Birthday weekend coming up. 39 years young on Sunday. Aye Ole! The car is packed for a trip up North to the parents and extended family in the fine old town of Stamford in Lincolnshire. I'm cooking Sunday lunch - Elgar and Charles Mingus on volume 10, Wine in Goblet, Chocolate puddings..and you are all invited! (better ring ma)

The above snap is to show the squalid conditions i am expected to teach in. A day on 'the Mythology of Leadership' at the Ashridge Stately pile outside London. its tough but i am recovering. Co -lead with my good buddy Matthew Burton, Director of the hit west end play 'the Dumb Waiter' and just given the job by Faber and Faber of assembling and editing Harold Pinter's letters. Good luck with that sir!

CINDERBITERS MANIFESTO.
Meet tuesdays, 8pm, Twice monthly. Bring work you are doing or are excited about. No passengers. Don't invite anyone along unexpectedly. Don't be shy on buying a round. If you absolutely cannot stand Tweed you can touch the hem of a Harris Tweed someone in the group has, and that will do - otherwise get yerself one. Force yourself to have another go at Robert Graves's 'The White Goddess' washed down by some poems by Sharon Old's to recover. Be free to be grumpy.Write with a Quill. Pay for your veg with lumps of gold. Resist pornography and embrace the erotic (specially for the boys). Allow more privacy in your life. Buy wild antiques for next to nothing. Patch old levis. Love hounds and nutty cats. Practice scowling at young people. Take up fencing.Never bring a child along.

Unless its Dulcie.

Hah! breaking the rules already!

I will prepare a more resilient manifesto soon. Visiting Cinderbiter Coleman will be sending a poem each fortnight - why not contact a poet and ask them to do the same where you are. If you do form a group, please drop us a line at the e-mail to the right of this blog. Certain themes would be good to explore internationally.

More soon on this wonderful, low key emergence as we move into the autumn......


So this is a first draft of something after feeling the autumnal pull up to the rivers of Dartmoor, and the thought that the rocks are impacted ancestors. Behind our house is a big lurching hill that leads to the crested Tors, so there is always a desire for heading upwards, and a weird kind of privacy. They are not great work but its good to let fly near a birthday without much worry of its shape!

THINGS IN THE RIVER

there are slow black stones underneath the water
great brains of wetness
and green old currents like raggedy blades
blades that are curly uncles
that are drunk children
that are magical opinions
that terrify my mild hands

i leave the tired house of opportunity
and haunch the fields
two at a time
to sup the briny sleet
in the rough cup of god

This glowing world
is truest in the orphans mud
in the shattering bite
of the hard eyed ram
that refuses to be cut from
the barbed wire fence

I boiled under the Hunters belt
mad fistfuls of language galloped past
The Devon town underneath
my seeing
grew indistinct
almost gone
than flared up again, fought back
with teeth not made of bone

This autumnal privacy desire continues with something scrawled a few days later. I'm sure we know this feeling, whilst cherishing the beloveds we do have....

OLD MEN TAKE ME NORTH

We need a hooded life
i reclaim boisterous peace
and the good Lion in the word No.
Baba’s hut always stays east
no matter how the chicken legs turn

My fierce entry into conversation
after a lifetime inside
is causing trouble with the old growth forest
Brugels postcard of the hunters
floats off my study wall
defeated

I don’t need dramatics
or the eye wrenching hurt of the mountain fast
only to know that certain slow notes inside
carry my fingerprints only
that some golden cup has been stolen back
for the adders delight
that my chair is empty at the town meeting

we have made too many friends


Avaunt beloveds - see you in my next year x