I have begun to add readings of poems to my YouTube channel (sidewaysstation). For the time being there are five, but I’ll be adding more over time.
Category Archives: My Poems
Two moods of darkness
Listen to the poem here
Two moods of darkness
Darkness has its swings of mood.
It also has long arms and countless
fingers. Those nights your worries
start to make the floorboards creak;
first one, then several, then all
(and if you have no floorboards
they bring their own) then
darkness slowly tries to strangle
you all the long, steep and
staggering and ever-louder
climb till light.
But on those nights when darkness
shimmers like a honey-watered
river, after the crossing of a desert
day, it fits itself around you
snugly, better than a glove,
it gently sifts a cradle
from your breathing,
out and in and out,
sets you inside
to float downstream,
then paints a parting
lullaby upon your brow.
Phillip Hill 2018
The World is Big
Listen to the poem here
The world is big
but I would like it bigger still,
more different not less.
Maps show that there’s
still room for one large island
or small continent.
Within, let us suppose,
a people with another calendar,
new names for stars, and constellations
patterned on the shapes
of animals and plants
we’ve not encountered yet.
(The contralope, let’s say,
or else the peeping duck,
the two-toed toad
and then the dipsodillo bush
which moves ten yards
over a century.)
Complexions which we’re unaccustomed
to chime out upon the faces
of the men and women
when you make your mutual discovery,
as they assemble round you on the beach
displaying every shade of blue.
You will find out
they greet each other touching feet.
They have no clocks,
but they have trained
their dogs to softly howl the hours.
They have a way of telling fortunes
based on the bends the river waters
make when one steps in.
They have a form of speaking
called the disconjunctive
which we will never truly understand.
They carve out poems on the
bark of trees
and hang them in the branches.
“A ten-bark tree” is what they call
someone or something
that is much loved.
When sunset comes
some feel an urge
to dance wherever they may be –
lawns, streets or beaches,
porches, benches, tables,
bath-tubs, ladders, window ledges,
unicycles, boats – and while the sky
is flushing, their numbers
grow and grow.
“You’re only dancing well,” they say,
“when you make everyone around you
feel they must join in.”
They make great dives,
from off their cliffs.
“Blue into blue is ecstasy”, they say.
They have designed
musical instruments
with the most complex shapes.
The biggest, having the
span of eight of our pianos,
and thrice as tall,
is laid out when a storm arrives.
The rain and winds
drive surprising music
from its multifold appendages –
flute-chutes, adjusting bells, song-gongs,
murmur pools, gurgoyles and vibro-sieves,
just to name a few.
“Nothing can outperform
the sky,” they say.
So many other things are
there to chance upon
if you’re inclined to stop and look.
They also say, “the world
is big, our minds
should be so too”.
Phillip Hill 2018
Walking near the Roman Forum
Listen to the poem here
Below,
next to our feet,
the present
just about to turn
into the past.
The plastic bottles,
and the beer cans
from last night.
The cigarette butts
impacted in between
the cobble stones
And next to them
the newly sprouted seedlings
thrusting upwards
like minute berserkers
insanely charging
our enormous flattening
human tide
trying to turn
everything back
to forest once again.
Below
the surface
which we tread,
bus tickets not yet
decomposed,
someone’s grandmother’s
favourite brooch,
a pen which wrote so
wonderfully
that there was a person
who still rued its loss
the day they died.
And here and there
lost coins which might have
saved who knows how many lives.
Below,
the years crushed
into millimetres.
Beams, tiles, mortar,
and porcelain and building
stones and bric-
a-brac;
and midden, midden, midden
through metres down to
the ancient centuries
Below,
with the remains of empire:
columns, undiscovered
temples, mosaics and
everywhere that’s else
the ruins of a million
not once remembered lives.
Above,
around my shoes,
the future imminent,
constantly undoing
my oh so carefully
tied laces.
,
Phillip Hill 2018
The winter starlings
- © Photo Copyright Walter Baxter
Listen to the poem here
In early winter every year
the starlings in their hundred thousands
come to Rome.
They populate the branches of the trees
from where their shit rains down
in abundance and unceasingly.
Umbrellas must be opened
as you rush across the road,
weathering their excremental storm.
They whistle, grate and screech hysterically.
I’ve always wondered whether
it is the overwhelming thrill of being a horde
which causes them to shed
so many city-stopping droppings or whether,
conversely, it’s the collective defecation
which drives them to this state of frenzied ecstasy.
But then, at once and all together, they
take off. They fly as if
a giant hand were stirring up the sky
and they were swirling foam upon it.
Great swarms arching
at breakneck speed
across the air
splitting and recombining,
in balls, bursts, spirals and abrupt
departing arrows,
Birds flying in all directions inside
one greater common course
so that it would not be hard to believe
that skiddily those flocks are shaping,
too swiftly for our earthly eyes,
the secret letters
of a text of revelation
high above our heads.
It is magnificent.
It is, it is.
