Stand-Up – Page 2 – Writer-insighter

Last Defences

I was walking yesterday, up along an old path called Into The Light, along the road a little way then north towards the railway, along an old drove road, towards the house of someone I used to know.

A man was burning a tree fallen in the storms and the pheasants shot into the air as I walked along a cart track underneath where they’d roosted. I went and talked to someone else who knew the same person and we didn’t mention her at all. I got back in the last of the light, out of the light and said hello to someone I didn’t know to stop an old man cycling into me in the dark.

An old apple tree, planted nobody knows when on a drove road most people have forgotten. I think someone long ago threw away an apple core. — Unwanted apples on a forgotten drove road. I think someone long ago threw away an apple core.

I thought about a poem I started years ago. I’ve never been able to finish it. I thought about a girl I used to know in Cornwall and I thought about the Spring coming and the old wartime things you sometimes discover walking here, still littering the fields and hedges after what, 70 years or something. Time moves at different speeds in some places, sometimes.

I don’t know whether to call this Walking With Blue or Last Defences. Let’s stick with the second one for now.

Last Defences

March and the raw wind cradles the rooks calling.

March and the wet wind licks my face

Waiting for the Spring to start

So we can go for a walk together again.

Secret clumps of snowdrops,

Uncleared pillboxes among the hedgerows,

Winter’s last defences mowing down the unwary

As they walk along the oddly empty lane

Unthinking. The sudden burst of flowers

Shattering the grey, reminding you

It really will be Summer again one day.

Cock pheasants clattering,

Calling safe from the guns

Until October now.

Woodsmoke from a bonfire

Clinging to my scarf,

Walking with blue even indoors.

I remember these last days of February too.

Spring term. Mock exams.

Back when everything was new.

And walking with blue

Jeans and dove grey sweater.

It was a poem I’d started then.

I can hear me now, still walking towards me

From the other end of my life

As I walk these different fields,

Too far from home, still walking with blue.

Hello stranger. I knew it was you.

Where’ve you been all this time?

Why didn’t you write and tell me

If you were alright?

If you couldn’t say at least

Why didn’t you write to me?

Why didn’t you write?

© Carl Bennett 2104

Artwork and soirees

I scribbled Songs Without Music down after my shower on Sunday and used it to introduce the set that night, at The Anchor, Woodbridge, where almost everything started and very sadly, one thing stopped.

As soon as I stepped off the stage I was invited to an afternoon of song and art and poetry that half of Woodbridge wanted to go to. I think that might have been part of it. Pity. But it started the stand-up gigs and it got me this rather lovely artwork that flowed from my reading.

Raw and Hypnotic

I was more than a bit surprised to hear my stuff called this that. I’d done some work on the delivery, making it less converstaional even though I’m always a bit scared it’ll drift into ‘POETRY READING WITH VOICES’ territory, (you see what I mean?) which takes the life out of it and means people feel they have to clap even if it’s utter crap. Although I don’t think they’d do that in the pubs I’d played.

A tough-looking bloke half my age came up to me and said ‘you’re like me’ after this gig. A slightly drunk rocakbilly girl massaged my shoulders while I drank a pint of cider after. Never before. After the gig, you understand. After the gig.

It’s reaching people, somewhere in thier hearts. Poetry isn’t just for books in libraries. It’s for talking, maybe to yourself, or to the thing inside us all. It’s very, very flattering that so many different types of people are hearing this. I’m assuming of course that an entire pub going silent is a good thing. I could always be wrong.

Songs Without Music

I started using my iPhone as a voice recorder. The quality isn’t that great, but it’s good enough to get things down as you think of them and there are times when you just can’t find a pen and paper.

Doing stand-up poetry has shifted my brain into overdrive in some respects; it’s made me think about words a lot more. It’s also made me think about what poetry is and despite Google, I still don’t really know.

I always had problems with rhymes. When I first came to London I bought strange books. One of my first pay-packets got me Betjeman’s Summoned By Bells, which wasn’t his greatest stuff . Anything qualifying as that would have to include Invasion Exercises On A Chicken Farm. There’s a brilliant original recording on Spotify.

