Calling Home

A blog for poetry and prose that is worth occasionally obsessing over. Please follow the links and buy the poems. If you would like anything removed or taken down, then please 'ask' below...

[calling-home]

Teazles

Out in the vacant lot to gather weeds I found these teazles – their ovoid heads  delicately armoured with crowns of thorns. Arthur, from whom I haven’t heard a word in thirty years, who must be ninety if he’s a day, told me they were used to raise the nap on the green felt of billiards tables and, since Roman times, for combing woollen stuff. He also said their seeds were caviar to the goldfinch. And then I lost the knife he’d lent me to cut some – the loss of which was the cause of grief. In honour of gruff Arthur I shake the seeds out in our small green patch and stick the spiky seed heads in a jar.

Jamie McKendrick

[calling-home]

After Sanraku Koshu

Jailed for being drunk, but far from contrite, the bard, minus shoes, tie, belt, savoured steel grille, rank pallet, mused ‘Ah! Raw Material!’

Peter Reading

[calling-home]

Walking Through Walls

Unlike flying or astral projection, walking through walls is a totally earth-related craft, but a lot more interesting than pot making or driftwood lamps. I got started at a picnic up in Bowstring in the northern part of the state. A fellow walked through a brick wall right there in the park. I said, “Say, I want to try that.” Stone walls are best, then brick and wood. Wooden walls with fiberglass insulation and steel doors aren’t so good. They won’t hurt you. If your wall walking is done properly, both you and the wall are left intact. It is just that they aren’t pleasant somehow. The worst things are wire fences, maybe it’s the molecular structure of the alloy or just the amount of give in a fence, I don’t know, but I’ve torn my jacket and lost my hat in a lot of fences. The best approach to a wall is, first, two hands placed flat against the surface; it’s a matter of concentration and just the right pressure. You will feel the dry, cool inner wall with your fingers, then there is a moment of total darkness before you step through on the other side.

Louis Jenkins

[calling-home]

[calling-home]

I hate that this one keeps being relevant.

[calling-home]

Delio in The Duchess of Malfi

                             These wretched eminent things Leave no more fame behind 'em, than should one Fall in a frost, and leave his print in snow; As soon as the sun shines, it ever melts, Both form and matter. I have ever thought Nature doth nothing so great for great men As when she 's pleas'd to make them lords of truth: Integrity of life is fame's best friend, Which nobly, beyond death, shall crown the end.

John Webster

[calling-home]

Lachrima Negativa

Someone told me not to cry, and since that day tears fail me, hard before they form and fall,

seeds between thumb and finger, flies' eggs on a tear duct's rose, too sore now to rub.

Still the tides turn and swell behind my eyes, but on the cheekbones' strand they wash up only silt,

grit, some sour amber sugar. Whose fault is this drought? I recall a crowded street:

carnival, market stalls, cooking smells, dry lips that brushed my ear. Someone told me not to cry.

Michael Symmons Roberts

[calling-home]

from 'v.'

The ones we choose to love become our anchor when the hawser of the blood-tie's hacked, or frays.

Tony Harrison

[calling-home]

from 'God's Gift to Women'

Whatever difference I make to anyone by daylight is dispatched in that last torpid kiss at the darkening crossroads; from there they go back to their torturers. But if I could put the sleep I lose over you to better use,

I'd work the nights as signalman to your bad dreams, wait for that drawn- sword sound and the blue wheelsparks, then make the switch before the track flicks left, and curves away to hell... This once I can, and so I will.

Don Paterson

[calling-home]

Aus Einem April

            We dust the walls.             And of course we are weeping larks falling all over the heavens with our shoulders clasped in someone’s armpits, so tightly! and our throats are full.       Haven’t you ever fallen down at Christmas           and didn’t it move everyone who saw you?             isn’t that what the tree means? the pure pleasure of making weep those whom you cannot move by your flights!           It’s enough to drive one to suicide. And the rooftops are falling apart like the applause

of rough, long-nailed, intimate, roughened-by-kisses, hands. Fingers more breathless than a tongue laid upon the lips in the hour of sunlight, early morning, before the mist rolls in from the sea; and out there everything is turbulent and green.

Frank O'Hara

[calling-home]

from The Proof

He takes his harmonica out of his pocket and starts to play a sad song, a song about love and separation.

Agota Kristof

[calling-home]

from The Master and Margarita

Margarita's heart began to knock.

Mikhail Bulgakov

[calling-home]

from Infinite Jest

[...] morning is the soul's night.

David Foster Wallace

[calling-home]

from Ukelele Music

[Inside the cramped cell, the coded graffito: Just do your bird like H. sap without moaning.] 

Peter Reading

[calling-home]

from The Heart of a Dog

The creature walked round the flat today for the first time. Laughed in the corridor after looking at the electric light. Then, accompanied by Philip Philipovich and myself, he went into the study. Stands firmly on his hind (deleted)... his legs and gives the impression of a short, ill-knit human male.

Laughed in the study. His smile is disagreeable and somehow artificial. Then he scratched the back of his head, looked round and registered a further, clearly-pronounced word: 'Bourgeois'. Swore. His swearing is methodical, uninterrupted and apparently totally meaningless. There is something mechanical about it - it is as if this creature had heard all this bad language at an earlier phase, automatically recorded it in his subconscious and now regurgitates it wholesale. However, I am no psychiatrist.

The swearing somehow has a very depressing effect on Philip Philipovich. There are moments when he abandons his cool, unemotional observation of new phenomena and appears to lose patience. Once when the creature was swearing, for instance, he suddenly burst out impulsively: 'Shut up!'

This had no effect.

Mikhail Bulgakov

[calling-home]

from 'The Flowering of the Rod'

[9]

No poetic fantasy but a biological reality,

a fact: I am an entity like bird, insect, plant

or sea-plant cell; I live; I am alive;

take care, do not know me, deny me, do not recognise me,

shun me; for this reality is infectious - ecstasy.

H.D. 

[calling-home]

I Was Going to Say

something like 'I take it all back' and it's not even my line but when I got to the bar I realised I couldn't feel my face slipped on a step & got distracted by 3 girls' smiles & the image of their crotches buzzing away below the table like 3 cuddly bees

Sam Riviere

[calling-home]

Perigree

Freak alignments. I am the best man, she, the bridesmaid. John, the resident MC, once our playground quarry, does not complain when we corner him, frisking for his master key.

Our affair was stripped of all the usual padding - just a flat joke about not getting 'committed' and a serviceable number by Joan Armatrading - but we honed the ruse de guerre that first outwitted, then destroyed our partners. I'd do sentry duty, she, the dangerous stuff - who wouldn't trust her? 

Posted at the door, I watch her spike the marriage bed with handfuls of confetti, discreet as fallout. Smiling, she swings back towards me again, a natural disaster.

Don Paterson