DJ COXON

The Sirens

2008-10-01T20:53:00.001+02:00

Inspired (at least in title) by a poem of the same name by Laurence Durrell. Not a big fan of his, but I liked the title, and wanted to give the idea a more modern twist.

The Sirens

They follow me again, the same three faceless
girls, calling their names over and over,

the night sweet with their warning. I long to
ignore them this time, have no patience

with women who do not need to be clear
in their purpose or motivation. I turn:

they wait in the shadow of where I’ve been.
I want to ask them, why me? What do they

hope to achieve in this act of stalking,
where do I fit with their idea of what

decent prey should be? Their song says nothing;
it is beautiful, yes, but missing a beat

somewhere, a cadence which should draw me close
to death, wreck me, make me run in front of a car

or something. But all I sense is the breath of things past;
of a time when their cool chant would lift a man

from himself and drop him at their feet. When
they meant something. And knew it, completely.

Sestina: Who Speaks for the Bones?

2007-02-09T20:00:00.000+01:00

This is my first go at a sestina, a tricky form which uses the same six words at the end of each stanza, but reorganised. I've broken each sestet into triolets, as I prefer the more broken up look of it.

In the corner of a field, where the dogs play,
they find a body, deep in peat, beneath
the bracken and bits of car and Tesco bags;

how long it has waited to be found, how far
its body has become the earth’s, how tender
its last touch, we need to know. We follow

the men with trowels and frowns, follow
them and stand around while they play
earth over their tools, admire how tender

is this caress of soil on skin, as they reach beneath,
around, behind, release the man (they’ve gone so far
as to call him ‘he’), line up the bags

they need to take his parts away. These bags
contain a past. Collective, distinct, but to follow
this to a conclusion is to show how far

an argument can go. Is this just play,
this claiming of an age-worn body, is it beneath
contempt to ask for more? Many tender

their interest in the man and in their tender
moments claim him as their own; these bags
of bones begin to touch a thing beneath

the ordinary, and when we follow
a line back, take time to see how we can play
with time, then science and pagans are far

away. For this man, for one whose life was far
behind, who’d lain in peat for how long? this tender
part of then has no interest in now, he cannot play

our games, will have no say in where the bags
will go, has no desire to follow
us to our conclusions. He is dead; better beneath

the earth where he belongs than have to follow
our urge to fill his past, to be beneath
the place he ended, which was his ending, with the play

of dogs and scrub on top, far far
away from all this crap, with the tender
breath of air through car parts and Tesco bags.

2007-01-10T23:39:00.000+01:00

It's been a while since I posted anything onto this site. This is something I have been working on for a while now. It's a reminiscence of my grandfather, who was, looking back, a pretty amazing man.

He worked their land, grew things not his own,
plotted the elegant rise of tomato plants
on greaseproof paper culled from their kitchen,

rested in the damp warmth of the greenhouse
until it was time to go home, to his cold frame
choked with passion flower bursting the glass

and the ranks of broken plastic pots
half filled with years old peat, stacked
like hats whose heads have long since left.

He was proud of his borrowed place, of the
things he did there. How clean it was, with
its order and its hospital smell of Jeyes

and him the surgeon, with canvas gloves
and the shears gripped, ready to operate,
ready to bring shape to the jumble of growth.

But then at home the random scatter of
his outside space, as if all his decisions were made
elsewhere, inside the safe glass house not his own,

as if things only grew the way they should
at work. I came, twice, saw him at his best,
at what he did for those who called him Snook;

his first name buried in the cooling peat,
or left hanging on the peg with his indoor coat.

The Fisherman

2006-04-26T14:40:00.000+02:00

Nothing but thick rain. The fisherman
pushed off from steady land and his one small room,

near the park, where he listened sometimes
to the play of children’s voices on the swings.

