Black Holes Don’t Speak For Themselves

Black holes don’t speak for themselves

And neither do poems

Poems aren’t facts

It’s not a simple matter of multiple choice

There’s no one right answer at the end

There are multiple answers

Multiple ways to reach them

Multiple ways to write about them

Poems overthrow the norm

Narrow channels become rivers

Poems don’t terminate with if-then-else

Poems don’t finish at black holes

Poems live beyond the event horizon

They come alive

Poems look into hearts

Let me show you black holes

Let me speak with ultimate conviction

I have the right

I wrote the poem

A whole new galaxy

It’s not utopia

It’s a lack of dystopia

What You Will See

In the title poem of my collection What You Will See, available for pre-order here. I’m using words that work their way through the alphabet from A to Z. It just started as a bit of fun with wordplay and alliteration (that’s repetition of the same sounds). You’ll see what I mean:

What you will see

Is Billy breaking out of his breeze block bunker

With a bust of Bloodaxe. You’ll see the concrete

Of his tenement crack to reveal corroded filigree

Excerpt from What You Will See (KDP 1st May)

The wordplay idea grew from that opening to paint an urban picture in a small town setting.

I struggled to find a sentence at the end with XY and Z. I remember applause when I read this last line on the poetry stand-ups back in the 1990s and I was very pleased.

Xenophiles survive. Youths yoked against zero survive

Xenophiles are the opposite of xenophobes, people who are scared of foreigners. It would have been too easy to use Xenophobe, and stereotypical.

It’s not obvious what the word play is, and those who detected the alphabetical alliteration on the night loved the positive ending which is why I included it and named the collection after it. I had no idea this line would grow in meaning. It’s the opposite of the “mundane provincial detail” that’s become a common way to define anything outside the ‘normal’ metropolis. I had the image of people arms linked. Out of word play came a defiant anti-Brexit statement. This was written in the 1990s when the seeds of Brexit were germinating. The good times rolled, or so it seemed, but not for everyone. Santa wasn’t stopping at every house on the street. I was living in a parallel universe at the time, one that I couldn’t come to terms with. I travelled south from the stricken 80s dystopia of the north in 1987. I was seeing only one side of the coin in the south and I wrote about what I saw.