adrianpfox8@gmail.com
Poetry is like sunshine it's free.
This isn't a creative writing class where the poet sits behind a desk and tells you your poems are good but they need a little tweaking and i'm here to tweak the money out of you.
POETRY IS LIKE SUNSHINE IT'S FREE
Feel free to send me your writing, all shapes and sizes and all genres.
Butterfly
flutter by.
Nature
comes in
the door
and drifts
like time
itself.
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NECTAR
The streetlight casts a pastel hue up-
On the frosted glass, encasing the night-
Shadow in a nectar amber glow. Time
Is of the essence, 2014 or 1402 time
Is trapped in time by Virgil’s honeyed bees.
The Cameos are coming down from the gallery
Like a poetic seal, the fresco is peeling off the wall
And the great pipes of the ulster hall is toe tapping
Seamus Heaney’s elegy, he is hanging proud.
There is a dead dog here and the beat from a Mothers
Heart, I can feel it through my feet. Humbled humanity
Has come in off the street out of the wood-work to form
A human chain, encased in peace.
The streetlight casts a pastel hue up-
On the frosted glass, encasing the night-
Shadow in a nectar amber glow. Time
Is of the essence, 2014 or 1402 time
Is trapped in time by Virgil’s honeyed bees.
The Cameos are coming down from the gallery
Like a poetic seal, the fresco is peeling off the wall
And the great pipes of the ulster hall is toe tapping
Seamus Heaney’s elegy, he is hanging proud.
There is a dead dog here and the beat from a Mothers
Heart, I can feel it through my feet. Humbled humanity
Has come in off the street out of the wood-work to form
A human chain, encased in peace.
SEVEN SEAS
For Swan
Taking a slug of cod liver oil
Throws me up on a new found
Land. I am in the
boat in Elizabeth
Bishop, I am the hook in the scales
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I am the fish in me.
I don’t live beside the ocean but
The ocean lives in me.
I’m not as
Good as she’ll ever be but I feel
The hooks in me.
Tearing flesh from my Father
And me but my Mother is the sea
She is my poetic wave, she is
The pen within me, writing not
Drowning. I take a
sip of fruit juice
To wash it down.
Washed up on
The shore of the ocean, washed up
On the shoreline of me.
I am here
In this life-boat, ‘where
water comes
Together with other
water’, ‘loving them
All the way back to
the source, loving
Everything that
increases me’.
I am the salmon spawning, I am the fish
In the sea. She felt
this boat rocking long
Before she was me, fish oil rattles her bones
And poetry sets us free.
My letter-box opened
To post the day, cutting the silence startling
My nerves like a calling so I write this ink
Feeling on the waves of a page, this is my
Ray river going out to sea.
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ABSENT-VANITY
for Andrew
1.
A jet stream shoots in-
To the blue, cutting a-
Cross the vertical blinds
Bars of my cell like Morse
Code un-coded, mainlining
It’s way to paradise.
I drink two hundred year
Old poetry from the urn
The Lethe, the river of
Forgetfulness. We are due-
Ende in this world of sent-
Time- mentality.
for Andrew
1.
A jet stream shoots in-
To the blue, cutting a-
Cross the vertical blinds
Bars of my cell like Morse
Code un-coded, mainlining
It’s way to paradise.
I drink two hundred year
Old poetry from the urn
The Lethe, the river of
Forgetfulness. We are due-
Ende in this world of sent-
Time- mentality.
Were saddened by the world
Of mass-acres. Every-day I see
Your eyes and feel your tears.
You are my Abstract Head
Your non-features will be
With me until the due-ende.
You are not there but there
In me.
2.
Here but not here, here
In spirit stealing some-
One else’s tide. How can
I Mr Keats be thee? When
I must first of all be me to
Be you/me. A split person-
Ality, a hyphen-ated blues.
There is only one poem in
The English language, there
Is only one poet in me. He
Wasn’t feeling himself, to
Absent to set down his pen.
Beyond the poets pome
The self can’t see because he
Has become me. The beauty-
Truth is in the eye of the be-
Holder, I love myself as much
As he loved me, my words.
I am, he is a part of me
Every writer.
Of mass-acres. Every-day I see
Your eyes and feel your tears.
You are my Abstract Head
Your non-features will be
With me until the due-ende.