I used to hang around Motor Books, a small shop still down an alley off Haymarket, full of odd titles like Sniping Towards the Rhine and The Improvised Munitions Handbook, which they refused to sell me unless I could prove I was in the police or the Army, on Home Office orders, they claimed. I wasn’t, so I left empty-handed. And I still don’t know what poetry is.

Maybe it’s a song without music. I think it is.

Songs Without Music

Some people think that poetry

Should rhyme

But there’s more

To words than that.

Sometimes rhyming

Just produces doggerel

Or worse; very often

You could hardly call it verse.

Poetry was something inaccessible

At school when your least

Favourite English teacher

Used to play the fool

And do his funny voice

For recitation, which bored

Almost an entire generation

At my school.

Poetry my dear,

Poetry simply wasn’t cool.

So I don’t call this poetry;

I call this music without songs

Or songs without music

And just hope it may amuse

If you’re in the right mood for it.

You see what I mean about rhymes?

Let’s get on. It’s getting late.

Besides, we’ve all got other things to do

Like drinking wine and reading poetry to you.

Slightly Foxed

I like Sundays. This one is going to be busy. I’ve got a job interview tomorrow as well as the Lifeboat Party radio show, and I need to make sure all of my stuff, the ironed shirt, the three forms of identity, the polished shoes, are all ready for that.

And today after I get some sleep there’s a music thing at the local pub a mile away, then at four nine miles in the other direction a party and then another open-mic gig at The Anchor in Woodbridge. The big question is cab or car? I don’t drink until after I’m not performing, or only one drink, but I might want a drink afterwards.

I talked to a friend yesterday, someone I’ve known since school. “Do something about living in Tony Blair’s Isington,” she said. “I used to read your email rants and laugh out loud.” She still has them from 15 years ago. Maybe we need to talk but we’ve never quite got around to it somehow.

Her advice was don’t be one-dimensional. Despite describing my stand-up stuff as cathartic and affirming and transformational ( I know, I’ve got to look all that up in a minute as well….) she told me to write stuff not just about my stream of not-quite gelling relationships. Even Wordsworth wrote about daffodils and Coleridge, my West Country dope-addled literary hero above all others, the man who melted and moulded words to create something more akin to a 1980s Tom Petty video than something people in crinolines might read, he wrote about all kinds of stuff. Gardens. Ships. Albatrosses. Crossbows. Caverns, if you’ll pardon the expression, measureless to man.

For years I’ve been fascinated by old photos. At last I think what I meant to write about them has come out properly. Almost. It’ll probably change a little soon but this draft is almost there. I think I’m going to do this one tonight and see how it goes.

Slightly Foxed

Box Brownies, Linda Eastman,

Cartier-Bresson, Fox-Talbot;

Just the names talk of pictures.

Photo-gravures and glass plates,

Fox-Talbot patented film and wrote a paper

For the Edinburgh Journal of Science

In 1826 bewitching “Some Experiments

On Coloured Flame”; To the Quarterly Journal of Science

In 1827 a paper on “Monochromatic Light”;

And to the Philosophical Magazine

“Chemical Changes of Colour.”

What did it mean?

Long exposures, pained expressions

And the blur of a small boy moving,

Too bored and too young to be so still.

It was the only way they could take pictures

Back when cameras were on tripods

And photographers wore a thick black veil.

Some people thought the camera

Stole their souls. Chief Skittiwash

In the Pacific Northwest, remembered now

Not for his photo but for his mention

In another text, “Demonstrating a conceptual

Link between Wilderness and” something else

I hadn’t the time or inclination to read.

The image was fading and blurred, foxed

Before my eyes like Mr Talbot and the rest.

Fading monochromes spoke of the same;

An instant etched for all time

As if we could stop the clock hands turning.

As if the picture of the people we loved

Could stop them leaving or ageing.

As if seeing their smile, or the way their lip

Curved, framing the flash of their teeth

In the streetlight could bring back their laughter

And that thing she said in the garden,

The day before the sleet.

The daguerrotypes of steam-haunted

Railway stations, the double-engined

Monster bomber about as big now

As the average car, if a car had wings.

