Two Poems

   Every so often, life will present poetical moments. This is not usually the case. More often than not, the soul, the heart, the ear, the eye or some other organ will suffer a momentary arrest or displacement as it projects or even experiences a certain resonance. In these times (and I have to use a simile to even describe this) there is some hidden strand of one's being that is under the exact tension so as to sigh like the string of an aeolian harp as the breeze catches it. The poet then has to wrestle with and arrange the words and ideas and sounds that  enable somone else to bring their tuning up to a pitch which is as close as possible.
   See? I just did that, or tried to. And I used at least one metaphor too, as the simile didn't quite convey it.
   However, as I said, I am not referring to these more frequent moments.
 I am talking about the times when the poem is seemingly just given, like being handed a guitar that has not only been tuned before you receive it, but plays itself...allowing others to believe it  was you all along.

   Here are two pieces of writing that are merely real. That is, they mention real and actual people, with the addition of actual reported events. They are factual and prosaic...so how come I'm claiming they are poems?
   Well, in addition to a real person with a real reported epithet is an inclusion of a separate and imagined idea: each of the two poems can be expressed as follows:

       real person + real reported inclusion + my imagined idea = poem

   All I next did, so as to claim my "poem" tag on each of them, was to edit and chip away at individual words for sound and/or rhythm, then arrange into lines that lead the viewer or reader or audience to what I have judged to be a "good" vantage-point, thereby hopefully to catch the same breeze that I inadvertently strung myself across.
   I wrote both poems about 12 years ago.

David

A kid I used to teach could never even do English let alone French
I'd written off his report before I saw him, hearing that
 he'd legged it after a bollocking, then was seen later on in town
eating a burger
And not giving a shit
He'd just thumbed up a grin at his teacher
Turned his back
And walked away

A year later
I heard he'd got lung cancer at barely fifteen
The boy whose life was a shout and a thrown table
And I hoped
That if he'd been caught out by a dark figure with a scythe
outside a burger bar
He just faced it with thumbs up and grinning
Then turned his back and walked away
Not giving a shit.




Charlie


A bloke I knew (well, to talk to) told me he'd got cancer
In a big, personal lump that he'd started to call Charlie.

I imagined leaving his house after a cup of tea,
Me whistling out of the garden gate
Away from the man and his lump,
Afraid that at any moment I might hear them both shouting in
Tethered domestic hell
And that I wouldn't know which was his voice or which was the man's.

At the funeral, as there must have been,
One of them must have won
But if it was the man
I don't know his name.