The Secret Poet's Diary

Today a great thing happened: I secured my first bookshop appearance - and it’s at Waterstones in town! Surely now - finally - I am on the verge of discovery and fame!

It happened this way:

At lunchtime, walking down King Street, I was thinking that there had to be some hidden beauty in the decaying decadence of the British High Street and, dodging buskers, panhandlers

and disability scooters, searching for an appropriate metaphor, it came to me - I would write a poem from the point of view of a dog at its master’s grave!

My subject, the owner, might have died - perhaps shades of Gene Hackman’s demise in there somewhere, to give it contemporary relevance? - and the dog will watch painfully as the body decomposes, whimpering and whining its and our pain. 

Somehow I must link the great old  business names to the decaying corpse. W H Smiths, I read today, is the latest to end up on Death Row. I need to get Woolworths and some of the old bank names like Lloyds in there - perhaps a black horse, too, or is that too cryptic? Faithful dogs whimpering loyally at their master’s graves are a forgotten sub genre which I shall revive! Old Shep is coming back!

Yes, if done right, this will be the lead poem of the new collection, Cerulean X. My plan, of course, was to think of the full title during my lunch break but that’s when the wondrous event occurred.

I was browsing in the Delph Road branch of Waterstones when I couldn’t help overhearing two shop attendants, one up on a small step ladder restocking Self Help, lamenting the fact that a writer due to appear the next afternoon - that is to say, tomorrow from here, as I write this diary in bed - had ‘cried off’.

“It’s the rain,” said the one up on the ladder.

“Yeah, probably,” agreed Gill, the manager, who’d sidled up too. “A Tuesday as well, don’t forget.”

“Tuesdays are cack,” said the lady picking books out of a box.

“Excuse me, Gill,” said I, a few moments later, when the manager was back at her berth behind the till, staring out at the open doors through smudged glasses, hairy arms folded.

The rain was really thundering down at that point - even the drunks had taken cover. “I couldn’t help overhearing…”

“Oh, that’s right - you’re a writer, aren’t you?” she said, cutting me off as I explained.

Thankfully Gill of the short mousey bob was vague on how we’d met before. (I’d come in asking for my second collection, Vituperative Selfies & Other Poems, to be stocked in the Local Authors section and Gill had rejected it on the grounds of the cover being ‘inadequate’.)

“I’m a poet, actually.”

“Oh, that’s right,” she said. Some shadow flickered across her hazel eyes.

I offered to step in for the absent author.

“To do what?” Gill asked, frowning. There came a great scalding hiss from the coffee machine in the café. An old man was sitting at a sticky table typing a phone message with one pointing finger, glasses up on his bald head.

“A reading, perhaps?”

Gill scratched her ear. “Remind me. Are you published?”

“I am.” A figure with a raincoat pulled over its head sprinted down the middle of the street outside - the rain grey, mighty and unceasing - with a soaked, skinny, embarrassed greyhound following - a sign, of course, not to forget the Hackman High Street poem (and, just like that, a title!).

“Who by?” Gil asked, watching me scribble in my Moleskine.

“Oh, a small, local imprint.”

“Who?”

“You wouldn’t know them. Bit obscure.”

“I work in a bookshop, pal.” Gill laughed. “Self-published, then, is it?”

“Some of my work is…”

“Well, look - maybe talk about that? Self-publishing?”

The debate raged on until I emerged - the storm having passed - under grey, heavy skies with a negotiated solution. The next day at lunchtime I would run a short creative writing workshop and discuss how self-publishing could provide local writers with an outlet for their work, a condition I agreed to on the proviso that afterwards I would read from and sign my books.

“Aye, if there’s any interest,” Gill had conceded.

“What time do you close?” I’d replied, winking. “Wouldn't want anyone going away disappointed.”

She’d snorted in reply.

With a few minutes remaining before I had to be back at the office, I rushed to find Keith, almost breaking my nose on his shop’s glass door as I tried to get in to tell him the news.

Seconds later, with stars still in my vision, Keith appeared in the window glass, grinning.

Before I could say anything he pointed at a sign - handwritten, in his own scrawling script - on the door. It read, No Wankers. “Sorry, mate,” he shouted through the glass, shrugging and laughing.

I tried to remonstrate with him but it was impossible. Finally I had to leave.

At work I debated sending an email with everyone copied in but finally settled on a handwritten note tacked to the corkboard by the lifts. Nobody mentioned anything to me but the office was quiet that afternoon, everyone preoccupied with the upcoming 360s  at the end of

next week. They're cretins anyway, of course, who worship Actors as God.

At home, mother was far more impressed. Ryan, whom she was watching The Chase with, asked, “Are they paying you, buddy?” but both insisted they would be there the next day. I spent the time before dinner trying to work out the best place for them to put the blue plaque on the facade of our house. 

