Martin Stannard

Martin is our favorite Brit poet. His exquisite and extremely amusing

Difficulties and Exultations" is just released from Smith/Doorstop Books

(ISBN 1-902382-29-3), although the work is quite different from the below.

He can be reached at martin.stannard@talk21.com.

SOME LIFE

I'm in trouble

because I've been thinking again,

looking for footprints in water.

You must have met a man

who wanted to say something

but didn't know how. He talks into the mirror,

hits his head with a hammer. Slumps

to his knees, mouth open,

a tunnel bored through solid rock.

There's work to be done

and you understand pain,

how predictable it is. Walking around the streets,

drinking in bars, trying to sell old cars.

On pain-killers since birth.

Some of these muscles haven't been used

for years; some of them I think we forgot we had.

Time flies.

Promises are often hard to keep,

but faith is bloody impossible

to whip up out of nowhere.

We carry on unsure

of the way we are doing this,

or what it is we're doing.

The book we bought,

the one with the diagrams

that makes making love funnier than it already is.

I've denied having it three times now.

You have to open your eyes and pay attention to things.

At night I used to be scared

for my life, and some things don't change very much, ever.

For these rheumy aches in my legs

whenever the air is damp, thank you.

They're part of my inheritance,

along with taciturnity, dolefulness and solitariness.

Thank you.

Thank you.

All these years stuck with my own company,

and I don't think much of it.

It would be nice to be comforted. It would be nice

to be wrapped in cosy blankets

and calmed by the smell of essential oils

like an Arab who knows how to be at home at home.

Blah blah blah blah blah

blah blah some blah blah blah

blah blah life blah blah blah blah

It would be nice

to be able to find what you're looking for in the Safeway

but I suppose that's not exactly the point,

even if your state of mind

too often comes to depend on it.

These two,

stuck in their house like strangers in a cell.

I love them

and if The Ice Age is ending

we'll try and organise the gangs

to shovel the water off our fields,

to wring out the bedding,

and to point out the difference

between the melting ice

and the sweet silent tears of regret

in which people like us might drown

with no one to listen out for their cries of despair.

No one to chuck them a rope

to be saved or hung by.

"The last thing we saw was his hand,

clutching vainly at the air, ever hopeful of a passing straw."

And that was the end of that.

The noise an aeroplane makes makes

us look up and we see the sky's canopy engraved with patterns

that mean something different to each of us. Mystic, it was.

Nearly fucking occult.

But I couldn't stand it,

all that fluff in the brain instead of on the mantlepiece.

I believed in the sky

but not in what people insisted on seeing

in it. It's just the sky. Not heaven, not your home.

Only the sky.

We worry about turning into our parents.

So we wander out into the winter gales.

The wind is like a wall: you can lean your thoughts against it

and they are revealed in their true size,

which is often stupidly tiny, they’re hardly worth mentioning,

though we should mention them,

have to mention them, if they are all we have.

Yes, these are all I have.

You could put them in a toilet bag and have some room left.

The world is falling apart.

People are killing people,

and our hair looks okay. And most things

seem to happen in other countries.

It's cold on the back of this horse,

on the top of this tram,

at the summit of this small hill

we try and clamber up each day

refusing to admit we can never reach the

We're not ready to make history;

reading about it is difficult enough. Troubles grate

on our nerves like fingernails on slate

and lately I've not been able to sleep.

At three in the morning I'm looking at my luggage

as it sits at the edge of another new day, daring the Sun.

The newspaper lands, full of darkness,

on the mat with a dull thud

and there's stuff in there we don't understand.

Things with wings fly out when we open it.

A woman asked me if I wanted to dance and I did

but couldn't, so I faked a brilliant limp and a story

about a car crash, and I think she wanted to dance with me

even more after all that. Now the chain of thought is broken

you can burst in if you like on this tiny drama of a tiny life

and create your own mayhem.

Why be mournful?

Who is behind the curtains in that lighted

window across the street and what they are doing is none

of our business but it would be interesting to know. It would be

interesting to know if it's interesting.

And I know what it's like to be worried about the future:

such worry holds my hand long into the night, even now.

There are things that should be said

and things that never can be said and as you get older

you should try and say as much as possible because when you're dead

it's too late and you might die with people thinking you thought

everything was okay.

It's no good laughing.

Some people do think that everything is okay.

Martin Stannard