His mother gave him little to begin.
He gave her what she wanted, grew into the oilskin

without praise, and he swept his sight over the sea.
The mornings drew fish and the evenings slept at the lee

of his tiredness. He fished his father’s waters
and all the while the murmur of the daughter

brushed against his thoughts. “Why now,”
his mother asked when she found

him silent, “why fish these places dry again?”
As the bland sky turned towards the rain,

dropped a tempest stopping him from work,
he contemplated forty days with just his thoughts,

enough to make him him again. The man
considered, and somewhere in the plan

he saw no ending. Nothing but rain
squalling, nothing but the sea and him.

Faith, her name, lapping at the boat
he named for her, even though

she never swam outside her water,
couldn’t slip from the hook that caught her.

Her cows

2006-02-02T21:08:00.000+01:00

are lined along the mantelshelf.
They’re her babies. She’s had them years.
Above, in clip frame on the wall,
is a signed photo of Cliff.
His songs often drift from her.

I’ve been visiting for weeks,
walking her dog, listening to the drain
of her boredom, trying not to notice
the acid smell of piss. She sits in a one-
armed armchair, the other arm long
broken. She pats the arm like an old friend.
I lean this way now, she says.

She asks me to hand her a cow –
a different one each time I come.
She puts them on her knee and
strokes them as she talks.
She calls them all her favourites.
Is it indecision, this constant
preference, or something else?
The space that choice once rested in
now missing everything but cows?

I buy her one, on impulse. It’s made of wood
and is rather grand. I put it with the others.
The next time I come it’s not there.
She clasps another in brittle hands.
I realise I am not there to add to her.

Shit boy

2006-01-27T23:39:00.000+01:00

This lad waits back at the end
of class, says he has things to say,
things for my ears only.

They call him ‘only half there’,
whisper about the other half
behind his back, about him shitting

himself last year, in maths. About
how he stinks, which is true,
only I’m not allowed to say so.

He sits on the edge of the desk.
‘Can you keep a secret,’ he says.
I tell him I can guarantee

nothing, which is always a good
way out. He nods. He’ll tell me
anyway, whether I like it or not.

It’s about a girl, he says, about
a girl he’s been seeing (no longer
do they ‘go out’ as we used to) –

about the things she’s been saying
about him, to her friends, calling him
‘shit-boy’ and making noises.

You know the sort of noises, he says.
Not very nice noises. They make me feel funny.
I shake my head and tell him I’m sorry.

He looks at me as if there is nothing
more than this moment, these
girls and their insults. I tell him

I’ll see what I can do. (Know it will be
forgotten by the time I’ve had coffee
and been to the loo.)

I leave him sat on the edge of
the desk, looking at his feet, like a
lemming contemplating freefall.

Launderette

2006-01-19T14:14:00.001+01:00

Smith took a job in the launderette so he could be closer to her. He knew she went in twice a week, so at least he’d be able to see her more often now. She was a nurse at the hospital. She worked in accident and emergency and sometimes she brought her bloody aprons to be washed there.

Davis came to see Smith every lunch time. ‘Why you wanna work in a place like this I’ve no idea,’ he said. ‘You ain’t doing yourself no favours.’ But he came in and sat with Smith and they ate lunch together. Then they would go out to the carpark at the back, for a smoke.

Smith knew better than to listen to Davis about his new job. He knew it was worth it, being here in the launderette every day. It was worth the long boring hours so he could see her twice a week. But he couldn’t tell Davis as he wouldn’t have understood. Davis was not the sort of man to understand what some men had to do. He was more of a sports kind of a man. Smith liked talking to Davis, but their conversations didn’t stray too far. But it was important to have friends like that.

Later, when the last of the clients had left, Smith locked up and joined Davis in the bar. He ordered an orange juice. He was trying to drink less and eat a more healthy diet. The last time he’d looked in the mirror he’d been disgusted by what he saw. He was only thirty but he looked twice that. He didn’t hold out much hope that his nurse would be interested in him. But at least he was giving it a chance, by putting himself in her way. By making an effort with his appearance and general health.

Davis wanted to talk about his warts. He showed them to Smith. They were in clusters on the fingers of his right hand. One of them was the size of a pea, and had been picked at. ‘You see, they’re beginning to spread now, and I think that I should go and see someone, you know, a doctor like, but what do you think? Any advice?’
Smith looked at the warts. ‘I think you should go and see a doctor.’

