If I…

If I am a poet…
and my thoughts pour out in slick black rivers to stain the page,
to ink it with dull-edged bleeding letters and fade
like exhausted breath in air…

If I am a poet…
how could I even think a thought or think of words again,
never mind, find them, imagine them, inscribe and rearrange them
from the dust inside my head; how could I pick them one by one
from so much cut and thrust; how should I even try?

If I am a poet…
when will the ring-tone voices in my skull eventually be still;
when, after all the listening and the speaking, the heeding and ignoring,
all the claptrap nonsense and wheedling whispers hissing, muttering,
slyly laughing, with cupped hands covering their embarrassment,
covering mine, covering up my sham of competence, my locked-out heart,
my pridefulness, my prejudice, my hubris, my narrowed eyes;
when, oh, when will I hear or see the whole world whole again?

If, in truth, the truth should be that obvious
should we not all be telling tales, sparking rainbow patterns
across the dance-floor, across a bar-room’s spit-and-sawdust;
would I not be a stand-up, silhouetted, haloed, against the lights, solo,
behind a mic-stand on some smoke-dark podium, leaning, lonely,
parting the veil’s safety-curtain rags, a spot-lit rabbit in the proscenium arch,
wildly slinging lines and chiming rhyme, outrageous, like the bells of freedom?

If I am a poet
should I just release my thoughts, set them free, not pixel-perfect
but running word for word, verbatim from my poetic, gift-horse mouth,
where I dare not look, dare not scrutinise the cracks and blemishes
in these, my approximated truth and lies?

If I am a poet
rhyming meat with heat, fate with hate, expression with depression,
cooking up a storm of god-knows-what, unconsciously streaming
verbal gymnastics from my tongue, joke and paradox juxtaposing,
literal and illiterate, riffing and blinding, speaking at you, just supposing,
saying and telling, one thing and the same, talking and walking,
strutting the strut, tut-tut-tut, hand on hip, finger-wagging bad,
the mind is blank but more’s to come, it’s my diatribe, my loose jive talking
my rock-n-roll soul, my oscilloscope lips, like sine-waves, mad;

If I am a poet
everything will rhyme until the echoes die,
and the song that’s left will be the jangled music behind what I said,
all meaning will decay or lose its way among its infinity of shades,
never guessed at because who ever thought a thought before it came
and if they ever did, forgot it?

If I am a poet…
I too have learned to remember nothing.

© BH, 2018

---

I watched Kate Tempest perform one of her pieces and I liked the declamatory, rappy, style. Thought I should give it a go, I says. So, here, this arrived. Different, obviously. I’m an old geezer and she’s not. We all have different resonances, different takes on the world, different lines and rhymes, signs o the times…

Whoops, off I go again! Time for a lie down.

PS. The beginnings of this lay fallow since 2016. Just a musing on the nature (as ever) of the muse, and that.

The illustration is taken from an image of a ruined proscenium arch back in the 60s. That’s me in the spotlight. Losing my religion…