The Door

Found a wonderful collection of poems by Margaret Atwood called, The Door. Here are two of the most beautiful. Click the link below them to order the full collection.

Heart
Some people sell their blood. You sell your heart.
It was either that or the soul.
The hard part is getting the damn thing out.

A kind of twisting motion, like sucking an oyster,
your spine a wrist,
and then, hup! it’s in your mouth.
You turn yourself partially inside out
like a sea anemone coughing a pebble.
There’s a broken plop, the racket
of fish guts into a pail,
and there it is, a huge glistening deep-red clot
of the still-alive past, whole on the plate.

It gets passed around. It’s slippery. It gets dropped,
but also tasted. Too coarse, says one. Too salty.
Too sour, says another, making a face.
Each one is an instant gourmet,
and you stand listening to all this
in the corner, like a newly hired waiter,
your diffident, skilful hand on the wound hidden
deep in your shirt and chest,
shyly, heartless.

Your Children Cut Their Hands
Your children cut their hands on glass
by reaching through the mirror
where the beloved one was hiding.

You weren’t expecting this:
you thought they wanted happiness,
not laceration.

You though the happiness
would appear simply, without effort
or any kind of work,

like a bird call
or a pathside flower
or a school of silvery fish

but now they’ve cut themselves
on love, and cry in secret,
and your own hands go numb

because there’s nothing you can do,
because you didn’t tell them not to
because you didn’t think
you needed to
and there’s all this broken glass
and your children stand red-handed

still clutching at moons and echoes
and emptiness and shadow,
the way you did

Click here to buy the full collection

Codes in the Clouds

Yesterday I bought a raft of new music from the record label, Erased Tapes. It was discovering this label that helped to inspire this blog. Hearing the music the label puts out for the first time just made me want to rush out and tell everyone about it, “listen to this!” I wanted to cry. “Isn’t it beautiful…” And so this blog was born. And now, here I am again saying the same thing.

It’s difficult to convey the impact some of this wonderfully crafted and curated label’s music has had on me. It goes with me everywhere. It has, almost literally, soundtracked quite a large proportion of my daily travels. And that’s quite fitting because some call much of the label’s output, “cinematic music”. And yet it’s wonderfully free of the restraints that traditional cinematic music or soundtracks can have; with their pre-determined narrative and structure which become indelibly glued to them. With this music you are free to create your own narrative, your own soundtrack, your own story.

One of my favourite bands on the label is, Codes in the Clouds.  I plug myself into their world of roaring highs and simmering lows and just for those few snatched moments on the way to work or after a long day as I make my way home, I dream…

Play track: Don’t Go Awash In This Digital Landscape (feat. Paul Mullen)

Play track: Distant Street Lights (iambic remix)

Play track: We Anchor In Hope (Tom Hodge remix)

You can buy the album these tracks feature on by clicking: this link

What Do You Want To Do Before You Die?

Earlier this year artist Candy Chang launched a public art project which invited passersby to write their own ending to the sentence, “Before I die I want to…” on a large blackboard installed on the front of a disused and dilapidated building. Sticks of chalk in a bowl attached to the wall allowed people to respond as soon as they saw the board.

Responses were, inevitably, mixed – some funny, some profound and some more than a little worrying: “make a life and take 1” is a tad disconcerting. But I love the way that artists like her are re-defining public spaces. And it does, after all, ask a question which resonates with us all.

If I write now…

If I write now:

‘I want to live
and I want to love
and still see you and the sun’
then later they’ll just
shrug and say:
‘The poor thing had no idea’

Better to speak of my premonition of our dying
Then at least someone will nod and say:
‘How prophetic!
He knew about it all the time’

But then premonitions of death
always come true in the end
just as the great rain prayers
of some native tribe
are never unanswered
because they dance the rain dance
day in and day out
till it really begins to rain again

So I declare in writing
being of sound mind:
‘You won’t have to wait so very long
for my longing is already beginning
to lose faith in itself
and I am often tired
in the middle of the day

And if I open my heart
perhaps my love will fall out
like a brittle
pressed four-leaf clover
Not long now
till I come visit you
as a pebble or a fly
no one recognises’

Tornado

A new look for the blog and a time to revisit one of my favourite albums. Go Live by Jonsi (lead singer of Sigur Ros). A gorgeous live album recorded during his acclaimed tour in 2010 in a sumptuous package (CD and DVD).

It’s a triumphant record and well worth seeking out. Below is the track Tornado, one of my favourites…

Play track: Tornado