A pity then that these displays,
at some point have to end;
the starlings all regain their trees
and at that very instant,
if you are thereabouts,
a sudden truth descends:
shit – it strikes you –
sometimes outdoes magnificence
Phillip Hill 2017
The S’s of Mexico
Listen to the poem here
On my last day in Mexico,
Mexico City bade farewell to me
before I had had time to pack my bags.
I looked for water late at night
and every road performed
a drum-roll down each side—
shop-shutters closing,
clanging, just for me—
Goodbye, good luck
and most of all
good night.
At last, inside a little lane,
under a string of
dangling, dismal, wind-blown bulbs
I found a stall
still open for
some paltry scraps of business.
A plastic tub kept
a few bottles
cool and bobbing.
Behind it sat a lady,
one of those women
whose chairs seem to have
grown from out beneath them,
with which they have attained
a state of stability
too perfect
ever to relinquish.
She made no move to serve me
but with a languid flick
of just one finger
beckoned a child
crouching by the kerb.
“She likes to do the selling,” she said.
The girl came over chuckling
at her appointment
to a grown-up task.
She was so small, I
wasn’t even sure that
she could speak.
Never had I bought
anything from one
so young.
Airport security in 2041
A frisker-bush hedge
(Listen to the poem here)
The bottle collectors,
the metal detectors,
the boarding pass checks,
the ID inspection.
Past the scanners, the guards,
through the frisker-bush hedges
The trackers, the scopers,
the seven-armed gropers.
Then the dumbstunner pistols
which
make
all your
electronics
electroffics
for the duration of your flight.
The tattoo inferencer,
the Rorschach blot sequencer.
The flocks of pecker pigeons,
and the crazed sniffer-dog packs
which howl at the scent of imaginary moons.
Then the accent locator,
the who-are-you-reelies,
the get-down-and-kneelies,
the just-calm-down-misters,
the testicle twisters.
The yardsticks, the metrics,
the inchers, the ouchers,
The enhanced question-session
when you’re spun centrifugal,
plus the 9-Richter quaker
and the upside-down shaker.
Then the emoji-faced probot
whose five eyes are bloodshot,
but whose smiley gets brighter
the deeper it probes you.
Last, the 50 ml syringe
which puts you to sleep,
(when you checked in you chose from six classes of dream).
Then you’re into
your casket,
the hopper,
the loader,
and your slot in the bunk.
And click, whirr …
Ding …
Ding …
Ding …
Ding …
Ding-ding
(here’s the lock)
CLUNK!
Phillip Hill 2017
More often not
(Listen to the poem here)
The day comes every day.
It brightly knocks upon your door
Sometimes you answer and
sometimes you don’t.
Sometimes you leave a message
to say that you’re not in for life
right now.
The night comes every night.
It sits upon the ground
and everywhere
it plays its silent flute.
Sometimes you listen
and sometimes you won’t.
The hours come every hour
upon the hour.
They bubble up and.
jostle at your window
looking in.
They’re always there.
And you –
more often not.
Phillip Hill – 2014
The Indian boy outside the temple
(Listen to the poem here)
Swaying in his walking mother’s arms
The two-year old is studiously
Extracting strands of moonlight
From her long and precious hair.
Phillip Hill 2017
Hey, History!
(Listen to the poem here)
Some people tell me that
they feel compelled
to read books
to the end, no matter
how brainless and
repetitive the plot,
how many unattractive
characters,
or how nobody ever
seems to learn from
their mistakes.
Me, I’m not like that.
If I’m fed up
(and it could be on
page fourteen or thirty-three
or even four seven six)
well, then I toss
it parabolically into the furthest
corner I can conceive
and that’s the
final end of it for me.
What’s more,
I’ll tell you what,
I’m right, they’re wrong,
And now I’ll show you why –
(excuse me while
I shout a little)
“Hey, history! Stop
turning pages! Go
get yourself another book!”
Phillip Hill 2016
Blue Lemons
Blue lemons,
Prickly guitars,
A cat in charge of all the icicles.
Disparitions Mystérieuses des Civilisations Méso-Américaines
(Listen to the poem here)
Après le repas à Oaxtepec
le patron du restaurant
nous dit d’un air de satisfaction agaçant
que toute sa viande
vient du Texas.
Je trouve que ce n’est pas normal
de manger tellement hormonal.
Au Mexique on trouve
partout des traces
olmèques, toltèques,
aztèques, mixtèques,
mais qu’en est-il
des Bixtèques?
Phillip Hill 2008
(After the meal in Oaxtepec/the owner of the restaurant/tells us with an/ irritating manner/that all his meat/is from Texas./I find that all this hormonality/is somewhat an abnormality./In Mexico everywhere/one finds traces of/Olmecs, Toltecs,/Aztecs, Mixtecs,/but whatever happened to/your Beefxstecs?)
(This poem is included in my book The Observation Car which is available from
- Amazon.com (paperback)
- Amazon.co.uk (paperback)
- Barnes&Noble (e-book)
- Lulu (paperback or e-book)
Sideways Station 