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    Gutter Verse and The Baboon Concerto
    Gutter Verse and The Baboon Concerto
    Gutter Verse and The Baboon Concerto
    Ebook173 pages46 minutes

    Gutter Verse and The Baboon Concerto

    By Andrew Sparke

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    About this ebook

    Compilation of richly autobiographical free verse from the Stourbridge writer who is one half of the performance duo, The Incredible Fake Twins.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAPS Publications
    Release dateMar 2, 2018
    ISBN9781911310013
    Gutter Verse and The Baboon Concerto
    Author

    Andrew Sparke

    A lawyer and retired local government Chief Executive, Andrew Sparke has reinvented himself as a writer and indie publisher. He owns and manages APS Publications, a vehicle for fiction, poetry, food, travel, sport, erotica, music, photography, health and spirituality, which publishes other indie authors as well as his own work. News and more information is available online at andrew.sparke.com Two novels 'Abuse, Cocaine and Soft Furnishings' and 'Copper Trance & Motorways' are available. A third entitled 'Anger Limerence & Fault Lines' is in preparation.

    Read more from Andrew Sparke

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      Book preview

      Gutter Verse and The Baboon Concerto - Andrew Sparke

      DEDICATION

      This is a dedication page without a dedication

      A blank canvas made of pure emotion

      Too complicated for merely words

      Fetters on the heart of truth

      And better to write nothing

      Than to utter lies.

      ACHES

      The aches of morning,

      Aren’t ever the same,

      As the aches of evening,

      Saving only one,

      The ache which comes,

      From you not being here.

      THE SACHEVERALL SYSTEM FOR WRITING TIME

      No matter what the scientists say, time is non-linear. Nor is it constant. Time is a subjective illusion.

      As a child, every day stretches into infinity. In later years the rockface of personality is denser, less permeable, the gradient steeper for the tumbling experiences racing to meet the sea. The physically conjoint excitements of life and love tear past, a seeming blink of an eye and gone. Only tedium and perhaps old age slows time down again.

      But even in the moments of fastest travel, there are rooms within time for dreaming; for the hip-hopping of hope, memory and expectation and for the mourning of loss. When a dream is a person, the best kind of dream, it occupies a whole mansion of rooms from which the day-to-day is entirely excluded.

      And what reality can stop time in its tracks to feed such dreams? The sight of a beloved face; the unique timbre of her voice; the subtle jigsaw rightness of her hand in your own; just walking together, arm in arm; standing on a street corner, seeing her being driven away, not knowing if you’ll ever be with her again; or holding her and watching her sleep. Simple pleasures and uncertainties; cause enough for heartbeat’s insanity.

      To personalise the Sacheverall System for you, if time were merely linear, no one moment could have greater significance than any other. But your moments have disproportionate impact. They are oases of time never lost, never ever wasted.

      MY FATHER’S FACE

      I shaved my father’s face.

      All careful brush and blade

      And with my fingers travel

      The shapes I now know as my own.

      My brother too can see it

      In the mirror every day.

      The planes we carry with us

      From a gentle, honest soul.

      QUAKE

      It was a significant tremor on the Richter scale.

      Plates shifted on shelves across Dudley. A chimney pot or two toppled harmlessly. Nobody was injured. My Black Grape CD hit the floor, it’s case shattering and its fake, stuck-on eyeballs skittered away across the parquet.

      The earth moved for me. That’s what I thought but my mind was in another time. Not on geomorphology.

      KAREDIG

      I wish I could speak Breton

      Like my Cornish forebears could.

      And the messages I’d write you

      Would boil right off the page.

      You needn’t understand the words you read,

      Their sound would be enough,

      For you to know my feelings

      As if rolling off my tongue.

      FATALITY

      Capped for your country,

      Or capped by the gun.

      Were you shot to glory

      Or did you shoot straight past?

      GEOGRAPHY

      At 3am and suffering from clarity; the geography of place in time is different to plain old latitude and longitude. It describes what is or what should be transcribed by the desires and spatial recognition of the human heart. It owns no boundaries or border crossings. It has no limits, no obvious beginning and no finite end. It says only this man, this woman is the sum of my desire, is the missing half of me and wherever he or she is, that is my home and from wherever physical geography places me, it is toward them I will struggle, whatever it takes; whatever it costs. And there is no arguing with that certainty. It comes once in a lifetime and the only question it raises is whether both he and she are equally cognisant of it and what it means. If they are then anything, all things, are

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