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Episodes
- Ward Fourteen - York District Hospital
(2mb)
Sat, 10 Dec 2005 10:43:40 -0600 Author: noreply@blogger.com (Simon M James)
This will be my last podcast for a little while - but the blog continues here.
Place of smells and silence
Of faces and paper
A haze of care
Lift The Patient
The Patient Is Lifted
Handflighted into bed
I can't resist
Lift The Patient
The Patient Is Lifted
Sink featherlight forever into sheets
Drift into conversations with someone.
In the rain
Two fat pigeons snuggle in.
I perch to shit on a tea tray
In the night count drips of saline
Invaded by fear
Memories of blood and light.
The old man in the bed next door shouts " Joanna!"
At least I think it was him. - The Night You Twocced My Heart (4mb)
Sun, 20 Nov 2005 15:38:33 -0600 Author: noreply@blogger.com (Simon M James)
The night you twocced my heart
I thought it was secured -
Parked, locked and under lights
Taxed, tested and insured
The night you twocced my heart
I left it parked in gear
Downhill in the suburbs
And dented in the rear
The night you twocced my heart
It had been cleaned ? it?s just
The exterior trim was shabby
With a lot less chrome than rust.
The night you twocced my heart.
At forty it was shaking
It backfired in the morning
And had inconsistent braking.
The night you twocced my heart
You?d have spotted something wrong
The carburettor floods
If you choke it for too long
The night you twocced my heart
The heat blew hot ? then cold
The fan-belt started squeaking
And an offside tyre was bald.
The night you twocced my heart
It veered slightly to the left
Covered only by Third Party
Immune to fire or theft.
The night you twocced my heart
It did have a full tank
? A tiger?s tail and sticker
Saying ?Atomkraft ? Nein Danke?
The night you twocced my heart.
It?s one of the older types
Ready for a re-tune
And white Go Faster stripes.
The night you twocced my heart
I thought you?d soon despair
The clutch is always slipping
And the body needs repair
The night you twocced my heart.
Why you took it is a mystery.
It had several careless owners
And no full service history.
It isn?t a new model
It doesn?t always start
But it went from nought to sixty
The night you twocced my heart.
- October (1mb)
Sat, 12 Nov 2005 11:48:57 -0600 Author: noreply@blogger.com (Simon M James)
always arrives a wet dog coughing
like dawn doors in the gloom
or axe on wood
days end early too
my conker socket eyes
stare up at lower suns
dead things turn white bellied
toward the North
and first frost expected
thought lost
etched in laced dreams of glass
edges iced
and a letter to a lover
penned from the front line
ripped open eagerly
as snow falls smiling - Cheviot Lament (3mb)
Mon, 05 Nov 2007 18:07:19 -0600 Author: noreply@blogger.com (Simon M James)
This is a poem and some music that I wrote in 2001 at the height of the outbreak of Foot and Mouth Disease in the North East of England. I subsequently recorded it with the superb Northumbrian Piper Andy May on his album "The Yellow -Haired Laddie " released on Fellside in 2003. It was a real honour to collaborate with Andy and I hope one day to be able to write another piece of music for him. - Sunlight (1mb)
Sun, 23 Oct 2005 08:56:13 -0500 Author: noreply@blogger.com (Simon M James)
On the floor in my hallway
Early spring sunlight on our faces
We sit in shadowless conversation.
Through the open door the daffodils nod acquaintance with translucent privet
And the sweet smell of earth rises.
You tell me about the time you sat in a room for a whole day
Moving round to follow the sun
As it lit each wall in turn.
On reflection
I think that the sun followed you
And finally, at dusk
Lay with its head on your lap
As I do now. - Another Country
Sat, 15 Oct 2005 09:47:38 -0500 Author: noreply@blogger.com (Simon M James)
A set of poems that I wrote about some of my favourite American musicians. All of them dead now - except Scotty. - Another Country : Zevon Heaven (0mb)
Sat, 15 Oct 2005 09:48:47 -0500 Author: noreply@blogger.com (Simon M James)
I see him standing at the door of a hotel room
Somewhere downtown
Just in his underwear
With the light behind him
Reefer Clint-clamped between his teeth
A headless gunner
Letting fly with his Colt 45
Laughing as he turns his back to
Motherfuckermotherfuckermotherfucker
Ringing in his ears
My Odeo Channel (odeo/beae3566f0ffea4e) - Another Country :The Dreams of Scotty Moore (0mb)
Sat, 15 Oct 2005 09:06:03 -0500 Author: noreply@blogger.com (Simon M James)
The old man smiles
Mother of pearl
Across his fretboard
Does he dream?
Is this his dream?
That his fingers dribble over notes
Like water over the rocks of a Mississippi stream
Where the dangerous boy from Tupelo
Bathes in the spotlight
Visible only from the waist up. - Another Country :The Man in Black (1mb)
Sat, 15 Oct 2005 09:03:26 -0500 Author: noreply@blogger.com (Simon M James)
His head and his hairs were white like wool, and white as snow; and his eyes were as a flame of fire; and his feet like unto fine brass,as if they burned in a furnace; and his voice as the sound of many waters.
