Robert Heath
E-mail: contact@carpe-somnium.com
Website: http://www.carpe-somnium.com
Twitter: @RobHeath1969
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100003492794082
What can I say; this bit is harder to write than the poems themselves!!
Forty something project manager in the engineering sector by day and in the very early hours, before work, a dream of being a writer. Avid reader. Keen Allotment grower. Proud family man. Happy. Living with my long term partner. Two great kids.
I am a recovered heroin addict who lost a good portion of his twenties to drugs. Having redeemed myself somewhat I am now in the position of being happy enough to try again for the only personnel dream I have ever had, that of being a writer.
As a man I am massively influenced by my late father, who taught me how to read and therefore how to learn, and my partner and our children, who taught me how to be free.
As a fiction writer and a poet I am influenced by the greats as I see them – Kafka, Dickens, Bret Easton Ellis, Hubert Selby, Cormack McCarthy, William Faulkner, William Burroughs, Phillip Larkin, W H Auden, Adrian Mitchell, Brian Patten, Roger McGough and myriad more – people who could paint the inside of your mind with words. I like to think in some small way, I am following in their footsteps, or at least trying to.
I have to date won an online short story competition and had several pieces of poetry published in various magazines. As well as posting my debut novel on Authonomy which is Harper Collins online slush-pile.
For me poetry represents freedom to explore and explain – Poetry is distilled prose, the frozen second immortalised in a handful of words whose power lies in their form and construction as well as their given meaning.
Poetry is the very heart of the writer – the mirror to the inner self.
EVERYTHING’S BLUE IN THIS WORLD
I’d say Christmas and birthdays are the worst.
It’s like a hollow pull in your guts.
Eight years ago....................
And I don’t seem to have even moved.
Bernard helps.
Though he locks most of it away.
Sometimes a sherry or two will set his eyes bright
And he’ll reach for his hankie and mutter something about dust.
In the mornings I awake and wonder why I can’t just sleep
In dreams I see her as she was
In the day......
....well, you can’t hide from it can you
It’s in everything
The lack of her laughter
The silence at mealtimes
The slush in your groin when the news talks of another
The stupid way people are with you.
I know she’s dead
Some think, because her room is just the same
That I’ve gone a little mad.
They talk of moving on
And how time heals.
But I have nowhere to go,
Just here and the clocks tick
Just the guardian of a memory.
don’t eat as much cake anymore
used to make my own but
The taste’s gone.
And as for the garden,
It’s lucky if it sees attention once a month.
We just sit around I suppose.
We like to watch telly
And, on Sundays we put on faces and play bowls.
I hate the quiet
I hate the (w) hole in me
I hate this endless drift.
I think I’ll go look at her picture
That helps.
Sometimes.
For awhile............
HOW HE DANCED
How he danced when youth was the currency of long summer days,
And she with him. Red fire dizzy in the meadows,
And now this uncalled for haze.
A shutting up.
A pawning of trinkets.
A closing of days.
But solace, half caught like glimpses of dragonflies looping by,
to achievements never tarnished by time.
Quicksilver laughter chasing her white ankles through slurping streams.
Ambitions of becoming immortal,
yet how short the summer seems.
Too vague at times,
The holiday by the river,
The time she tripped and he caught her arm.
her breath misting in the winter air.
Too vague to grasp. Just sit and stare.
Back to a time of simple things, joined by common desire.
Just left to him embers of that fire.
And no more breath.
A simple slip.
A culmination that lasts an eternity.
Oh, how he danced.
BE ADVENTUROUS WITH THE CRISPS
Be adventurous with the crisps dear,
The salted can’t be ready this time,
No, it’s not that I am different and
Yes dear - everything is just fine.
I rather fancy denying the clocks tock today – that is all,
Beating back the reapers hand –
Like the day we spent in Haringey
Shopping on Green Lanes – now that was grand.
We were ageless then, zeal crazed too,
imbued with a desperate fire,
Yet it leaks away so darn quick,
Dear, make sure you take your walking stick.
And no cheese and onion dear,
that I am afraid will never qualify,
It’s as banal as the others are dear,
Oh hurry lest I cry – a little admissions tear
I’m so coffin crushingly alone - aren’t I dear.
No one actually to fetch the crisps,
Adventurous or otherwise.
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