List 43 poems that have inspired me

Stand on high ground and turn in a circle
Be surprised by trees and ponds
Those greens ribboning the city skyline.

Look above Northumberland Street shoppers
Find the stained glass ladies
Selling fine stationery and pens

Travel a lot by bus
Listen to the voices
Their warm lozenge vowels
All those elasticated eeehs

Wear noisy heels and tap along
In time to your own voice, saying
Blaydon to Two Ball Lonnen

Drink sweet sarsaparilla, est stottie
Swallow the stories of marras and hinnies
Until their history is yours

Travel north and south eating and
Sleeping in many places
Let your return ticket follow the curve of the Tyne
With your eyes closed, trace the swing of its bridges

Fiona Ritchie Walker

“Be nice to yu turkeys dis christmas
Cos’ turkeys just wanna hav fun
Turkeys are cool, turkeys are wicked
An every turkey has a Mum.
Be nice to yu turkeys dis christmas,
Don’t eat it, keep it alive,
It could be yu mate, an not on your plate
Say, Yo! Turkey I’m on your side.”
I got lots of friends who are turkeys
An all of dem fear christmas time,
Dey wanna enjoy it, dey say humans destroyed it
An humans are out of dere mind,
Yeah, I got lots of friends who are turkeys
Dey all hav a right to a life,
Not to be caged up an genetically made up
By any farmer an his wife.”

Dear Doctor,
I am writing to complain about these words
you have given me, that I carry in my bag
lymphatic, nodal, progressive, metastatic
They must be made of lead. I haul them everywhere.
I’ve cricked my neck, I’m bent
with the weight of them
palliative, metabolic, recurrent
and when I get them out and put them on the table
they tick like bombs and overpower my own
sweet tasting words
orange, bus, coffee, June
I’ve been leaving them
crumpled up in pedal bins
where they fester and complain.
diamorphine, biopsy, inflammatory
and then you say
Where are your words Mrs Patient?
What have you done with your words?
Or worse, you give me that dewy look
Poor Mrs Patient has lost all her words, but shush,
don’t upset her. I’ve got spares in the files.
Thank god for files!
So I was wondering,
Dear Doctor, if I could have
a locker
my own locker
with a key.
I could collect them
one at a time,
and lay them on a plate

morphine-based, diagnostically,

with a garnish of
lollypop, monkey, lip

The Owl and the Pussy-cat went to sea
In a beautiful pea green boat,
They took some honey, and plenty of money,
Wrapped up in a five pound note.
The Owl looked up to the stars above,
And sang to a small guitar,
‘O lovely Pussy! O Pussy my love,
What a beautiful Pussy you are,
You are,
You are!
What a beautiful Pussy you are!’

Pussy said to the Owl, ‘You elegant fowl!
How charmingly sweet you sing!
O let us be married! too long we have tarried:
But what shall we do for a ring?’
They sailed away, for a year and a day,
To the land where the Bong-tree grows
And there in a wood a Piggy-wig stood
With a ring at the end of his nose,
His nose,
His nose,
With a ring at the end of his nose.

‘Dear pig, are you willing to sell for one shilling
Your ring?’ Said the Piggy, ‘I will.’
So they took it away, and were married next day
By the Turkey who lives on the hill.
They dined on mince, and slices of quince,
Which they ate with a runcible spoon;
And hand in hand, on the edge of the sand,
They danced by the light of the moon,
The moon,
The moon,
They danced by the light of the moon

I’M a lean dog, a keen dog, a wild dog, and lone
I’m a rough dog, a tough dog, hunting on my own
I’m a bad dog, a mad dog, teasing silly sheep
I love to sit and bay the moon, to keep fat souls from sleep.

I’ll never be a lap dog, licking dirty feet
A sleek dog, a meek dog, cringing for my meat
Not for me the fireside, the well-filled plate
But shut door, and sharp stone, and cuff and kick, and hate.

Not for me the other dogs, running by my side
Some have run a short while, but none of them would bide
O mine is still the lone trail, the hard trail, the best
Wide wind, and wild stars, and hunger of the quest

Overnight, very
Whitely, discreetly,
Very quietly

Our toes, our noses
Take hold on the loam,
Acquire the air.

Nobody sees us,
Stops us, betrays us;
The small grains make room.

