MichaelAitken

The Lombardy Poplars

I’m reading about how this wet April month
Has inspired the bluebell to burst out in effusion.
I think about the woods on Winter Hill
And the view across the winding river.

This depression deepens like a newly dug mineshaft
How deep are they dug into the earth?
Before the crop of darkness overwhelms
And the coal board closes it down.

Now you must be making a Sunday dinner
For friends from far and wide to descend on
While it pours with rain on Richmond Hill
And Canary Wharf Tower hides in the clouds.

If I had the eye of a simple pigeon
Could I focus on the coming sunset?
Could I flap two wings and fly away?
With nothing in my heart but tranquility.

There is Carolyn with those Lombardy Poplars
Her little blue eyes looking you straight in the face
Standing by the seven stumps left by developers
Who do they think they are that they buy and uproot?

I am down amongst their agonised roots
Those roots are like a mother to me
A mother who can no longer smell nice
A mother who will grow no taller.

The sky draws me up and out
The last of my spirit dances there
Above the seven stumps of the Lombardy Poplars
That are left for dead in Viaduct Street.

While Carolyn walks to the Reference Library
And in her Pennsylvanian accent asks for her books
Alone she asks for council records
As her eyes dig down into the foundations of government.

And Sean standing at his very own doorstep
Where a battle had raged for years
Over the names on his tenancy agreement
Finally won the right to stand there.

And Sean on his very own doorstep
How he kept the front door wide open that day
As if phantoms were there as his doorman
Looking down on the graveyard outside.

With his floor strewn with photocopies
That he highlighted in yellow ink
How serious he has become about their policies
That nearly made him homeless.

Then there’s Nick in his new flat
He’s got so many friends in to see him
Talking about music and making his films
And about his brother who breaks things.

While I walked across Weavers Fields
Alone with just a crumb of truth in me
How I felt that I was inside an ocean
Or with an ocean on the inside of me.

Bethnal Green 2000

I can smell my mother’s perfume

I can smell my mother’s perfume
It’s a memory from long ago
Tears try to well up inside me
But the pain develops too slow.

A memory mixed with anger
For her hard life like a tomb.
I can remember her in her best dress
And I can smell my mothers perfume.

A working class woman from Marlow
Crippled by the poverty trap
Crippled by a lack of affection
By the bad luck that fell on her lap.

She died wanting to know who loved her
It was the last words I heard her say
Her words were like the smell of her perfume
That I remember down to this day.

I can remember my mother’s perfume
A two-shilling bottle of scent
That I brought for her on her birthday
With the pocket money I spent.

When I was only an eight-year-old
She kept it as a special keepsake.
Now I have that little bottle of scent
Only half used up to this date.

I remember it in her cabinet
By the wall of the old spare room
And I’m taken back to my childhood
By the memory of my mothers perfume.

A reprimand from the absent guest at the A.G.M

You invited yourself along and all that you do came too. Carolyn’s shrub, wet with pain, you passed by as if you wore the night like a fairy tale. Now what have you done with the oyster of your mouth? Counting the steps of my vertebrae up to the moon that rattles in my brain amongst the deadwood of words; A white lie in the dream of corridors echoed through the old building like a rampant albino nettle. The piano played like a skeleton in the hunger of my heart; the music was a dark closeted room of loneliness; Despairing in the maze of rooms in my identity of ice and fire. A spoil of war put at your feet by the red ghost of love.

How often unfairness drags me through prison walls laughing
How often has unfairness blunted my own words in my own heart?

Tired alone and defeated by the stress of cats mewing in my brain
I left you to the spoils of war fashioned out of the ivories of my bones.

Now you have formed a mystery with me
Your inbred arrogance slips through the closed door like bath water.

I can hear the voices of the roses inside
But all I’m given are the pledges of distant voices.

My imagination is plastic and it is clay
It is formed into whatever you want it to from.

If I were a man made of glass windows
The world would see the fool inside in his red fur coat.

But it seemed like a normal day to Jehovah
And I seemed like a grain of sand in a fire.

2000

Life surrounds you, hems you in

Life surrounds you and hems you in
People like antibodies congeal on you
Drag you down to the ground
Pin you to the floor so you cannot travel

The place where you grew is far away
Those you grew up with are trapped
By life congealing around them

A force for life or a force for death
Loved ones are separated from you
the power of strangers crowds around them

And each man, woman and child
Is helpless in the sea of humanity
Is sown into the fabric of life
Absorbed into the quicksand of society

Freedom is a level 10 in the heart
So many of us barely reach a level 2
We sit into the tapestry of life around us
Like birds without homes flying forever

2002

Song: I’m a Desperate Man

I’m a desperate man

Please click on link to see a PDF of chords and melody.

A sort of English RnR song.

In the Hobbits Room Tue Night March 22nd

Chris has got it taped; he fills the emptiness with selfish silence.
Chris, what do you keep to yourself? Sitting there like a budding Jean Paul Sartre.
The circle of smoky coincidence and a candlelit heaven in a wine bottle?
Maps on the wall obsess the intellect.
Every freedom you give means there‘s one you hide in.
I sit and I listen, I recall. I am impracticable, but you cope with me perfectly.
Leaving me alone, I look inwards, and then I become I.
I seek to remember when I have nothing to remember of nothing that grew out of importance.
I’m talking of love. I’m thinking of my private life.
I’m learning that a private life is and is not an exclusive thing.
Sometimes I pin mine on the wall like scientific studies of the behavior of white mice.
My experiments are made while I am in a deep sleep.
The intellect cannot free me from the curiosity of the unconscious
It cannot by-pass the lines that grow as I age.
Dreams shake the intellect.
Always an individual finds he does and he does not have what he needs.

Forgive this writing, as you sat there I found I needed someone to talk to.
Only to find myself with this observation – that you will frown at and ignore.
That talk is different from conversation, this writing is mere talk.
They’re wrong about conversation, non of it is intellect.
Intellect belongs to our silences and to us.
Conversation, music and arguments are the confusions we need.
Peace is the solitude of intellect and is easy to live with, but very vulnerable.
I talk of this because -you seem as vulnerable as the next man
And he is armed to the teeth with conversation, music, and argument.

1977 (from Kibbutz)

I was a volunteeer in Kibbutz Ziquim colony. I shared a hut with Chris from Manchester area. He didn’t talk much, I felt at times that it must be because he didn’t like me but I tried to take it all in my stride.

Song: My Love Walls

My love walls are flesh
My love walls are fire
My love walls are tall trees
Growing higher and higher
My love walls are phantoms
My love walls are veins
My love walls are visions
My love walls are brains