Some Poems
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This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/.
©Oliver Delgaram-Nejad (2012)
Contents
Lecture (08:58)7
Older8
People Watching9
Looking10
Waiting for Songbirds11
Whimsy12
Canned Life13
A Bachelor’s Tragedy15
Insomnia16
Nursing Home17
Teacher18
Melting Man19
The Farm20
Network21
Autumn22
Graves23
Coffee and Cigarettes24
Distant Times26
The Life Manifesto27
Anon29
Collector30
Weary32
Death33
Closed34
Time35
Age37
Ghosts38
Early Hours39
The Odds40
‘Pick a Spirit’41
Industry42
Party (a Beat Poem)43
The Grey50
Rebel’s Epitaph52
Ghosts II54
Horizon55
Another Tired Epiphany56
Confession57
Petroleum58
Lecture
(08:58)
A shuffle of breath,
Fractured coughs,
A laugh or two,
All brains turned off.
Older
The signs creep,
Although it sounds cliche,
The little things:
The morning shave,
Feel but a blink...
A sigh revives
Any thoughts misplaced
In memories lost,
To stress, and age.
People
Watching
Don’t watch the people,
Watch the patterns.
The habits, the gestures,
The shared reactions.
Looking
To revisit a bench,
In the park of nonsense -
Where as children
We felt colour as drugs:
A pool of rain, reflects
Fleeting wings.
As the moss-oak bench,
Ages.
Waiting for
Songbirds
A cigarette drips,
Between fingers and lip,
As the dark of December,
Hangs.
Whimsy
To recollect
Fluorescent childhood dreams:
A stuffed bear,
Clutched firm in hand
At the love-torn seams.
Canned Life
I was born on a belt in the factory of man,
Rolled into a home, labeled and stamped.
My life was made honest by ink on a page,
And my future controlled by a system of wage.
Incompetent bureaucratic, institutional reign
Has seen us shuffled
Down the educational lane,
Where we are unified products
For unified gain.
A Bachelor’s
Tragedy
When young and stirring from his bed,
Before hopes and days so bright,
He weary lifts a cheek of youth,
And takes to teenage flight.
And when returned in the half of morn,
To shades of amber light,
He scans a home so blankly left:
His prison cell by night.
Insomnia
The spiritual hour:
The clock,
Static, stagnant,
Glowers.
Nursing Home
When I am old,
Give me white walls
And false family, dressed in green.
Bring me pills
To slow my growth,
And suffocate my dreams.
Teacher
Lenses, looking out:
At the silent body,
Jostling.
Melting Man
Birthed from earth-water
Gathered with little hands,
We laboured in the ice-dark dawn
To mould our image of a man,
Modeling our fathers’ clothes.
The Farm
A jackdaw’s calls
Ring out the rusted shells of Tractors.
The grey fog, engulfing, perished to
Cloud.
As shadows, linger
In the twilight.
Network
Come join the network with me -
Watch your friends in the freak tent, see,
See their pictures when drunk,
Their reactions when dumped,
Just sign here to... 'tacitly' agree.
Autumn
The pot hums a feral anthem
As the light at my window dies.
A candle stagnates on the sill,
The autumn wind cries.
Graves
Broken skin burned by bracken, toil.
An earth printed palm.
A shovel, older than memories,
The slight horizon calm.
Years of making others’ beds,
Time spent digging.
The wind and rain he must endure,
Whilst waiting for the living.
Coffee and Cigarettes
In murky pleasure, fingers rest.
Cradling a cigarette – hand rolled,
Wrinkled raw.
Smouldering.
Pressed between lip, and the grimace of youth
As gentle licks of grey
Obscure his vision’s corner,
Flickering.
As new born temporary pleasure,
Living short its life
To the car horn muse.
Soon finds itself in a sunken pit
Face down,
Ground in between battlements.
On nicotine fuelled days
Where dull, heavy musk hangs malignant.
He sits.
And - raising a cup of crude
To toast the capital bullshit passing
Peering over near pressed vessel,
Straining through a blur of steam.
Distant Times
An envisioned time.
In which thought itself -
Perceived a crime.
A time where rights remain for few,
Where the masses praise
Those our fathers slew.
The Life Manifesto
I am twenty years old today.
I know nothing.
I am thirty years old today.
I know a bit, but not what I’m doing.
I am forty years old today.
What little I thought I knew… turns out it was wrong.
I am fifty years old today.
I know more than you sonny.
I am sixty years old today.
I’m tired of knowing.
I am seventy years old today.
I never appreciated people.
Anon
In the mi
ddle of the minutes
Between nine and ten,
An unknown walked in,
Grasping a pen.
