Poem published by Eunoia Review
Huge thanks to Ian Chung for including two poems in Eunoia Review. This one is set in the area around Charing Cross Hospital in Hammersmith.
Tag: Poetry
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London Grip Magazine
‘Half a thought for Hamish’ has been included in the autumn edition of London Grip. It was initially submitted (unsuccessfully) for the summer edition but I’m grateful to editor Michael Bartholomew-Biggs for suggesting a resubmission in June for this month’s magazine. I didn’t change anything, so I imagine it must have been deemed to fit better with this month’s poems (introduced below). The poem was written with a very specific setting in mind, which is the Windsor side of Eton bridge.
N.b. There currently seems to be a problem with the link below – poem posted here in the meantime
Update: All London Grip data from Autumn 2023 to Autumn 2025 is currently lost
LONDON GRIP DATA LOSS: RESCUE PLAN – londongrip.co.ukHalf a Thought for Hamish
Spare half a thought for Hamish McGinty,
his boots spattered by river mud,
geese and sea birds peppering his temporary table
under the sky’s off-white Sunday.Spare half a thought for Hamish,
his grey and white head
smiling without direction.Spare half a thought,
he thinks, if you can,
but for what?Spare half a thought for Hamish McGinty:
those river walks he’ll never vlog.
This is the man without subscribers.Spare half a thought for Hamish,
caught between Mephistopheles
and the raging salt chuck rails
of The White Stuff; half local,
half tourist – both parts mystified.Spare half a thought when the dawn means nothing,
when you’re clambering around sealed boxes
from the past on the lorry of the mind and heart.Spare half a thought for Hamish McGinty.
He restrains himself from talking:
would do so if you asked him.The mind isn’t ‘out there’ for him yet
on communal pavements – you wouldn’t mentally file him
as another babbling shipwreck.Spare half a thought for Hamish
when he has no satellite pre-sets
or passengers for the road ahead.Spare half a thought
as he gets up from the table
and over the bridge past Wren’s hotel,
an ancient church and the reliable indefinable
grey and violet of the river.Spare half a thought for Hamish.
No-one can search his catalogue of the present
from a distance and click some heart. Spare a thought.,
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Just Burial
Unfortunately we’re booked up, sold out –
all the major graveyards and burial grounds,
odd patches of land and even driveways
people used to book on our app
are resting places of people squashed together
like faded burgundy landfill coffee cups.
In fact, ‘Just Burial’ has gone into liquidation.
Where we used to charge the earth
we’re undercut by conglomerates of ash.
They keep your memorial in the cloud
just as safe as if you were in the ground.
No fragments to reassemble on ascension,
no odyssey of the skull, but a 64-bit virtual mansion
forms the many rooms of our father’s house.
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A Ship in Distress
(This is one of the first poems I wrote, over 20 years ago. I probably wouldn’t go with the same rhyme or rhythm now but there haven’t been many revisions over that time, other than an oscillation between ‘when storms rip up and’ and ‘when rip tides occlude or’).
In Christchurch, under old management,
A Ship in Distress was Grandpa’s favourite restaurant
(though the pleasure was transient).Ships in distress are hostage to
unseen forces manifest
beneath the settled blue.A ship in distress withholds cargoes
of human immaterial,
emotions and suggestions
unheeded, individual.Ships in distress are obviously so
when storms rip up and defeat them,
but many a vessel is quietly low
as warning sounds die on emission.
Wilderspool Causeway 