Two girls came into the bar and sat down at the next table to the men. Davis turned his chair to face them. They weren’t very pretty, not like the nurse. One of them had a top on which was too short for her. Her stomach poked out over the top of her skirt. Smith went back to the bar.

‘How’s the job then,’ the barman asked. Smith had been coming to the bar for a year now, but he still didn’t know the barman’s name. He had meant to ask, but then it got embarrassing, so he gave up. He kept hoping he would overhear someone say his name, but he never did. There weren’t many regulars at this bar. Mainly hospital visitors and a few doctors, finishing their shifts.

‘Going well,’ Smith said.
‘Stolen any panties yet?’
‘Not yet, no.’
‘Let me know when you do. I’ll give you a free pint for them.’

Smith took the drinks back to the table. The girls had moved to the other side of the bar. The two men talked about the football, about who was playing who and which manager had said what.

The next day at four, the nurse came into the launderette. She walked past Smith and began to unload her washing from a stripy bag. When she had finished she sat at one of the picnic tables by the door and lit a cigarette. She took out a magazine and smoked her cigarette and occasionally looked across to see how her washing was doing.

Smith began sweeping the floor. He moved across to the nurse, sweeping all the while. He swept under the other picnic table then moved near the door. The nurse carried on reading her magazine, looking at the pictures of models and movie stars. She chewed at her fingernails between drags on her cigarette. She smoked the same brand as Smith.

Smith wanted to talk to her. He wanted to sit down opposite her and ask her how her day had been, whether it had been hard, whether she enjoyed what she did, whether she was lonely or not. She had such lovely hair, long and wavy, which she always tied back with a scrunchy. She wore glasses to read, which suited her. They were tortoiseshell, like the sort librarians would wear. Or at least the sorts of librarians Smith thought about when he was on his own. Smith wanted the nurse to look at him with those glasses on.

After he had finished sweeping he went to the back of the launderette and filled up the soap powder dispenser. He sneezed a few times when the powder got up his nose. The nurse did not look round. An elderly lady did, who had come in to wash her dog’s bed. The dog sat at her feet, looking bored. ‘Bless you,’ the old lady said.

The nurse’s washing was nearly finished. It was spinning now. Smith knew that, by the time it finished, he had to talk to the nurse, say something, anything. After all, he’d taken this job so he could be closer to her. And if he didn’t do anything, there would have been no point in it all.

The spin cycle finished. The nurse stood and waited by the machine for it to unlock. Then she unloaded her clothes and put them back into the stripy bag. Smith knew he’d lost his chance. He knew it, because the nurse never used a drier. They were a waste of money if you had somewhere at home you could dry your things.

Diet Club - 2nd draft

2006-01-16T11:51:00.000+01:00

The Diet Club

At morning break, skin bared,
four girls compare nights before.
All are changing. All changed.
Inhabiting a space the body can’t provide.

They compose weight-stories. Lie if,
by some quirk of chemistry, their
bodies get it wrong. Plan ways to cheat
their system, hurry things on.

They have all the best advice, know
just what they need to keep alive
barely, understand the calorie
and what it does. Its capabilities.

Each carries a future: a picture,
perhaps, torn from a magazine,
or words from a forum: a lifestyle,
not a disease. It is their choice.

Worlds rest on the look of an arm,
its circumference. The shape of
the space between finger and thumb.
They use one girl’s hand as equivalence.

The bell goes. They dissolve
back into classrooms. Dream
of love in feather-thin days.
Observe their disappearance.

January 2006

Looking for Elizabeth

2006-01-16T11:49:00.000+01:00

A complete redraft of the original sonnet form - no longer a sonnet...

Looking for Elizabeth

We park our car somewhere around the back
and hunt for where your ward is, but a lack
of signage slows us down, finds us testing
locked doors, looking for alternatives.