These pictures become the images of death.

Not in the machines or even the guns

But the uniformed men, the unformed lives;

The old, the young, the not with us now

The blank expressions and glassy eyes

Trapped on tables and mantlepieces,

The charity shop or the skip,

Staring stiff and still at the sky

From where their picture fell.

And sometimes you know they’re still there.

You can see them. You’ll be taken unawares

In a junk shop or a museum, in a place you’ve

Never been before and suddenly

You see them in the place

Where you dropped your keys

Staring past you out of their years:

A dog, a cart, an older man and a girl

Holding the back of a chair,

A woman frowning as she stands

For the photographer with better things

To do before she was fixed forever there.

“The popularity of picture postcards showing Indian women weaving baskets or digging clams attests to a growing nostalgia relating to Indians. Historians have demonstrated a conceptual link between the disappearing American wilderness and a changing attitude toward Native Americas by looking at both popular literature and the federal government’s Indian policies. The Indian came to symbolize America’s lost youth, and his image commemorated that unspoiled past.”

Still Life

I was thinking about old photographs, the way you’ll maybe find a picture of a place you know well, but taken years before you were even born. How sometimes you’ll find a photo of people long, long dead, standing with their dog or a basket of washing on your own front doorstep, this place they knew, this place you know.

Boulevard de Temple, Paris, taken at 8 am by Daguerre, either in 1838 or 1839. We know the time of day but not the year.

And this poem just didn’t come out the way I thought it would. The one I meant to write is still waiting to be written.

Still Life

Louis-Jacques Daguerre

First captured souls

When men wore promade

And greased the anti-macassars

On chairbacks with their hair.

The image is projected onto a silvered surface,

Shone on the fakery of Sheffield plate

Exposed to iodine fumes and

Tobromine and chlorine,

Half the firmament of Victorian chemistry

To produce a halide coating,

Carried to the camera

In a light-tight plate holder.

Sensitive in the dark

Like a tender girl.

Then like a magician’s trick.

The light is let in,

An invisible image on the silver plate

A tarnish of light arrested by sodium thiosulphate

Or a hot saturated solution of common salt,

And uncommon liquid gold

Poured onto the ghost’s face

Heated then drained and rinsed and dried.

Underneath the silver will always tarnish.

The picture must be kept under glass.

You can always tell a daguerrotype

Or teep, more properly, as Louis was

Unfortunately French.

A century and more on

The image is still bright,

The mirrored surface mirroring past lives.

Long after their last goodnight.

After last night

Well, the night before, anyway. My very, very first paid-for stand-up poetry gig was at Justine de Meirre’s Tapas & Tales event at the Old Mariner in Woodbridge. Ok, it wasn’t much, just petrol money, but something of a landmark event, the first time anyone’s put their hand in their pocket and said ‘here, that was worth my money.’

Which isn’t why I do it, but it’s nice, despite the monetisation of something I’m not quite sure what it is. There’s a good, edgy feeling before you go on. I kicked it off with All Of Your S**t, the one that started it all, the one that gets the audience wondering if they’re allowed to laugh.

I need to put more theatricality into the delivery, I think. I’ve always resisted that ‘this is my stage voice’ thing, the booming Brian Blessed oration and now I’m up on a stage doing it I can see exactly why it’s done. I talk as if it’s late and everyone’s had a couple of drinks and we’re relaxed and sitting on a sofa and I’m not at all sure that totally works as a delivery to a room full of people. Let’s face it, it doesn’t always work on a sofa, depending on your definition of ‘works’, of course. There have been some memorable sofas, it must be said. But it’s not that kind of show.

Songs without music

Back To Ourselves followed up, which is a bit Hugo Williams but I like Hugo Williams anyway. It’s a little bit about the end of the summer holidays, which is to say that of course it really isn’t at all. Then In Silence, and then the one that really does silence, When The Phone Rings.

That poem, if these are poems and I’m not at all sure about the definition, so I call them songs without music as I can’t sing and play a guitar at the same time, doesn’t just silence the entire room every time I do it. People come up to me and touch my arm afterwards. Always my left arm, just above the elbow. Men, women, always the same reaction. This time I recorded it and there are even people saying ‘oh!’ at the end.

