100. Stephen Hooker

Love, Lust and Loss at the edges of life.

Stephen could do with a nice third person biography. It needn’t be too much - just stuff like where he’s from, his inspirations, and what he enjoys.

Poems

Be Photogenic
Getting Used to it
The Iron Poet
Seasons Without Fun
I Can Make the World Perfect
Break Me Some More

Be Photogenic

It’s the edges of life
That focus my eye
I despise all those other photos
Of smiling faces
And plastered on selfies of
Those tortured expressions
Wrung out from the worst horror
The pretence of happiness
Strained over too much grin
A cheap plastic emotion we can trot out
The paperback cover to so much fiction of lives
And let's not ask too much  
That’s never admitted to
That it hides
Sawdust scattered over vomit
Brushed away the next day

A trillion billion photos
A cascade of coloured distraction
Enough to wrap up the horrors
The bloodshed, the rape, the child exploitation
The ritual gender mutilation
The domestic violence
The billionaires fucking the economy
Because, well
They can-can 
And dance on your grave

I don’t want your faked joy
Your projection of what the world should look like
Outside of you
Show me your insides
Tell me who you really are
And not the you that everyone
And everything has crushed you into 
This space you occupy
For less than a blink of an eye
To be you at all costs
You have paid the price
Give my unflinching lens
Your truth
Be photogenic 

< < <

Getting Used to it

Of course I’d like to see you again
Although it appears
Amongst my friends and family
I am the only one who does

I really see you
Not imagining 
Picturing you
In all the pictures I have
Where you exist
Locked in a time
Where there is no time travel
But there are warlocks
Eating away at the flesh
Soon to be burnt
Ashes to ashes no fun to funky

I can close my eyes and then I can see you
Even if everything else is black
Inside of me
There you are
Not imagined
Really seen
You are here
And everyone else is there in the stalls 
Emotionally stalled
You breathe in my heart
Your life in every beat

Except I was there when you stopped breathing
And your life halted
Terminated.
The nurse 
With practiced condolence
Came over and closed your eyes
I couldn’t move 
But you didn’t see
She closed those lids
And then everything else was perfunctory 

The arrangements
The death certificate and the charge for extras
Because you can’t make copies
£12.50 now by the way 
Each to their own they say
For you people
In attendance
For your future reference
There is no fun in funeral 
Although it is there
In those first three letters
Like fangs
Sharp
Glaring at me
Monstrous in their desire
Knowing
There is nothing I can do now
But to suck it up 
There is nothing left to do 
In your empty space
But to get used to it

< < <

The Iron Poet

Up in the gallery I look down at my feet
This is not quite the gods
Well, not until we meet
And I think about your footsteps
As through the corridors and on the steps
They would have fallen
Where they must have wandered
I'd like to follow them
You're a giant though
And I'm only very, very small
Maybe an iron filing
Still I walk on
Come by your statue 
And sit with you for a while

It's a one sided conversation 
Frozen as you are in your prime
I can't help wondering about you as a child
As I wonder about myself 
As I go back in time and watch 
As Rod Taylor did
Those shop window mannequins
Undress and redress
But not address all those feelings gathered over time
In barely restrained words
Hammered on paper
Tiny metal fists
You insist 

Nineteen seventy and my eight year old self
Sat in class in rapture in your words
As the teacher, Mr Morris 
Reads your story and you take me to the sun and back
And I realised then
Maybe to save something important 
You have to damage yourself

But then we would do that for you
Well-meaning as it was
Smiling faces brandishing paper cuts
That they should use to open up their own hearts
And the bitterness there in
But no, let's eviscerate you
Because we need to look
As I feel we do
In all suicides 
For someone to blame
I get what it is to be a Yorkshire man
Rough and bluff which of course 
Is only there to hide the pain
What is it they say?
All men live lives of quiet desperation
You can't always stop
The butterfly from breaking itself on the wheel 
Life isn’t always a gas after all

You were gone by the time I read your birthday letters
And I had to put together the man who wrote about the Iron Giant
With those more metallic words
Where you were trapped in a bell jar
And here I am standing in your school
Hoping to be schooled by other poets
Listening to this stumbling confession
I'll not be standing on your shoulders 
I'll just look up to you from the grounds
You, the ferrous wordsmith
Hammering away in my heart
Because you have - damn your silent self -
Galvanized me
Completely

< < <

Seasons Without Fun

The plot was all gone
Escaped out the back door
See you next week it said, with a wink and a smirk
And a doff of its burning desire
And for good measure
A question about how’s your father
While I would be exiting out the bedroom door
To the box room
Away from the box in the corner
Where they once or - so it’s said -
Buried that Mr Morecambe and Mr Wise

