Sonnet Plus 2 [poem]
It was a face I knew I’d never see again.
The only time its leaves had blown across my view
was through the window of another endless train
which, in the opposite direction, crowly flew.
No answer came when, nonplussed, I had wondered why
those eyes — of all the others in this realm today —
should penetrate the weathered piercingness of my
disguised delight and throw me into disarray.
And then I saw her tender hands pressed on the glass:
her face which (puzzled) followed mine till seen no more.
Why would she want a man who travels pirate-class —
our lives spent on a train stuck in a corridor?
I was a blaze which burned for seconds through her why.
She was a breeze which passed across my broken sky.
.
.
© Alan Morrison, 2013
The Lighthous & The Brine [sonnet]
If I was a lighthouse and you the sea
(evaporation’s salt reveals you are)
I’d warn the vessels on your waves to flee
and head for port — ignoring every star.
You stir up storms (though tempest is the word
[+ {yo}u and {o}us]) I’d use to style your tide.
On your bed, ugly life-forms darkly stirred;
the wrecks you dashed to bits have multiplied.
For when I trawl your lure (unfathomed deep)
there is no anchor — barely can one swim.
There was a time when in your brine I’d leap
but now across your surface I will skim.
So pound my rocks with all your typhoon force.
I’ll shine my lights; let nature take its course.
.
.
© Alan Morrison, 2013
Why I don’t (and won’t) play cover versions of other people’s songs
People often ask me why I don’t (and won’t) play cover versions of other people’s songs. The reason is simple: I can only express my art if it bubbles from my heart. I’m not just a singer; I’m an artist painting pictures with my words. I create my own palette of colours. Other people’s palettes are their business. I love to see their pictures but I cannot repaint them. Does all that make sense?
Kid Gloves [poem]
Roll up! Roll up!
Imagination picks a fight with common sense
and Mr. Fantasy has booked a ringside seat.
A fat and crumpled three-piece suited man
(who I swear is only there to line his pockets
on a whim) sucks on a big cigar and smugly
grins at both the boxers who he represents.
Darkness lights the ring, as you can see;
delusion is the hugely biased referee.
It’s happened again
It’s happened again. I see some random person in a shop, on the street, a bus, train or plane, and their whole life washes over me. It feels like a mixture of being breathed on by the sky and being hit by a truck. It is always shocking and powerful and mind-altering. She was mid-fifties, I guess; but I reckon younger than she looks, shopping with her husband. We had some eye contact and it was as if I saw every burden — every sigh which lay behind the lines on her face — her heartache, her indiscretions, her unfulfilled desires, her longings, her little successes, her perceived failures, her soldiering on in the face of hopelessness and much more. But not as separate elements; all of them at once, like an avalanche. And I sent some of my heart her way. It always makes me weep. She saw my wetted eyes and she knew. Yes, she knew. Do you have that experience too?
The Speaking Chair [poem]
Rays of rising sun had struck the chair and table awkwardly
as if through shyness (though that can’t be proven here).
A corner of that little plastic throne was shredded –
worn and torn by countless swift unthinking hands
and now forlorn we stare each other coolly in the eye.
(How can we ever know if things are real? Who decides?
Perhaps that chair is just a figment of my mind –
my over-fevered dream imagination working overtime).
Stuck inside my decomposing head, that corner of the chair
becomes a finesome hirsute masterpiece instead;
and I recoil. What if we, at this stage of our river’s flow,
are not equipped to full discern the working of a brain which
dwells within a chair or any other dense unanimated thing
but then, at some far future date develop apparatus which
can see a brain (or more) is plainly there? And if you tell me
that no chair has ever moved I will reply by saying that not
just a little chair but every single thing in earth or sea or space
or in the air vibrates and turns in ways beyond our mind
can nowly see. And furthermore I here declare that nothing
anywhere is what it seems to us to be. We, in our desperation,
give our mundane names to things and then there are the
frames we bring in which to trap the essence of an object
lest it acts in ways which pull the wretched rug of rationality
from underneath the boring functionality which makes our feet
stay firmly on the ground. And all around is light and something
we have not learned yet to name, nor ever will so long as in
these lumpy bodies people dance the karma-dharma game.
I’ve sought that unnamed something through the halo of my days;
yet here the worn-out chair before me speaks in brainful ways.
© Alan Morrison, 2013
Cosmic Soldier [poem]
Sometimes one has to go where even angels fear to tread –
a barely-heard-of hinterland where one is neither live nor dead;
a world beyond the forest fires and quaggy mires of ordinary fate,
a semi-hopeless state where greyness has no legal home,
where demons cruelly duelly roam, poke fun and poke out eyes,
where mysterious means dangerous and truth consists of sighs,
where every trail leads off a cliff; where driftwood floats not in
the sea but in the air and nothing’s just and nothing’s fair;
where only patience gets you through combined with prayer
disguised as tears and nothing ever there allays your fears.
Yet freedom slyly creeps up on us when we throw away the map
and compass, wander down that muddy unmarked track,
explore the meaning of alone, face the bloody rumpus, then,
with luck (& after many thrusts of lance and sword) come back,
a thousand aeons older, a wounded tattered cosmic soldier.
© Alan Morrison, 2013
Call Off the Search [poem]
“Make the most of every day”, or so they say,
“for you never know which one may be your last”.
Which sado-masochistic dreamer coined that koan?
Presumably a robot with no record of a past!
Is our only goal to stay alive? If so, for what?
For in this stricken broken world what reason
could there be for anyone’s desire to survive?
The Verdict [poem]
The coroner (a meaty sort of man
whose mother made him sit for hours writing out:
“I must not touch my willy with my hand”)
composed a so-called solemn face
because he was the boss man in that haunted
clutch-at-straws deliberating place
and said with gravitas:
“The deceased took his own life
while the balance of his mind
had been disturbed”.
Sonnet for a Sacred Cow
I rail at the sky, the sun, stars and moon
but no answer comes from the canopy
of endless empty airless nothing hewn
from vestiges of astrotherapy.
You sent me thingless to this barren ball.
(I am thingless still to this present day)
Of why I’m here I have no clue at all;
and everywhere… the rancour of decay.
It seems to me so vain to leave someone
revolving in a door with no respite –
a turning whirling carousel undone;
a never-changing waterfall of plight.
I’m not afraid to slay a sacred cow:
I’ll wrestle with You; choose your weapon now!
© Alan Morrison, 2013
The Naked Troubadour 