Soft fists insist on
Heaving the needles,
The leafy bedding,

Even the paving.
Our hammers, our rams,
Earless and eyeless,

Perfectly voiceless,
Widen the crannies,
Shoulder through holes. We

Diet on water,
On crumbs of shadow,
Bland-mannered, asking

Little or nothing.
So many of us!
So many of us!

We are shelves, we are
Tables, we are meek,
We are edible,

Nudgers and shovers
In spite of ourselves.
Our kind multiplies:

We shall by morning
Inherit the earth.
Our foot’s in the door.

This is the Night Mail crossing the border,
Bringing the cheque and the postal order,
Letters for the rich, letters for the poor,
The shop at the corner and the girl next door.
Pulling up Beattock, a steady climb:
The gradient’s against her, but she’s on time.
Past cotton-grass and moorland boulder
Shovelling white steam over her shoulder,
Snorting noisily as she passes
Silent miles of wind-bent grasses.

Birds turn their heads as she approaches,
Stare from the bushes at her blank-faced coaches.
Sheepdogs cannot turn her course;
They slumber on with paws across.
In the farm she passes no one wakes,
But a jug in the bedroom gently shakes.

Dawn freshens, the climb is done.
Down towards Glasgow she descends
Towards the steam tugs yelping down the glade of cranes,
Towards the fields of apparatus, the furnaces
Set on the dark plain like gigantic chessmen.
All Scotland waits for her:
In the dark glens, beside the pale-green sea lochs
Men long for news.

Letters of thanks, letters from banks,
Letters of joy from the girl and the boy,
Receipted bills and invitations
To inspect new stock or visit relations,
And applications for situations
And timid lovers’ declarations
And gossip, gossip from all the nations,
News circumstantial, news financial,
Letters with holiday snaps to enlarge in,
Letters with faces scrawled in the margin,
Letters from uncles, cousins, and aunts,
Letters to Scotland from the South of France,
Letters of condolence to Highlands and Lowlands
Notes from overseas to Hebrides
Written on paper of every hue,
The pink, the violet, the white and the blue,
The chatty, the catty, the boring, adoring,
The cold and official and the heart’s outpouring,
Clever, stupid, short and long,
The typed and the printed and the spelt all wrong.

Thousands are still asleep
Dreaming of terrifying monsters,
Or of friendly tea beside the band at Cranston’s or Crawford’s:
Asleep in working Glasgow, asleep in well-set Edinburgh,
Asleep in granite Aberdeen,
They continue their dreams,
And shall wake soon and long for letters,
And none will hear the postman’s knock
Without a quickening of the heart,
For who can bear to feel himself forgotten?

I engaged the man who could appreciate
the different shades of beige.

A man who knew the difference
between lilac and lavender sheets,
and never unmade my bed by getting in.

We had sex in silence, serious
as taking vows for some holy order
we could not name. His body
smooth as a pebble I picked up
on the beach, white as death,
and rubbed flawless by the tides of hands.
And my electric taped nipples
like badly repaired punctures in a rubber boat.
The intake of breath, and my face
gave the instructions Do not remove.

The only man to say I was beautiful,
bought me purple razors
instead of flowers. Our twin pubic bones
like the half moons of newly born heads.
Sweat raining on me
on our journey with no destination.

Sex, with the most normal man
you ever want to meet, that if I had known
I’d have had more of, and squirreled away
for the days to come.

Like the shade of his face I want to take to Dulux,
and paint my walls with. The day I walked in,
and found him suddenly moaning.
The hard pearls of our silence spilled.
Pumped out with his left hand,
into a pigs face on a Manga T-shirt

I am not a painter, I am a poet.
Why? I think I would rather be
a painter, but I am not. Well,

for instance, Mike Goldberg
is starting a painting. I drop in.
“Sit down and have a drink” he
says. I drink; we drink. I look
up. “You have SARDINES in it.”
“Yes, it needed something there.”

“Oh.” I go and the days go by
and I drop in again. The painting
is going on, and I go, and the days
go by. I drop in. The painting is
finished. “Where’s SARDINES?”
All that’s left is just
letters, “It was too much,” Mike says.

But me? One day I am thinking of
a color: orange. I write a line
about orange. Pretty soon it is a
whole page of words, not lines.
Then another page. There should be
so much more, not of orange, of
words, of how terrible orange is
and life. Days go by. It is even in
prose, I am a real poet. My poem
is finished and I haven’t mentioned
orange yet. It’s twelve poems, I call
it ORANCES. And one day in a gallery
I see Mike’s painting, called SARDINES.