You’re in a room which smells of someone’s shit;
not yours, you tell us, looking vague, yet with
a hint of tired embarrassment. What you
mean is: this is not me here, complete.

You toddle to the day room; we follow.
‘If you see a woman in her knickers,
ignore her,’ you warn us. ‘She’s not all there.’
Your thin hands worry a yellow hankie.

At first it’s hard to see what’s wrong with you.
You can make tea, joke about the patients,
comment on the view from the dining room.
Offer us chocolate from a small tin box.

Numbers puzzle you. ‘I can’t seem to take
seven from one hundred. It just won’t fit.’
You close your eyes to try and picture it.
Your fingers flutter over blank options.

Your actions loop over themselves. Chocolate,
again. More talk of awkward numbers. We
try to tempt you with other things, like news
from our families. From next door we hear

a woman sing, her voice cracked with something
none of us understand. ‘Such a shame,’
you comment. ‘A nice lady, too.’ Your hand
comes to your face. You offer more chocolate.

© DJCoxon, January 2006

The diet club

2006-01-14T12:53:00.000+01:00

Another draft, this time as a response to a programme I saw the other day about anorexia. Apparently there is now a group called 'pro-ana', which makes the whole thing sound rather trendy and lifestyle-based, which is terrifying.

The diet club

At morning break, arms bared,
four girls compare the nights before.
All are changing. All changed.
Inhabiting the tight space their bodies now provide.

They compare weight-stories. Lie if,
by some quirk of chemistry, their
bodies get it wrong. Plan ways to cheat
their system, hurry things along.

They have all the best advice, know
just what they need to keep alive
but only just, understand the calorie
and what it does. Its capabilities.

Each brings their own ideal; a picture,
perhaps, torn from a magazine, or
the words from a forum: a lifestyle,
not a disease. It is their choice.

Sonnet for Elizabeth

2006-01-14T12:50:00.000+01:00

Draft of sonnet, the first one I've tried. It's about a friend who's been struggling with mental health for a while. We went to see her in hospital. Not sure it works yet as a sonnet, as the narrative in stanza 2 seems a bit 'cut off'. Still, it's a start.

Sonnet for Elizabeth

That mind, the one you knew was close,
was near, yet chose to keep itself from you,
a mind which, losing touch, began its loose
unwind, and being left behind caught up
with you – where is it now? We know you know;
you know it too – but what’s become of you?

We leave our car somewhere around the back
and hunt for where your ward is, but a
lack of signage slows us down, that plus
a haze of foreign words that make no sense,
such blind degrees of difference remind
us both of where it is you think you’ve gone:

down faceless corridors without a clue
of where the next sign is that points to you.

January 2006

Eviction: a villanelle

2006-01-11T17:34:00.000+01:00

A first draft of a response to the recent plans to kick bad people out of their homes. Hmm, seems like a sensible idea... And they'll go where, exactly? Oh yes, into a 'sin bin'. Ridiculous.

Eviction: a villanelle

They’ll drag us from our house today
me and the kids, put shutters on our door;
but part of me still living wants to stay.

Because there are some problems round our way
and Stevie and the lads doss on the floor,
they’ll drag us from our house today.

It hurts me when I’m called an easy lay
and kiddies laugh and shout 'your mum’s a whore',
but part of me still living wants to stay.

You see I have a hundred bills to pay
and nippers as they grow want more and more.
They’ll drag us from our house today.

If only for an hour I had my say
I’d say we’re not all bad, not to the core.
That part of me still living wants to stay.

I haven’t seen the boys at all today:
I’m not surprised, they must know what’s in store.
They’ll drag us from our house today –
but part of me still living wants to stay.

January 2006

Avalanche Training, second draft

2006-01-11T11:20:00.000+01:00

I've tried to cut out some of the more poety-bits, and make it more honest; also to concentrate on our childhood/childish perceptions of snow versus the reality if there's too much of it.

Avalanche training

In the drab safety of a hall
we met, knowing what
it was we came for – that
too much of a good thing
can be bad for your health.