American Bandstand. 1962.
His beltbuckle leaves a searing sunspot on the screen
As he prowls sleek and slick like the Arkansas panther
That used to follow him home from chapel.
His voice the rasp of a sharpening razor.
Beehive girls swarm the foot of the stage
Offer him all with their eyes
Tonight he ambles, a big black bear
With the barrel bellychest and saddlebag eyes
Of a man who?s spent his life in the deep darkness beneath.
Folsom Prison Blues.
That voice
Never missing a piston-beat
Of the freight-train rhythm.
His band of young gunfighters
Still watching for a finger twitch
From the Man in Black
As the song pulls into the sidings
He smiles like he?s seen the sun
Closes it softly like a piano lid
Or a coffin. - Another Country : Hickory Wind (1mb)
Sat, 15 Oct 2005 09:06:30 -0500 Author: noreply@blogger.com (Simon M James)
A dead weight.
A desert night
Black
Strung out
As our bootlace ties.
The gasoline smell
A faraway city
The fleeting shadow of a man with a spear
Caught in the flames.
A promise kept.
I remember the oak tree
That we used to climb
Still
Someone should say something
As a hickory wind
Blows the smoke South. - Another Country: Crazy (1mb)
Sat, 15 Oct 2005 09:05:27 -0500 Author: noreply@blogger.com (Simon M James)
Randy?s flyin? the plane
I can see his neck muscles stretched taut
As he tries to hold us in the storm
I love that ol? neck
The hair bed-tousled
From runnin? jumpin? an ? playin?
I want it all to stop
To feel his hands on my face
Play house.
The lights of Camden Tennessee pass
Low and fast
Underneath
I fall to pieces
Crazy
For thinking that my love could hold you - Another Country : Hank Williams' Last Drive (1mb)
Sat, 15 Oct 2005 09:06:53 -0500 Author: noreply@blogger.com (Simon M James)
Young Charlie Carr's got this tune running round his head
( It?s Jambalaya - but he don't know that. He don't speak French.)
Whistles it between his teeth over heater hum and Cadi purr.
Don?t wanna wake The Man
Sweat-stetsoned in the back seat
Staring eyeless at a desert focal point
As a pallid dawn blurs by. - Do Ya Wanna Touch? (12mb)
Fri, 14 Oct 2005 20:14:54 -0500 Author: noreply@blogger.com (Simon M James)
I wrote this short story a couple of years ago and it was subsequently published in Sand Magazine.
It's based on a real event. - Leaving (1mb)
Sat, 01 Oct 2005 12:29:41 -0500 Author: noreply@blogger.com (Simon M James)
Breakfast is over.
John Humphries is whispering in the background
A sawing noise comes from the garden
Mum has looked through her Get Well Cards again.
Now she?s planning her day.
?What time are you leaving??
The voice is blurred
Eye contact imprecise
? About 12.30?
She nods like she?s understood a foreign language
Everything is recorded
In her ?Book Of Remembrance?:
Lunch! ( S leaving at 12.30 )
Look for holiday diary
Geraniums
Pay John
Outside I foot the ladder
While my stepfather performs tree surgery on the plum.
I look up at him
An old man in overalls swaying against a blue sky
Crashing the gnarled dead wood down onto the buddleia
With a murmured warning.
Knows I?ve seen.
He paints the fresh wounds with a grey sticky liquid
Gentle as a priest
As I drag branches to the bonfire
His silence says as much as her talk
Her talk as his silence
While I the intercessor of their love
Say goodbye to both of them - Saltburn (1mb)
Sat, 01 Oct 2005 12:04:44 -0500 Author: noreply@blogger.com (Simon M James)
A rainbow
Arch - perfect
Catch its colours in the street names.
Emerald. Ruby. Garnet
Watch the pier dribble people out over the sea
Where surfers hurdle the wind-whipped breakers
Under a shark-shaped cloud
We walk the tideline
Dig into conglomerated memories of seasides
Me an excited puppy
Scattering thoughts across the beach
Chasing every movement
You digging deeper
With a pale sunlight smile.
This is your place.
Amber streetlamps pull the last light from the sky
But we grin like dogs against the biting wind
Stumbling back over rain peppered pebbles
Sandblasted younger - Echo Beach (1mb)
Sat, 01 Oct 2005 11:56:38 -0500 Author: noreply@blogger.com (Simon M James)
His redhaired son and Little Mermaid daughter are asleep
A sea breeze whispers them goodnight
Kashmir
Weaves with cigarette smoke and talk
Out into the dark of the olive grove below
Far away in time
Christos
Family man
Silversmith
Friend
Shirtless we push the wine bottle and conversation forward and backward like chess pieces while
A mantis knits and watches from the warm wall
We?ve agreed that Sotirios Kyrgiakos has settled well with Rangers
And what the thing about women is
Sheila at his side tuts in the Greek way that has become her
Fans herself
Strokes his leg
That Independence Day is Philip Roth?s best novel
Sheila and the mantis both look up but say nothing
That sometimes you just wish ?
Then as a dog barks somewhere out in the night
Stalemate.
Was it Ultravox or Martha and The Muffins?