I don’t know whether it’s ‘oh that was so moving’ or ‘oh god, poor you,’ or both, but it seems to speak to people. So I really ought not to canter through it because I’ve heard it so many times, and I also really ought to remember that not everybody has and although the more impressionable women might go for that whispered in their ear, the person at the bar can’t actually hear it unless I BrianlyBlessedly boom it out a bit. Which is a performance in itself, because first of all it’s quite a despairing, non-shouty, sensitive piece and also because when I put some volume into my voice it cuts across every conversation in a pub, which was quite useful in places like the Sloaney Pony (oh come on, the White Horse on Parsons Green, you do know, rarely…) in the ’80s, when girls wore a single string of pearls outside the turned-up collar of their borrowed stripey shirt under a tight jumper, and jeans, blazer, a rugby shirt, RayBans and Topsiders were actually cool (what do you mean, they aren’t now?), it does sound a bit as if I practice scaring Labradors across three fields.

So some work on the delivery needed. But a night when other story tellers told me they liked my stuff, when the monetisation didn’t matter, when you get through the pre-stage nerves (there’s a simple cure, just tell yourself ‘ok, if you feel like that just don’t do it, just don’t get up there. You don’t have to. Nobody’s going to make you do it.’ That cures it), when you feel genuinely that we’re all in this together, that like Bronze Age people, we’re huddled here out of the storm in this little pool of light and we’re telling the tales of our tribe, sharing what it is to feel in all the different ways there are.

And I felt ‘this is what I do.’ Just such a pity the person who helped me do it wasn’t there. So all that after last night. At least nobody said ‘we need to talk.’ Even though we all did. I do, anyway.

All Of Your S**t

Years ago I read an ad in the Personals. No, honestly, it really was years ago, although it’s probably time to start reading them again. There really was a real ad from a woman who took about a quarter page ad, telling everyone about her children and how devoted she was to them (as if anyone was asking) and how she would always put them first (as she should) and how nobody would get between her and them (as if they’d want to).

It just went on and on and on, as if someone kept suggesting the opposite, over her shoulder. I don’t know if anyone ever replied. I didn’t. The saddest thing was also the funniest thing, the very last line:

I’m looking for a man with no baggage.

It’s always stayed with me. So I updated it a little, in case that poor woman is still out there somewhere, still going on about her adult children. I should say now, this poem, if that’s what it is, is NOT based on or about anyone I have ever known, met, spoken to or done anything else with. Ever.

All Of Your S**t

I’m looking for someone

Without any baggage

I am a man woman couple looking for a fun

Reliable person partner soulmate

Who is tall short and dark light

Who is funny serious adventurous

And likes staying at home

And going out with friends,

Just chilling, doing the same things.

They say opposites attract lol.

I love my children, my home, my family

My car my job I would give the world

Lay down my life for or

Never forgive them or someone, for something.

I love my pets and

I don’t want any ties right now.

I like walking on beaches in the mountains.

I love going on Citybreaks in the countryside.

I want someone to be there for me

When I need them and I can’t handle commitment

Right now. I love having no responsibilities

And caring and going away

Whenever I like.

I love staying at home.

I am looking for a life

Partner a serious relationship

A one-night stand

Who knows let’s see. Fun.

I am married, single, divorced,

Separated, just looking.

And widowed. It’s complicated.

Delete as appropriate.

Delete as inappropriate.

Friend me. Chat. Txt. IM me.

Review my post and report me to Facebook.

Delete my posts on your timeline.

Remove your profile and change

Your privacy settings

Even as you change mine.

Forever and ever,

Or until the next time.

Mark me as flagged until that thing happens when

First the Xs disappear from your msgs

And quickly then the txts get shorter

And less often until sooner than you thought

There’s no reply at all and quite finally

Without appeal and irrevocably,

You just unfriend me.

So I’m looking for someone

Without any baggage.

(c) Carl Bennett 2013

Looking back I can see I posted this on November 28th. That was the day I went to the Blaxhall Ship and my life changed quite considerably.