Avalanche. Even the word falls
over itself, races from sliding v
to a hiss of snow-slabs, piano-
sized, as big as a car, capable of
rearranging parts.

We listened. Some took notes. You’d
think that snow on snow was no more
than a child’s winter dream,
the thing that turns clocks back
and is hard to stay mad with for long.

Not so, our instructor warned:
snow is no easy customer, prone to
sudden bouts of indecision, easily
tricked by the vagueries of wind-toss,
liable to end up in all the wrong places.

And then there is the cold, or
lack of it. Or the excess of it.
Snow seems never to be happy
being the sort of thing
that at home

lasts a breath. Here it’s different.
Here it can kill.
So we listened, took notes,
hoped we wouldn't be the ones
not found till spring.

January 2006

Such a lovely girl

2006-01-10T20:39:00.000+01:00

First draft of a short story

Anna wipes the children’s faces before they go in. She straightens Jacob’s tie. He squirms, then is still. Marianna waits placidly by the bottom step.
Inside there is shouting. Anna waits for one of the children to say something, ask a question or say they want to go home. She won’t blame them if they do. She feels that way herself.
She knocks on the front door. Jacob and Marianna remain by the bottom step. Shuffling footsteps approach the door from the other side.
It takes a moment or two for the many latches and locks to be opened. The children fidget in the cold air. Anna’s finger ends begin to lose their colour. ‘I need the loo,’ Jacob says.
The door opens. Anna barely recognises the man on the threshold, standing hunched in the sudden draft caused by the mixing of warm and cold air. Her father, Gustave, a headteacher for twenty years, a housemaster before that, now lost in his own doorway, as if he’d left part of himself back in the sitting room.
‘Ah,’ he says by way of a greeting. He holds out a bent arm, lowers his head a little. ‘So good of you to come.’ Always so formal, the old man. Even to his daughter and grandchildren. Even to his own wife, most of the time.
They stand in the hallway, the four of them, and for a moment no one speaks. All are pretending not to be listening to the voice, or voices, coming from the next room. It sounds like someone asking unwelcome visitors to leave. Gustave looks down at his grandchildren. ‘My but you have grown,’ he says. His voice is whisper thin. The children hide behind their mother.
‘A bit shy today,’ Anna says.
‘Of course,’ Gustave replies.
Anna takes the hands of her children, squeezes them gently. Marianna’s hand feels cold and sticky. The three of them follow Gustave in.
‘Hello mum,’ Anna says to the woman standing at the end of the room.
‘Oh I am so wicked, such a terrible terrible person, oh dear yes. You need to leave right now. You shouldn’t be here. I’ll do you no good.’
Gustave sits in his usual chair, with his back to his wife. She leans against the wall, her head tilted upwards a little, as if bracing herself for an earthquake or explosion. Anna looks at her two children. They stare at their grandmother in a mixture of terror and fascination. Marianna grips her mother’s hand more tightly.
The three of them sit on the sofa; Anna in the middle, two children either side. The sofa is old and soft and gathers them into it. Jacob struggles to stay close to the edge with his feet on the floor. Marianna seems to have stopped breathing. Her eyes have not left the strange sight of her grandmother, who in turn stares absently at the candelabra above the dining table.
‘And how is work?’ Gustave asks, his hands resting on his knees, as they always do when he sits. As they’ve always done.
‘Good dad, yes – but –’ She pauses, looks back at her mother, who is swatting imaginary flies away from her face and talking to them all the while. ‘Won’t you come and sit down, mum?’
‘Oh no, I can’t do that – I must stay here. The chairs are dirty, too dirty. Like everything. Just so much filth. Where are my cloths?’ She moves towards the kitchen, her hands moving restlessly. Gustave turns.
‘Don’t worry about that now, Ellen. I will see to it all later, as I told you before.’
‘I need the loo,’ Jacob says.
‘And me,’ says Marianna.
‘We’ll go together,’ Jacob says.
They are out of the room before Anna has time to speak.
‘Oh where are my cloths,’ Ellen says.
‘Why don’t I make us some tea?’
In the kitchen, Anna leans against the counter top and forces herself to slow her breathing. She fills the kettle with water and waits for it to boil. Her mother has a point; it is dirty in here. Gustave has never been a practical man; his books are too important. They come first, even now.
Anna looks through the serving hatch. Her mother is now sitting on a dining room chair, attempting to remove a heat ring from the polished surface using only the cuff of her cardigan. Gustave sits with a book, but Anna can see that he is not reading it.
She brings the teapot in. Her mother stands and moves towards her, arms outstretched. ‘No, that is the wrong tea pot, can’t you see? It has a chip in it. The tea will be ruined now. All of it ruined. I should have thrown it away before, when I could. Now look, all the tea ruined.’
Gustave stands and takes her arm. ‘It’s alright Ellen. This teapot is fine for us. Don’t make such a fuss.’
Ellen pulls her arm away from her husband. ‘Get off me you stupid man. You stupid, stupid man. Oh why did I marry you and have all those children. Where are they now, those children? Where? I’m no good for any of it, really. Just keep your fucking hands off me.’
Theirs had always been a polite home. If they had gone out, perhaps for an evening, or if they were on holiday by the pool, the sound of toilet words (as they were known by their family) always raised comment from Ellen. ‘Only dirty people swear,’ she’d say. So the word, as soon as it leaves Ellen’s mouth, hangs in the air like pollution. Ellen shrinks into herself even further and begins slapping her leg. ‘Oh dear me,’ she says. ‘Oh dear me.’
‘It has been getting somewhat worse,’ Gustave says as they move back to the sofa, leaving Ellen to castigate herself.
‘I’m sorry dad.’
‘Yes.’
The children return and stand at the door. Marianna has been crying. A sensitive girl, like her own mother at that age. Anna stands, gestures for her father to remain seated.
‘I think we should make a move,’ she says.
‘Perhaps,’ says Gustave.
Ellen moves towards Anna and the children, who shrink behind their mother. ‘Have you seen Anna?’ she says. ‘Such a lovely girl. Lovely, lovely Anna.’

