Original poem written in 1985 from ‘The New Country’
Page 6 of 20
Experimenting with poetry and sound….
26 poems related to a damaged ecology 1981-2022
set to some ambient electronic soundscapes.
neither fish nor fowl….
Album cover and here first track based on the Crystal Palace fire as seen above.
The original poem was written in 1982 one of my earliest.
The collection will provide spoken word soundscapes for 26 poems related directly to eco-green political themes I written over the last 40 years.
The tracks are being uploaded to Soundcloud as they completed .
Here first recording..
the great exhibition
two jays in tic-tac spinning
cresting waves of lace curtain and linoleum
two-stepping tarmacadam’s invention
a century’s first mast
the barge of the crystal palace
this gaping hole
where the machinery ploughed into the past
the smell of smoke
of ashes
from ‘The Tithe Machine’ Poems 1981 -84
The playgrounds were strewn with ash
Smoke still billowed from the underpass
Further out in the estuary steam rose
From the tanker now beached and rusting
Lights now only flickered around the estate
On every other day to conserve energy
Milk floats converted to run on steam
Carried bodies of those who froze
Up the icy streets to the crematorium
The one place left they still used gas
The old cylinder gas tanks long since
Deflated like punctured balloons
Horses and cattle roamed the empty fields
Looking for their owners and a bale of hay
But the engines that brought them
Had long since died and started to rust away
No-one now could remember how it started
One day there were fires everywhere
The pylons buzzed in the rain
Then it stopped, silent roads, empty skies
Hands scratching for fuel kept finding
Impressions of leaves and insects in the coal
For a while the neighbours chopped down trees
Built holes in their eco-house roofs
To let the newly built fire-places let out smoke
then the hard winter stopped that
By spring there was no firewood to be had
All the oil and gas had burnt out long ago
Slowly the bones started to appear
Bodies lying in the fields slowly
fading back into the chalky soil
Row upon row of chalky fossils.
Latest volume Grass Clouds Poems 2002-22
A selection of published and self-published volumes 1992-2022…30 years! I will be reading poems from these various collections tonight at The Organ Grinder with Neil Fulwood.
Here my CV 🙂
A NEW YEAR GREETING
****
(poem here)
Addenda: What I am not.
Shaun Belcher is the author of one out of print slim volume that disappeared into the virtual ether before it was printed via lightning strikes/amazon so qualifies as a work of fiction.
He did not edit any anthology of obscure, unacknowledged legislators nor did he win any prizes, nor should we be specific did he enter any competitions.
He has held no official tenures as a creative writer at any top end nor third rate provincial university and has never reviewed other poets he dislikes for the simple reason of building a profile to get published.
He has never been recommended by friends in the poetry world as he has none and has studiously avoided anything to do with poets or poetry for over two decades.
He is member of no group who look after his publishing and reading interests when his work over time slides into fabulous irrelevancy or simply becomes so bad it an embarrassment.
He has no agenda nor minority axe to grind and has never played on his working class beginnings for pity or favour.
He regards his lifelong devotion to obscurity and keeping some semblance of sanity in a world over-run with poets like a corpse covered in flies that he should not add to other’s suffering by maintaining a steady output of academic poetry which simply done to fulfil research departmental targets.
His earnings from poetry over 40 years accrues to £70 he once got paid for being given a slot at Ledbury Festival by a friend and a commission again via a friend for £500 which works out to roughly £14.25 per annum which a living wage in the poetry world these days.
He is however still a poet if being a poet is none of the above.
He is still alive at time of writing and doesn’t expect things to change radically.
It all depends on a red wheelbarrow apparently and he does not have one.
Happy New Year.
After twenty years chez Nottingham I finally been invited to share my thoughts at a reading.
So if you wish to listen to a couple of bolshy poets tearing down the walls of heartache now’s your chance…
Neil Fulwood been around a bit has some books and generally a good egg….
He will be promoting his new Smokestack Press publication and generally taking the piss out of the Tories which in current climes no bad thing.
I will be ranting as usual……at everything.
I will be reading from this book available until August 2nd as a free pdf download below.
I will be offering this as a free download from this evening as it Bastille day.
GRASS CLOUDS contains everything I have written as ‘poetry’ since I arrived in Nottingham in 2002 so about 20 years worth
Contains 80 poems and some illustrations. I will be reading from it on Tuesday August 2nd at the Organ Grinder Canning Circus with Neil Fulwood who celebrating his new Smokestack Press publication.
Includes the following pamphlets and projects:
Drifting Village Poems 2001-2011
Edwin Smith Commission 2014
Burning Books and Buying time 2017 – 2018
My Father’s Things (illustrated) 2019
At the Organ Grinder I shall also be reading from the new volume ‘Substitute’ which due in Fall 2023.
Privilege
Is mine and always will be it is my birth-right
I am born to this and never shall let it slip
I am the world king and God’s chosen one
To let go of power is to betray you all
I will make the problems disappear
All it takes is character as my masters told me
Drilled with a sense of purpose and entitlement
From a young age to handle the reins of power
The ethos at Eton and Oxford is always to be right
even if found out never let the mask slip
For that is a sign of weakness and I am not weak
I am the firm hand, the strong voice, the liar
Who can not ever be found out to lie
The philanderer who can buy secrecy
The fool who cannot be judged wrong
For there is no other King
This morning the cloak of privilege
Is torn and stained but still wraps me round
With banker friends and people of high birth
who will take me in and bathe my wounds
I will return to the battle with my Excalibur
Smite my enemies and ride again into battle
This county needs me in its darkest hour
I watch re-runs of Churchill in a darkened room
This is my right my destiny
I am alone A King of no country
I have been collating a selection of poems written since coming to Nottingham in 2002. It hasn’t been a particularly inspiring location for my poetry and hardly anybody realises I actually published in 2010. I surprised to find 96 poems in 20 years which was my yearly output back in the 1990s. So once I thought of an appropriate title and found an image for the cover I will release a pdf of the ‘Nottingham Years’ 2002-2022 in advance of my 20 years in waiting reading at Neil Fulwood’s fine poetry event at the Blue Monkey in August when he will be the main act.
Perhaps I should crowdsource a title..’Dark Tarn’..Guntown… Wordy Poet Hood? Forest and City :-)…..’Play on the Grass’……maybe that it …
GRASS CLOUDS…
job done son…now go have a shower..
COLLATERAL
(for D.D.)
Windows shake, tyres screech
Litter blows across the estate
Gunshots ricochet as sound
The Divis Flats, Brixton Market
Beirut, Jerusalem, Sarajevo
A baby cries, a baby cries
The broadcast stops, the helicopter hovers
There’s a smell of cordite, a cold wind
A face you have seen before on the news
Starting to dissolve in a pall of smoke
Gravestones, a line of mourners, a hearse
More tracking shots, more candles to light
The post-war peace has been noisy
All night the rain streaking the vans
As another round up begins
Difference is a slogan, tolerance fades
Hope drifts downstream like radium
Whitewashing concrete stained with blood
We can carry on, we can care even more
The trains will run, the tide will turn
The supremacists will make everything alright
The same arguments start again and again
Tube trains fill with dust and smoke
Collateral damage drips through the door
You choose what to believe, what to see
As another herd of innocents die in a cellar
The missing migrant is pushed into the sea
Sixty years of peace in Europe a lie
From the Balkans to Ukraine this is total war
An iron curtain swinging in the breeze
In the morning a cold silent light
A white horse streaked with blood and lame
Dragging itself to a poisoned stream
The crusaders horse is then shot full of holes
Its body carried away on a torrent of pain.
Collateral: The ghost in the Western dream.
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