Upstairs, exhausted, I fished the cardboard box of Vituperative… out from under the bed and stared down at the covers. My then girlfriend Vanessa’s painting of an exploding brain stared back at me, its dark crimson swirls and pink valleys more iconic than ever.

Later I lay in bed thinking of Vanessa, wondering if perhaps I could somehow work her in to Hackman High Street. Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, Ted Hughes and my actual-height, cardboard cut out Emily Dickinson watched over me. 

Soon I was being interviewed.

And where did you get the inspiration for Hackman High Street?

“Well, that’s actually a fascinating story. I was still a complete unknown at that point. And do you know something? Sometimes I miss those days, the anonymity of them. Because back

then one could just walk around, anonymously, and notice things, notice life…”

Hackman High Street

On sandhoofed black horses they ride, these fiends,

clotting urban arteries with gambling and usury.

What of Walt Henry Smith’s whining cur?

On Iceland’s porch, by corpse unseen?

- Tbc

Submissions sent this week - 6

Acceptances - 0

Rejections - 1

"I can be changed by what happens to me,” said Maya Angelou, “but I refuse to be reduced by it." Perhaps she, too, had been alone at a table of her own publications on a rainy day in a bookshop - alone, alone for hours and hours. Perhaps she, too, had walked in the rain with a slowly disintegrating cardboard box of her own books, paid for out of her own pocket, and set them up in stacks and standing lines on a rickety, white, fold-out table only to sit for three hours behind them without once speaking before stacking them back in to the soggy remains of the box in exactly the same order and leaving by the same route with the same box into the same rain. Perhaps she, too, watched, horrified, as the box finally gave up the ghost as she walked through her front gate, seeing her poetry splashing down into puddles and dog shit and disappearing under a brown tsunami from a passing bus.

“Where the fuck where you?” I asked my mother, crashing in through the front door. She was watching TV alone, some dramatic series on Netflix full of low-lighting and dramatic close-ups. 

“Oh,” she said, blinking, white wine in hand, “was it today, love?”

Alone in my room I pondered my future. 

It is hard to live like this, to believe in yourself, to continue to believe in yourself despite the endless onslaught of nothingness - the breath of the abyss in your face always, always - but I take comfort, as usual, in the knowledge I am not alone. 

Pessoa wandered anonymously through the streets of Lisbon, working in his offices and filling his trunk with scrawled scraps of fragmented genius. My dear Emily Dickinson, of course - I’m looking at her now, standing before the net curtains and evening drizzle in her gothic muslin garb - was anonymous in every sense during her lifetime - more anonymous than I! One day there will be youths with cardboard cutouts of me in their bedrooms; people will go to cemeteries with my poems to commune with life and the universe! Proust, Poe, Kafka, oh the list goes on - I am in good company, I know, I know, but oh, the pain of living amongst the apathy and the indolence and ignorance and mediocrity - I must assume it. I must absorb it. I must reinvent it.

Keith, summoned by my mother, I think, arrives and more or less arm-wrestles me to the local public house, The Fox and Hounds. He force feeds me cheap fizzy lager and tells me, in no particular order, that I need to: write something controversial, get pissed, get laid, grow up, forget about it, find a ‘school’, do videos on Instagram, jack my job in, work with him, form a band with him, invest in vinyl, write lyrics for him, write something good, take up boxing, join Tinder, write something funny, hassle journalists, forget about it, forget about everything, take drugs, get some tattoos, go to Ibiza with him in summer, just nick stuff and copy it, forget about fucking poetry and, well, there was more but I can’t remember any.

Something happens to me overnight - in my drunken snooze. Some change takes place within me; I can feel it when I wake up. I am not the same. And nor is the world. The sky behind Emily’s dark silhouette is blue and clear. I hear, with strong conviction, the voice of the universe instruct me that I am a poet and must do whatever it takes to continue to be a poet. Very quickly, my train of thought rattles on with answers - resign from work, take your savings and travel the world. Write and live. Write and live.

And I think, quickly, breathlessly: I shall go to the airport and take the first flight I see - the first flight to anywhere. And I will live there and I will write there. I will be a leaf in the wind. I will be a feather on the running river of life. I will live!

On my phone, a notification arrives - the beep distracting me. Queef, a literary magazine based in Moscow, Idaho, has accepted Hackman High Street for publication in its next issue. Online only, but already running to sixty-seven publications, Mary F, who writes an uncapitalised message to me, tells me she loved the poem.

It is a sign! 

This is my life. I am a poet. I will survive. 

I stand up and am violently sick all over Emily Dickinson.

The Reading

I am the one you ignore,

whose works you scorn.

These bloodletters, these soulmarks,

writ in symbols dark on pages white,

are my life.

Yet I feel dead, already in the grave

watching your soles tread away

to be entertained, to not to think

to do anything but meditate,

to vote for fascists.

And so I leave you, my home - 

I leave you behind. Time, time,

only time will tell who’s right.

My shadow here will always cast light.

Submissions sent this week - 6

Acceptances - 1

Rejections - 1