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| I miss this. |
My former colleague Andrew Suction, the current Shadow Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom and a close, personal acquaintance of mine dating back 40 years, introduced this new poetry column last month to great fanfare. I won't lie to you, dear readers, he's become so successful from that one column that cocaine has developed an Andrew Suction habit.
He's not been seen in his Kensington office in over a month (yes, we poets have offices. Lord Byron used to be that boss who leans over his female colleagues inappropriately whilst helping them on the computer, Percy Shelley would lob balls of paper into the bin and celebrate over-zealously, pissing off his co-workers, and John Keats was the office weirdo who nobody knows outside of work and can often be heard crying in the office toilets) and people are starting to worry.
Let me reassure you, he'll return to his perch when he has one of his 'visions'. Ah yes, the legendary Suction visions. To adequately describe what he looks like when having one of these visions, one needs to cast their mind back to the end of Captain Phillips when Tom Hanks is rescued from the Somali pirates in a traumatised and catatonic state. Imagine that, but without the heroic and intensely moving backdrop of a man having gone through hell to save the lives of his crew, and replace him with a man who hasn't been published in 15 years and cannot please his wife.
I know I sound bitter, but I can assure you I am not. We two go back a long time. He knows my acid tongue, I know his buttons, he knows mine. We fight, we go back and forth like an old married couple, just like him and his wife, whom he cannot please.
I cannot stop myself. OK, I'll come clean. I hate his guts.
But, lest we get carried away, i'm not here to talk Suction. I'm here to provide this month's NNNN 'Poem of the Month'. Last month's poem was terribly underwhelming, and that's not just another shot at old 'Sucker' as we used to call him. It had no recognizable rhythm or flow, it was full of cloying, vapid, nonsensical appeals to emotion, and i'm pretty sure he stole from Auden in one of the verses. It was the work of a man desperate to put his stamp on the 'COVID poetry boom'. Every poet I know has written about the blasted pandemic. It's become a whole category in and of itself, just like WWI poetry. Everyone's spilling ink and jostling to become the COVID era's answer to Wilfred Owen. Suction, at best, will become this era's Ivor Gurney, not because of his poetry, but because Gurney was suspected to have had syphilis, and I regularly see debates on poetry forums about Suction having it.
So let me try and write something that has absolutely nothing to do with COVID, social-distancing, hand gel, toilet rolls, loneliness, grief, despair, numbness, misinformation, depression, addiction or face masks. As Caius Martius Coriolanus so eloquently put it before banishing the plebs for banishing him from Rome (knobhead), "There is a world elsewhere".
Normality
People, everywhere.
Wading through watery crowds,
Waiting for a lull,
I yearn to scratch my back.
People, everywhere.
Mashed on the tube like Play-Doh,
This is an orgy,
I yearn to scratch my back.
People, everywhere.
I long for solitude and smoking,
My heels are aching,
I yearn to scratch my back.
People, everywhere.
Pungent whiffs of body odour,
marijuana ghosts outside Ladbrokes,
I yearn to scratch my back.
People, everywhere.
I cannot catch my breath,
"Pay as you go with O2",
I yearn to scratch my back.
People, everywhere.
Blurred faces on Millennium Bridge,
Busker plays Ed Sheeran song,
I yearn to scratch his face off.
People, everywhere.
Evening Standard abandoned on bench,
George Osborne's ectoplasm,
I yearn to scratch my back.
People, everywhere.
Waterloo Station pigeon flurry,
Upper crust businessmen with headphones,
I yearn to scratch my back.
People, everywhere.
Everyone respects each other,
This is the facade economy,
I yearn to scratch my back.
-Barnard G. Fentonthwaite
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