We wouldn’t be flicking through the channels again
And you don’t look up
Even when I tapped our screen
Turned to you and said:
‘It’s dead, Jim’

But it was all heart beat to you
The endless streams of Netflix
Our lives measured out in episodes
Fast forwarding through commercials
Forever promising another life
That was there but not there when the screen blinked off
Blanked empty love
Closed down another day
We’re are all caught up now
You would cheerfully say
And take to the material bed
Which was a poor second - maybe an ITV3 or a Channel Five
In the ratings war
To the fiction that dominated us
Became us

And so to the fact
You never saw coming or cumming
Wishful thinking because there was none of that
The only boob was the boob-tube
Binge watched
To a blur of memory

And then when our lives went into re-runs
Two pointless and sexless affairs took me nowhere
Apart from your wrath of Khan
When I finally cut the cable
You still hold on to the fantasy
Of us
But our show time
This last season in the sun
Has been
Cancelled
Consigned
You are steadfastly locked into
Your endless re-runs of a relationship that never was
Never should have been
Born out of escapism
Aborted well past its sell by date
Slow fade then
To black

< < <

I Can Make the World Perfect

I don’t want to be discouraging
My aim isn’t to bring you down
Rain on your parade
Bring everything to a screeching a nihilistic halt
Although let’s be honest
Those Pearly Gates are plastic and fake
I bought mine on Temu 
You’ve built so much
Gone so high
Without a shit storm
But gone and hit the mats when you needed to
It’s not me trying to dispel all of that for you
You’re less than two years old
But you’re already on your feet
Teetering forward
Into my open fearful arms
I’ll hold you for as long as I can
And then you’re twenty-eight

So it’s a hug now
As reassuring as I can get
Without all the bets being off

I’ve never wanted to twist your head
Force your hand
Direct your gaze
Hold open your eyelids
Like clockwork in a tic toc world
Of zero concentration
And maximum titillation
Force you to see these events unfold
Blooming ugly flowers from ugly minds
Not my world
Not how I wanted it for you
But of course it’s all T S Elliot in the end
Covid was a practice whimper after all you see

So it’s an airborne bug now
As infectious as it can get but not quite enough
Not yet because it can wait 

Of course the solution is obvious
I know how to make the world perfect for you
It acquires some courage I’ll admit
Or none at all
Because it’s all about foresight because the ends
Will justify the memes
And I can’t make the world perfect without killing people
To line those up that need to be dispatched
At dawn
Seems like a good time as any
Winter it’s dark
And summer the sun’s up
If you are lucky
Kneeling, head down, chin dropped to chest
Far, far from in their Sunday best
Coupled with the aroma of lost boldly functions

So it’s a bullet now
As quick as it can get
And yet this is perfection in cold lead 

I move along all those people
A steady hand
A sure thing
Back of the head
Not some heavy round like a dirty harry .44 magnum 
I’m not that kind of a monster
.22 calibre. long, not powerful enough to take out the front of a face
Open casket funerals can still be all the rage
Just enough to go careering around the inside of the skull
Just enough to turn the brain into goo

So that’s how it is now
Oppenheimer
Hitler
Stalin
Pol Pot
And Trump

I have become a poet
Shatterer of words


< < <

Break Me Some More

There was a point she said
Turning away from me
On her marital bed
But not mine, not this time
And facing the wall
Where sex becomes tort
And tort becomes sex
But rest assured - her pointed tongue running over
The white on her lips
Smearing it a little more
Where the kissing had not
It all ends up as malfeasance

It’s bouncing outside she said
And stood and moved the curtain for a clearer view
Of a world neither of us occupied in the moment
But in the depths
That hurrying and scurrying in the fluid
That rush towards certain oblivion
But for us we have crept away from 

She returns to the bed
Call me old fashioned but this is where I like my fucking
Or to be fucked
She takes me in her mouth again
And soon she swallows with an eagerness I could explain
Clambers up me sliding the wetness of herself
Over me as if a comfort blanket of desire
And she falls on her back and I slide my tongue down her
Till I find - what U2 didn’t - and stay there drinking
For the next hour or two
If there is a fountain of youth then this is it

The world outside is not coming in
Although we are always cumming out
She cums in my face and over my tongue, into my mouth
I drink
And I am hard to the point of discomfort
And I adjust and place my cock to one side
Then back to the pleasure
We are married
Just not to each other
And there - as Shakespeare said - hangs a tale

She sits up, her sex sliding away
I feel deprived
‘You have broken me again’, she says, 
‘so please cum and break me some more.’

< < <