The Link

A month or so back, I was invited to bring a little spoken word set to a little festival I’d never heard of before, despite it being on my doorstep, and it being 20 years old. Gaunts Summer Gathering. A planet-conscious retreat that effectively showcases the year-round work of the team running the rambling old Georgian home. Healing and awareness and eco-spiritual kind of stuff that I fringe around comfortably enough. Especially at the moment.

 

Especially at the moment because of all that I’ve been reading and pondering over the summer. A summer rich in scibbling and developing in many ways ahead of what I hope will begin to look like a productive autumn. But having never been asked to assemble a whole words-only set before, it flickered an immediate conviction to write something especially for this – purely penned for words and no music or project context. A thing. A thing that might reflect the beginnings of where my head is moving towards being ‘at’.

It was a swooning sun-soaked afternoon in the verdant grounds when I stepped onto a little plinth to deliver this for the first time to three people and some haybails. And anyone listening around the still, hot campsite from the PA. Who knows. A typical Momo gig if ever there was one. Not least of which because the three people were very nice and might in fact have been five at one point and one of them was Bomo scene-and-beyond poet Lex Sciore, with whom I got to chew the cud in a hay-strewn field with wood-fired pizza. Which was worth it alone.

A month later, lastnight, I shared this again at the at September’s Freeway Poets at the blessed Winchy and it seemed to be a thing there too. As someone I properly met outside afterwards, silk-toned poet and Wicker Man front man, Justin Sellick said to me: “It’s all about who is here now.”

Indeed it is.

Here it is:

THE LINK

I am begun to think: There is a link.
There is a link.
A buried power line between, say,
failure and the drink,
narcissism and shrink,
loss of nerve and blink,
the longing and the wink.
My DIY, my leaky sink.
And that damply rotten stink I’ve half forgotten.

I am begun to see: There’s synergy.
There’s synergy.
A reflex telegraph response between
my Madeline’s request of me,
that I appraise her poetry, and our
divorce on grounds of cruelty.
‘Twixt lonliness and family;
bomb design and chemistry.
And how addictive cheese can be and diabetes.

I am begun to find, there is a bind.
There is a bind.
A trail of tricky evidence between
the things we leave behind
in the expensive place we dined,
clinking things drafted and signed, to
something we said half blind.
Some unguarded truth unkind.
And an unwarming thought in mind that’s slowly forming.

I am begun to dread, there is a thread.
There is a thread.
A transoceanic echo connecting
lastnight and my head,
like what ministers have said
and crowded dinghies in the Med,
as I watch, still dressed, in bed.
Inertial guilt, the floating dead.
And that new client I’ve bled, some corporate giant.

I am become suspect: Cause and effect.
Cause and effect.
A broadcast wave from small sound bite
of toxic idiom insect
to swollen global throat defect –
to breathless scale of noise neglect…
To my tiny local dialect?
My corporate pod? Or lone project?
And the global socket I connect with from my pocket.

I am begun to think: There is a link.
There is a link.
A fibreoptic nerve signalling
a green light to the brink,
sacrificing blue and pink,
from a contract’s drying ink.
To dancing circles, pouring drink;
fevered skating, melting rink.
And our heat quite choking out each chink of light.

Written by Timo Peach, the bloke from Momo:tempo