He scribbled a face on the whiteboard wall,
It was a face from the internet:
So we’re brothers after all.
Collector
I’m a bit of a collector, me.
(I like discographies, personally)
Why I collect?
(It’s funny you ask.)
I never gave thought to obsession,
(Too busy obsessing.)
These are in order of release.
Those are alphabetical.
(Don’t touch them.)
I haven’t gotten round to those.
(Subsequently, I can’t look at them.)
Weary
Fear, has worn thin:
And misinformation, therein.
Death
A great wall of slate.
Too tall, too wide -
To climb, to strafe:
A firm divide.
Closed
A sign.
Typical of a time, now snatching at its last,
An ebbing breath.
Branded bright with offset colours
Telling of better days,
Sweetshop-styled, screaming all is fine
With the unshaken dignity
Of older ways.
Time
I fell out of the night
And in to the day.
Got up from the morning,
Struggled into the bathroom of afternoon.
Stared into the mirror of mid-day gone,
And shuffled down the stairwell into evening.
As I found a seat amidst the lonely aisles,
Settled into worry,
A look at the clock,
No sooner to realise,
I had fallen back into the night.
Age
A man of age,
Decades rinsed his mudded fingers.
Raises a wet-dog brow in the face of rain,
His life half lived, half lingered.
Ghosts
I sat there in the rain,
On the cracking pavement.
I watched them walk with apathy,
But a step before enslavement.
Early Hours
A seagull grooms.
The harbour sleeps.
The sky a-stir,
Responsibility creeps.
The Odds
I will not die regretful,
Nor dissatisfied,
For I raced against the millions
To call this life my prize.
‘Pick a Spirit’
The night strays
Into a dream,
A retreat:
A wall,
On which I lean
When under throws
Of volleyed wants and drowned woe,
To stolen escapes,
Beneath the wet.
To smoke,
To dwell.
To taste regret.
Industry
A tower stood before me,
Of at least a thousand feet.
It took my right to light away,
And sold me back its heat.
I stood submerged in the shade and cold
Of broken bricks, stones of old,
And in a fleeting moment learned
The world is not a gift,
But yearned.
Party (a Beat Poem)
So it’s about half ten
And my then friend, Ben
Is walking with me to the shops.
We chat shit about lit
As we’re acquainted through college.
So together we’re relatively
Secure in the knowledge
That at least we can agree
On poetry.
As I flip my wrist
To look at my watch
I turn back to notice
That Ben has stopped.
He’s gazing amazed at
An open front door
That’s bustling with boozers
And music that soars.
“Let’s crash it!” Ben demands
Like the house party fascist that he is,
But I have to admit that
My state was, somewhat unfit
To be called ‘responsibly sober.’
So with a heavy eyed grin
I say “OK, let’s go in”
And together we both wander over.
As we move through the ranks
Of the bodies that flank us,
Past the guy with a guitar,
That we could hear from afar,
And the girl who sits just there by the wall,
Twirls her hair whilst absently staring
Into a beer,
We stumble upon the kitchen.
Here the music is nearer
And after an hour passes,
Along with some clear glasses
Of spirits and wine,
We think we’re fine
But then, it suddenly hits me.
We’re crashers, I remember
And as if our agenda was destined to fail,
We would now have to bail,
As just when we make a mission
Out of appearing exempt from suspicion
As if by intuition, some bloke asks casually:
“So how do you guys know Dave then?”
Ben decides to aid by looking artfully away
Whilst scratching his balls,
So it seems to me
That the responsibility falls…
“Dave!” I say, looking absently away,
“We go way back make man,
Holidays in Cornwall and that,
Y’know, caravans?”
The bloke goes away,
Presumably in search
Of the mysterious Dave,
And so I turn to Ben and say “Go mate!
We’ve been made!”
We bolt for the door past the prep lads,
The muso and a chap on the floor,
Ben’s grabbing bottles and fags as he goes,
When a voice asks aloud
“Hey Dave do you know those two?”
Hiding our faces we pick up the pace,
Pushing our way to a tidy escape.
We burst out the door and onto the street,
Finding it hard to stay firm on our feet.
Despite getting myself caught on the garden gate,
It has to be said,
…Best party to date.
The Grey
On slow-light morns
I meet the grey,
An absent sky,
It’s light, afraid.
It heralds the bleak
The tired, mundane,
Most loathsome, most
Despairing of days.
And yet this day, though bleak,
Though vision frayed
And blue sky strangled
By the 'gulfing grey,
After a shower and an eye-shut shave
The bleakest day,
Is realised.
I am awake.