london poetry systems 01

Outside on Columbia Road, Thursday evening unfolds over East London. Inside the depths of the Fleapit, the launch party of London Poetry Systems is just getting underway…

The LED of a video camera glows conspicuously in the dimness. Someone leaps from the audience, a guy with a perma-smile. He bounds onto the stage and welcomes us warmly to the show. "We've never done this before," says Jef Oswald - LPS poet and co-founder - "We're really excited you could be here. Have a great time. Oh, and say hello to Kuala Lumpur!" (A live video stream carried the night directly to an Anglophone poetry community in that country).

Jef darts off into the audience. Holly Pester, an ever-brightening star, who's taking performance poetry somewhere very else and very cool, takes the stage. Her first poem Srry offers glimpses of objects and scenarios, amputated from their context. The audience delights in its grappling with these stubs of meaning, while the text that appears periodically on the screen behind her, prods us toward peculiar resolutions, at odds with most accepted versions of the world. Her performance is a full-bodied first gulp of LPS vintage.

Holly sets the stage nicely for Jamie Wilkes, whose wiry and witty lines are inlaid with sharply drawn but scattered images, the significance of which is only half apparent. Characters emerged from his poems, somersault, bow and fade: ‘She suffers for her art, but half returns and offers up a beatific pose, balancing the pedals expertly between kitsch and gas.’

Jef's soon back on stage to introduce Cannes award nominee Zan Lyons. Zan is a master of live-sampling. He layers sound upon sound until the solo violin soars amongst a host of its looping peers . At the same time clouds race across the video screen, breaking and reforming, obscuring and revealling a dying blue sun. For a digital one-man band, his show makes a massive impression.

After a short interval LPS co-founder Henry Stead takes the stage. In a collaboration with VJ, Guy Bingley, Henry has fused poetry with live visuals, creating an experience that is somehow not just a poem set against a visual backdrop but a bold new type of expression that encompasses and exceeds both media.

Then the headliner, Inua Ellams cuts a lyrical, shamanic figure. His poetry came at the audience like extended visions of grace, by turns beautiful and devastating. His mesmeric voice melts through the audience, it seems to overturn the embedded stones of mental and physical history.

Overall we were delighted with how the night went. Inua, Zan, Holly, Jamie and all the LPS team managed to concoct that rare atmosphere that makes everyone want to talk to everyone else about what they've just seen.

It was a truly positive and collective experience and we can't wait for the next one, scheduled for 14th August, again at the Fleapit. Hope to see you all there!

Assault on 69 Cropley Street – For anyone who’s made the leap

Follow me over the moonlit wall
Locked out nearer dawn than midnight,
We beat against the door, there’s no-one home
Hoist your leg up, watch the fall,

A rusty bicycle, a smoky tree
Quiet! Beware the sudden window light
Hush dear Sir, we’re just your dream of laughter
Now go, let your legs hang free,

Catch my bag, I hope I closed the zips
My turn – how I feel alive!
Pennies tumble freely from my pocket
As I grasp the ancient bricks…

I slip! And tumble into dark and nettles,
Shut your mouth, I could have died.
This coat’ll never be the same, look
I know it’s yours, don’t worry we’ll settle.

For now, slip through the broken fence, homeward
Thank God, you left the window open,
Up the railings now, we’re almost home
We’re in and look at our reward:

A simple beer, chilled and strong as hell
We’ll share and smoke and sit in glee,
But wait, your arm, what’s that? My friend you’re bleeding
Aha look, I am as well.

the road

The answer is ‘yes’.

I will take that path that widens as I visualise it

Painted in a jolly – or is it bloody? – red

Beset on either side

By Confusion’s white mist

Overcast by crumbling towers of self-doubt…

Then the wind starts up.

Chicken wire waves uncoil in great lashes

And the road becomes a causeway

Of scratched and spilt rocks.

Eaten by the waves, it thins and thins until

I tiptoe along a lumpy vien

Like a slick, pink rope

I need hands, many hands, I need feet

I swing down underneath, like a crazed ape

Teeth bared, howling into the wind

Why did I come here?

I could be safe and dry in Greyland

Not lashed about the fur by a typhoon

Of secondary association, flashbacks

Like forks of lightning,

Pinning last night’s mania to the back

Of my skull

Stink of sulphur, sweat and burning flesh

I’m back I slip

Flailing into nothing but a giant, empty

Bang. There’s the road again

Now comes the pain. Flooding

Around my legs and back

That aren’t at all mine anymore

I’m up and I’m marching, I don’t know where

Down the road, down the road

A black and white pack on my back

A pen cradled in my arms

Loaded with ink and primed

Set on a hair-trigger, but who cocked it?

Who handed me the weapon to start the war?

I try to turn to catch a glimpse

A group of figures huddle round a table

They glance at me, whisper, shrug their shoulders,

One makes a joke, the others’ chuckle.