Another writing haiku

2006-01-10T11:26:00.000+01:00

An evening alone:
words in an empty room
fill the page.

Haiku

2006-01-09T21:29:00.000+01:00

Trying to get back to basics, so will post anything which comes up...

Voices in another room
stop at the door
when my pen begins.

Avalanche Training

2006-01-09T18:13:00.000+01:00

Something I've been working on today. Unlike the UK, which has teachers' INSET involving league tables, we in the Alps get to roll around in the snow and find buried bits of plastic which emit an ultrasonic beep. Not that I'm smug or anything. Anyway, this poem came out of us all sitting around trying to imagine what it must be like before you're buried. Not sure yet whether I get across this disparity between our comfy lecture, and having your legs almost snapped off, or being left buried until the spring thaw.

Avalanche training

In the drab safety of a hall
we met, knowing what
it was we came for – or at least
the theory, the brute parts which
made the whole.

Avalanche. Even the word falls
over itself, races from sliding v
to a hiss of snow-slabs, piano-
sized, as big as a car, capable of
rearranging limbs.

We listened. Some took notes. You’d
think that snow on snow was simple,
an accumulation of flakes,
the chilled equivalent of the rain-
blessed lake.

But it is not so:
snow is no easy customer, prone to
sudden bouts of indecision, easily
tricked by the vagueries of wind-toss,
liable to end up in all the wrong places.

And then there is the cold, or
lack of it. Or the excess of it.
Snow seems never to be happy
with simply being the sort of
thing that at home

lasts a breath. Here it’s different.
Here it can kill.
So we listen, and take notes,
and hope we aren’t like the boys
who weren’t found till spring.

2006-01-08T15:16:00.000+01:00

I thought I'd start by putting on some poems I've written over the last couple of years or so. I've been a bit crap about writing recently, but now I have this blog, well, who knows what gems/utter rubbish I'll publish now. It's all in my head at the moment.

Welcome to my blog!

2006-01-08T15:00:00.000+01:00

We'll see what happens, shall we...