POETRY LIBRARY: Dodo Modern Poets Date: Wednesday 7 May, 2014

POETRY LIBRARY: Dodo Modern Poets

Date: Wednesday 7 May, 2014

Time: 8:00 PM

Price: Free (but booking required)

Address: Saison Poetry Library, Southbank Centre, Belvedere Road, London SE1 8XX

Dodo Modern Poets celebrates its 25th anniversary in 2014. It was founded to bring new and established poets to as wide an audience as possible, and hosts regular evenings in Covent Garden and Merton. Join Dodo founder Patric Cunnane together with regular performers Sue Johns, P.R. Murry, and Jasmine Ann Cooray.

Admission Free but space is limited. To book a place emailspecialedition@poetrylibrary.org.uk

MORE DODOS IN 2014

16 May 2014

20 June 2014

19 September 2014

17 October 2014

12 December 2014

POETS TBA

The harrowing hustings,

I’m going to the hustings,

And I’m busting to be thrusting

My party’s ideas

Into your ear.

I will praise the perfection,

That will immediately be detected,

When this shower

Comes to power

And problems will melt away

Like icebergs or glaciers,

If this lot get elected

To the local council here.

In a school or in a church hall,

With three or four other hopefuls,

Who will each stand and say

In our own charming ways

That the other two or three

Embody incompetency

And delusion and confusion,

And are, in fact,  bags full

Of pure political pus,

Unlike us,

Because we are, you see

Bold, brave, clear sighted and free

And how good it will all be

If you just elected us.

We’ll take questions

And pretend to listen attentively,

as through gritted teeth,

We grin.

At the foolish, fools and bigots,

Who might just be

Voting for us.

And after the hustings are over

And when we’ve consumed the tea

Or the other hospitality,

And the biscuits are all crumbs,

We’ll go back to being humans

And cease from selling snake oil

From a platform in a church hall,

And stand in a queue in the drizzle

Waiting for a bus.

Nose cream

Have I told you lately that you’re

Nose cream?

Your emollience

Stops my nasal itching

And your unctuousness

Stops my nostrils twitching.

I’m a happy, happy chap,

When I unscrew your cap

And stick your nozzle,

Up my nosehole.

You lubri…,

You lubri…,

You lubricate my nose.

aqeouscoatimundi & demonz

     aqeouscoatimundi & demonz 

     2 paintings by P.Murry will be in the brent artists resource show: 

'Encounters'Journeys & discoveries

at BAR Gallery, Unit 4- 5, Queens Parade, Willesden, London NW2 5HT

     21^st Feb-20^th March

Private View 20^th Feb 6pm-10pm 

Oliver's many pockets

Oliver de Farr had so many pockets that he sometimes wondered if he might be a mutant marsupial. He had pockets in his trousers and also in shorts that he wore as underpants, from time to time. He had pockets in his jacket and his coat and many, many, many pockets in the photographer’s or fisherman’s waistcoat that he habitually wore under his jacket. He often also had one or two breast pockets in the shirt or t-shirt that he wore next to his skin.  He had no pockets in his skin and was of the male gender; nonetheless  had he, one day, reached into one or other of the pouches that he had about him wouldn’t have been surprised to extract an infant wallaby, an immature opossum or a baby bandicoot.

God knew that the things in Oliver’s pockets were weird enough without that.

Oliver’s plethora of clothing niches meant that he could always have everything somewhere about him, but also that he was never really ever sure where somewhere was. He was vaguely, but not strictly systematic about his carrying capacity. For instance he usually kept his phone in a breast pocket, but, not always the same one; it could be left or right, shirt, jacket or gilet. This meant that when the phone sounded an electronic ringtone, (a high-pitched fartlike sound, similar, Oliver imagined, to that which a marsupial kit might emit), Oliver never found the phone before the caller rang off.

Sometimes, of course, this was a blessing, but, more often than not, it just had the consequence of slightly swelling phone companies’ coffers. And the phone wasn’t the only problem.

Oliver sometimes missed buses and/or trains because he couldn’t find which pocket his travel card was in.

Pens lurked in depths unfound when wanted, and then reappeared, after they had bled and leaked ink, staining the clothing around them and the fingers that retrieved them. Coupons offering money off this or that item of grocery were never redeemed, having become as rare as the genetic material of the Sasquatch until, emerging immediately after their sell-by dates. Cameras vanished until the photo-op had gone, tangerines began to rot in dark cloth surrounded recesses where lint, panel pins and wooden coffee stirrers entangled themselves intricately with snapped elastic bands. Erasers slept in the darkest corners with treasury tags and co-habited with empty plastic ink cartridges and stubs of pencils.

Sharper objects seemed to band together in Colditz like escape committees to widen tiny tears in pocket fabric and then tunnel out into garment linings. Once here, these fugitive implements could torment Oliver even more than when they had simply stayed in pockets, because he could feel their outlines through the cloth and could sense their weight; so he knew that they were there somewhere, but he could not find them when he needed or wanted them. If he was going to sign a cheque or some other such document; or if he needed scissors for a minor manicure job, or a blade to slit open an envelope; Oliver reached into pockets and always grasped the wrong implement.

As he was a baptised Christian he might get up to the pearly gates and grope unsuccessfully around for whatever transcendent sim-card could grant admittance to heaven, so Saint Peter would not be able to scan the tally of his sins and condemn Oliver to “GO DOWN!”.

Or in another scenario beyond the bifurcations of the Book, he would not even achieve reincarnation as a silverfish living under a pile of damp smelly socks in Neasden flat. He would have to hang around in limbo forever and commuters in bus queues might just discern his shadowy ghost futilely riffling through its phantom pockets.

early morning shit poem

Whoosh!

Excellent!

My crap’s gone down the pan

And I get up from my morning shit;

Refreshed,

I am a new man.

I get up from my morning shit;

And start to dream again

What if it wasn’t just

What I ate last night

That got flushed down the drain.

I dream that I could flush the bog

And it would take away

Those who rape this planet

For their profit everyday.

If only it was as easy

As pulling a lavatory chain

Then capitalists and their sycophants

Would never be seen again.

New year’s morning 2014 in Mitcham (south London)

The writing, on the carton,

At the breakfast table,

Tells me that,

The liquid contained therein

Comes from fruit,

That has been grown

In sun drenched groves.

The wind’s howling changes pitch,

And I look out of the window

At a grove that is just drenched,

And only drenched,

And drenched again,

As another Atlantic gale blows in;

But I thank god or fate,

That I wasn’t born

A century ago,

Because I could have been

Getting well drenched in a trench.