, twisted in a cinema,

(The aviators stay on in case of retina burn

My skin twitches with imaginary convulsions

There’s a café opening in the back of the seat in front

Perhaps, after all, the screen is a liquid, like glass

Which would explain the waterfall at least…)

I returned there.  Safe, and warm, floating,

Seeing not the petrified lizard

Nor the commissioner’s tracks or chicken wire fence,

But the Frisbee, the first kiss, the treks through the wood

In the dead of night

To reach parties in clearings with the promise of fire.

It’s not like the white steam of a train

Or the dirty grey of the mean big city

The pale blue strands intertwine and then

Vanish.

Stephen Fothergill

'"If you've got a trumpet

Get on your feet now and blow it

If you've got a field that don't yield

Well get up now and hoe it

I look at you, you look at me and

Deep in our hearts we know it

You weren't much of a muse but then

I weren't much of a poet" - Nick Cave

Steven was born in 1986 and likes boom boom rock n roll and quiet country walks. 'Pome' was written on Rizla papers which Steven stuck around favourite country haunts.