Mr President,
valued members of the Committee,
Your Excellencies.
Today
I have come to accept
the Nobel Prize for Literature
will forever elude me.
Category Archives: writing
My Acceptance Speech
Too late
I too would have liked
to write about fog but
the Big Boys intervened,
told me to shut up:
they’d been there,
seen it,
done the poems,
had the T-shirts printed.
So here I sit
quietly watching
a pale sun melt
what could’ve been
my poem – all fourteen
glorious fucking lines of it.
Writing
Some days
a cotton wool tide laps
the windowsill,
drops to reveal
the green valley, grey
limestone peaks,
then billows up
to smother window, view
and the house.
Amid the creak of
the rafters, the chimney’s
tinny commotion
I persevere.
Now you see it –
now you don’t.
Operating instructions
Assemble all the implements.
Then lock the door and set to work
when night falls.
It takes the darkness
for the thing inside to stir, and hours
of tender teasing out before it shows its shape.
Then deftly, cautiously, you set it in a vice:
compress, condense, and purify;
decide what must be smooth and what left rough.
At last you chase its silver surface; polish round
and round until it gleams with hope
and sparkles with despair.
Now get up from the table
with its paperful of fragile words.
Unlock the door. Admit the day.
Yellowstone
After the geysers come the restless nights.
I’m my own Yellowstone: as sulphur mists
dissolve the rim of consciousness
my superheated soul spouts similes,
mixed metaphors thud from the mudpool
of my bubbling brain, hissing hyperboles
ricochet off the walls of lodgepole pine;
from underneath the floorboards fumaroles
steam acid vapour. The silver lining
to these endless nights: sleeplessness
crystallized in syllables; the scalloped edge
around the hotspring of my seething mind.
Love story, Midwest
That was long afterwards, though. Where I was now
was just wanting to get her to stop,
stop the car on that narrow lane on a Welsh hillside
whose name I’ve forgotten
like the reason for our insane quarrel, or where I found
the recklessness that made me
open the door of a car driving along a narrow lane
on a Welsh hillside, jump outside
while she was still slowing down, bang the bonnet
and leave a dent that we both,
separately, secretly, worried about for the rest of
that holiday, because of course
we hadn’t taken out extra insurance for the rental car,
as you do when you are young
and still trust in things mostly turning out right, and still
capable of insane, inexplicable emotions
that will make you jump from a car on a Welsh hillside
and write a story afterwards,
long afterwards, a story about a man skipping stones
over the surface of a twilight pond,
about two people walking through endless cornfields
towards the grain silos of a sleepy town
somewhere in the dusty Midwest of the United States;
a story about love.
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