I had the honour of being asked to headline 2019’s Positive Images Festival in Coventry, where I performed a collection of poems exploring our perception of positive images and where we might find them in our everyday lives.
I discussed the power of memory in making our most meaningful moments into some of the more positive images in our life, which led me to my final poem of the set: Denmark.
I hope you enjoy it and it reminds you of some of the positive images from your own life and memories.
Filmed live at Backhaus & Co. on Saturday 13th July 2019.
On the bridge, your voice is pink with cheap prosecco.
Our small talk tremors like tadpoles against the brick, our glances echo
and burnish the canal basin, my fingers fidget in my jeans’ pocket like a gecko.
We pause, spy our reflections staining the stagnant waters like spilt petrol:
we are the fuel that this night guzzles in great gulps and swallows,
our inexhaustible energy urging our engine forward, no longer concerned with tomorrows;
no fossil fuel burns brighter, what we yield is far richer than oil,
far more fertile than soil and, in this moment, see how our garden grows without toil.
Our rosemary and daisies photosynthesise beneath the August moon, its raindrops of light
washing the crickets in the thickets as they rehearse their ancient tune, their
timeless serenade that cushions the airwaves in a midnight cocoon that
softens our defences like an expensive perfume that could never be bottled.
You spray your words in clouds and wisps that glitter in the night’s glow
and I feel their philosophy fall softly like bare feet in fresh snow,
their crisp, white wonder whispers beneath the soft wind that blows the first leaves from the trees –
but we aren’t a bit cold.
Your company cradles me, contains me, comforts me in a caress of
silk and cotton, I feel the red of your dress flutter like a fleeting
daydream as its shimmer, subtly impressed to the outline of your frame,
lets out its delicate breath in goosebumps that garland my skin and, like Braille,
spell out your name.
400 years since the The Bard exeunt all from this stage, and still no words, words, words ever spoken
nor committed to page have had my attention so consummately engaged, so uniformly tied,
as your heartfelt soliloquies and hopeful asides. Your hair glistens
and glimmers like forbidden ocean tides from the paradises you paint
behind the lids of your eyes that open now like rainbows after storm-savaged skies,
and you: you are the treasure at the end I’ve always longed to find.