You are not there but there
In me.
2.
Here but not here, here
In spirit stealing some-
One else’s tide. How can
I Mr Keats be thee? When
I must first of all be me to
Be you/me. A split person-
Ality, a hyphen-ated blues.
There is only one poem in
The English language, there
Is only one poet in me. He
Wasn’t feeling himself, to
Absent to set down his pen.
Beyond the poets pome
The self can’t see because he
Has become me. The beauty-
Truth is in the eye of the be-
Holder, I love myself as much
As he loved me, my words.
I am, he is a part of me
Every writer.
LIMBO
translated in 2013 by Adrian Fox
It is a strange place this limbo
where time and space aren't
mine.
Seated in this
wheelchair with
being, elastic space and time in
outstretched hands in barren
shifting sands of time unmarked
as moonlight on the dial of day.
The old man sits in human time
with scant white hair and fear-
ful steady look that stops earth
to watch his sky moved by moon
and seen by sun. His whole face
is full of silent sight, his look
looks back reflecting light.
No shapely kiss on sweet sight
limbo walled a spirit cell swirls
a ghostly swirl of shadow, horrors
fright of dull purgatory curse
a heaven/hell of future state.
THE WAVES
The waves
swim eyes
to shadow
light.
KNOWING THE UNKNOWN
I.M. Wallace Stevens
Deep in the depths of
irrationality, I’m being rational:
creating accidentally on
purpose poems like
a pre-meditated dawn,
a disabled reality.
Literature is my desire
to live in this able-
bodied world.
I’ve been down the road
of suicide poetry, stood
on the ledge of my soul,
looked down at the river
of poetry but couldn’t jump;
so I reign here with a blind brow.
LYRA
'I have two luxuries to brood over,
your loveliness and the hour of my death'.
Keats to Fanny Brawne July 25, 1819
John Keats holds the seat of poetry
the instrument plucked by the breeze
of Orpheus, riding high on the horse
of poetry, a stable-boy on Equules colt
star in the major magnitude of Lyra.
Like a knight shielding his mother's honour
the room fell into quietness, remembering
he wiped her fevered brow, the memories
of melancholy flooded, writing with
this living hand, this moment.
Luxuries of death and love keep me within
higher paradigms of expanded darkness, writ
water on the rippled land, his soul was soaked
in the shipwreck futures salty brine among
the mean streets beneath the bells of bow.
the casual graves of night soils along the dark
shore of the Thames, an uneasy light headedness
sweeps over gathering darkness swallows sky.
GALWAY KINNELL
Queens university Belfast
No one knew a Kavanagh poem by heart
And if they did they wouldn’t recite it.
It was one of them readings. The poet
Recited in memory of my father
Followed by a Neruda poem on Lorca.
A jet went overhead like a white flash
Of sound that sparkled, not that the poet
Heard that or the spacious form the fly
Found in the auditorium.
You’ve got to
Go deeper to find the voice beyond
The spoken word.
A smooth stone skimming back
and forth across a still reservoir
high up where the mountains
heaven out.
INSIDE SLEEP AND POETRY
The man within the poems
who lived outside the world
In the world of silent sight.
Inside sleep and poetry deep
Within the strife of human
hearts
Criss crossing gloom.
Looking up
And looking back a thousand
Different ways. Lost with-
In a swirl of dancing curls.
A thing of beauty flowers
And binds us to the earth.
We can feel the essence
Of short hours and ponder
On the time that is not mine.
Un-skinned hope rainbow
Wide, a myriad of hope with-
In
the man within the tides.
A MAN OF SIMPLE SLENDER SORROW
Take the sorrow from the soul
and you are left with
a book of wonder.
Poems of wonderment in words of un-
believe-able joy, a Keats, John Keats
that flows a page and singes under
words of simple honest ploy, words
that are packed with rain and thunder.
Take the sorrow from the heart
don't bury him under such weight
that he is glad he died.
Don't bury it down on top
that he may not
see tomorrow.
METAPHORICAL PALACE
Like a wind-up toy, the bird
Watched the sky: up, down
Left right, fly. The
book lay
Open on the sofa beside
The child’s activity centre
And the book of poems by
W.S. Merwin lay closed in
The kitchen at ‘this meta-
Phorical palace’, but no one
Capture’s this loneliness
better than me.
