Another collection of poetry readings

I’ve had some nice feedback on my previous posting of poetry readings so I thought it might be nice to post some more for your entertainment.  As with the other recordings, the quality of performance is not of the highest quality but that’s why I don’t usually perform my poems.  However, I am making these recordings so that there is some record of my existence as something other than some text on a screen.

The first poem I picked is Merlin.  Written about my beloved cat with whom it has been my privilege to share my life with for the past sixteen years or so, it is an example of my early work.

The second poem is The Watcher.  The subject of this poem was the infamous ‘Face’ on Mars and was inspired by the work of Richard C Hoagland and the team of experts who studied the Viking images of the extraterrestrial artefact (if that is indeed what it is).  This poem was also the first of a series of ‘Gaia’ poems of which there are only currently two at the moment.

The third poem is Raindrops...Teardrops.  This is the second of the ‘Gaia’ poems and was inspired by an instrumental piece of music of the same name.

The rest of the poems I have chosen are from the collection of untitled poems I have written over the years.  The only way I have been able to distinguish the poems is by assigning them a number based on the order in which they were written but, as some of the untitled poems were left unfinished, the set of completed poems seems to skip numbers at random.

The first of these untitled poems is, in fact, the second poem I ever wrote following my friend Nikira’s adaptation of my prose piece Solitude into poem form.  I wrote this poem during my lunch break whilst working at a company in their heavy press department.  Although some polishing was done at home that night, the majority of the lines are exactly as I wrote them that evening.  It is known only as Untitled.

The next poem is known as Untitled 10 and was written as an attempt to explain the duality in my personality.

Untitled 12, the next example of my work, is probably my darkest poem.  The imagery comes from a vivid dream I had as a side effect of taking Citalopram, an anti-depressant, and comes the closest I have ever been able to get to expressing the deep feelings of self-loathing from which I suffer.

The next poem is Untitled 16, an attempt to try to combine dream-like imagery with trying to out-do the darkness of Untitled 12.

Untitled 17 was written, on request, for a meeting I attended with the local mental health service commissioners to be performed by me to try to explain how service users felt when attending appointments with mental health staff.

Untitled 19 is one of a series of poems I called my ‘suicide cycle’.  In a way, the song Let Me Go (one of my previous postings) is a part of this cycle.

Finally, I have chosen Untitled 23.  This poem was written by candlelight when the cost of our electricity had become so prohibitive that we had to choose between heating the flat and having the lights on, a problem we keep having every spell of cold weather we get even now.

Although these poems tend towards the darker end of my work, I hope you will still enjoy hearing them if only as a way of understanding the deep depression of which I suffer and the associated feelings of self-loathing.