Then silver-birches and lamposts crackle out of the soil

The road snaps them up

Like match-wood, fashioning at first a knife,

Then a fork then –

I see my face in the nickle dinner platter

I’m walking on.

“Fuck you,” I try to shout, “fuck you.”

But there’s an apple in my mouth.

the Ballard of MacCharlie - for Stuart

Traveller to the dusky Highland –
How quiet your castle keeps in night and day.
Lonely Englishman away,
Awake, I say! And hear London’s demand,


That drum-rolls high over the Pennines –
Grumbles grey under a Northern sky,
Leaps the Weir and Tyneside –
And tip-toes through the maze of muted mines.


Hear the words of this scribe,
Blown with the bittern ‘cross misty fens.
Turn your face to home again,
Recall the treasured ways of your tribe.


Through your own window I can hear
London’s towers clamour with song and cheer,
The hour of your return is near –
At last, the feast of Fortune is here.

The Cyclone

Someone whispers softly in the darkness of a warm and

Sleepless night

Stirring under covers in the silence

Cicadas quiet tonight no chicker-chick chicker-chick

Sally in the yard paces patter-pit patter-pit

Shackle rattles, shackle rattles clack-click

Candle flickers and curtains lift

Tired minds

Drift

Back to drowse and door cracks hiss
Thud of knocking shutters missed
Enter dreams the strains of violent schemes
Percussive impressions
Percussive impressions
Thunder and shake
Thunder and rattle
Awake

Heart bangs and Pitter-patter and
Thumps and booms In the middle rings and rooms
Bars clash Titter-tatter and bash and
Drums loop In the riddle and twist and fuse
Rains lash Rat-a-tat on winding and black
Hands white On the window glass and grasp
Soaking strings Spitter-splat bound and thin
Drown In the middle and down
Tip-tip
Tap
Heart Bangs
Pitter-pitter
Pitter-pitter
Pitter-pitter
Pitter

Pat

Love Snakes

Love snakes around the corners of my room,
Coil and writhe, flicker like second-tickers,
Stretch like smoke across smouldered carpets,
Hiss like whispering, murderous gas from canisters

When I sleep, they wriggle ‘cross my lips,
And down the creases of my back,
And with softly strident tongues,
Riddle subtle muddles in muttered tones

Delightfully, I feel their fangs in me,
Wracked with lust, I twist in fast embrace
Then, mad with thrashings of wakefulness,
I encourage the venom in my vital streams

But come the morning I curse fitful dreams
For my visions of bescaled demons,
And in the mirror, no mark is left,
‘Cept the barest puncture, ‘pon my breast.

Sonnet #3

Love does sack the hearts of us
Disguised as roaming wind it groans
And grows from waft at first, to gust
Till every board and rafter moans

The wise will bolt their shutter’d home
And listen fearful for the sound
That tells the storm has onward blown –
Clement bells across the town.

And there upon the tender ground
They find those with enraptured face
Who dreamed to ride upon the cloud
Who shouldered free from safe embrace.

The wise folk slowly turn away
And live to hide another day

Sonnet #3

Love does sack the hearts of us
Disguised as roaming wind it groans
And grows from waft at first, to gust
Till every board and rafter moans

The wise will bolt their shutter’d home
And listen fearful for the sound
That tells the storm has onward blown –
Clement bells across the town.

And there upon the tender ground
They find those with enraptured face
Who dreamed to ride upon the cloud
Who shouldered free from safe embrace.

The wise folk slowly turn away
And live to hide another day

Sonnet #4

Beside a green reflective pool
Upon a tree-sighed grassy glade
There lay a liar and a fool
Reclining in the noontime shade.

Near them stepped a pretty maid,
With her handsome man in arm,
Said fool: ‘their love is made,
And never would the other harm’

Said liar: ‘I’ve known love’s charm.
In them it’s easily observed,
Like the pool’s unerring calm
- Its bliss is simple, never stirred.’

The maid did dab away a tear,
When on the wind these words did hear.

Sonnet #2

They said at root, our love was flesh
And never was to blossom
Fruits that between us flourished
Though sweet, they took for rotten

Are they so love-dry to’ve forgotten:
Young hearts sleep till woke by Lust,
Who roused them with a similar pattern,
Before the years did grind to rest

No, the early dew of love has passed
For them, who sit by ticking clock
Each others’ wizzened hands do clasp,
Who can but wait for it to stop.

Sweet girl, I think of thee and weep
Tis glad our love were never deep

Sonnet #1

All love is strange to lovers
A form unseen but from afar
A shape, soft to them and no other
And rounded oft by the heart

Till midnight in the quieting parks,
They may step in careless bliss
Love holds the gates of time ajar
Then seals them with a kiss

But lovers to their faults persist;
He does not know the word ‘forever’
She’s had his every lyric twist
And all she hears is ‘never’

Together, they could ne’er happy be
Alone, cruel love, they yearn for thee