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SEP 07 2025
And then, alone, at the tidy end of night, in the kind of tight silence that prohibits sleep, as I am about to initiate my ritual, practice my dark arts the door to my room flies open. It is ghostly. I think I have done it again, summoned some spirit here. I can feel she is near. And before I compose my response the door slams suddenly shut. Everything is still. I can’t tell if she’s gone or if she’s closed her self in. I call her name. I call her name again.
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17 AUG 2025
There is little joy in the Joy Cafe in the same way the view from the Belle Vue Hotel is always disappointing. There were never any sailors in the Jolly Sailors pub (there were bikers but none of them were jolly). I’m not entirely sure what the intent, beyond basic accommodation, was at the Good Intent Guest House but generally it wasn’t good. I guess it’s what you bring to these places, not what you go there to find, their names and gaudy signage designed to elevate status beyond the misery pits they invariably are.
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10 AUG 2025
The world misses out on great art not because there aren’t enough artists but because there are very few people who not only recognise enduring talent but are willing to risk reputation, who have the time and the tolerance and the tenacity to take on seemingly unbankable projects, to manoeuvre them past the gate keepers of taste to a place where they can achieve legitimacy and find wider appreciation. The internet provides for the pushy, the puerile and shamelessly self promoting. It is not the cream that rises to the surface but the unflushable turd that gets noticed.
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03 AUG 2025
This walk will involve a crossing of borders, a traversing of territories, a starting point marked on London’s North route to York: Ermine Street, the old Roman road that takes you out of town through bandit country, Tottenham and the A10. I shall instead venture East in degrees of longitude. I will take only the book with me for company and stop at intervals along the way to read for this will be a journey of poetic orientation, a study in time and distance and rhythm and language, this shall be a walk of voices, of conversations with the page and upon my return I shall tell a wanderer’s tale.
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27 JULY 2025
She had come back to London to say goodbye. Not to me, to him but mostly to the city. This city where two lovers had come together, where their affair had grown, evolved and flown. It was over. He’d gone home long ago. She had retuned and I, I guess I was here as some kind of final witness, to see the paper signed, the seal dried. This all happened some time back. I think we were supposed to meet for lunch, which became a ‘maybe dinner’ or just drinks until we agreed last orders. If you’ve ever had to meet a poet then you’ll know arrangements can be vague, appointments, like last lines, can take a while to finalise. Try and get two poets together, that’s like trying to find a rhyme for Wednesday.
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20 JULY 2025
There can never be enough poetry. Never enough. I believe it is the lubricant to language. Oiling the cogs of clumsy conversation, greasing the wheels of squeaky sentiment, coating the ever expanding tracts of quickly written or carefully curated content that is shot into the cybersphere and never read again. Poetry is mobility contrary to the viral thesis, the obverse of popularism facilitating movement in the opposite direction, slowing time down, a divergent agent, antidote to journalism, to political rhetoric, to spiked opinion it is a balm, it soothes, it resonates on barely detectable frequencies, on unregistered channels. Poetry floats. It is music. May you tune your dials to it
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13 JULY 2025
The poets are squeaking, excitedly announcing their names on the long list, their poetries on the short list, their works on the right list, the good list, the hot-tip-top list. All of their poems are poem shaped. Neatly folded paper darts they aim at an open window high on the fourteenth floor of an office building that is staffed entirely by people well practiced in the art of folding paper, of throwing paper darts
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6 JULY 2025
I thought of you there, on that rock, alone on your promontory. How unreachable you seemed, how lost in your own story you were. We can so easily get lost in our own stories. I thought I wanted to get lost in yours whereas, in fact, I wanted you to get lost in mine [ … ]
29 JUNE 2025
Old football grounds could be intimidating places, as frightening as they were exciting but always, always magical; theatres of possibility, of story, of song and dare I say poetry
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22 JUNE 2025
Today the sea was too clear, too tranquil to be disturbed, the sun too high, too bright to show my face, the day too perfect to spoil. Some days just need a little dirt, some days I just need to kick a rock along the street
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15 JUNE 2025
Everyone is leaving. Everyone is on the move. Everyone has somewhere else to be, somewhere else to go. I join the line. We move up a step. This morning I am so tired that my eyes sting, I think that if I closed them now I’d be sure to meet the kind of sleep one might never be revived from. Today this doesn’t actually seem like an appalling prospect [ … ]
7 JUNE 2025
Just because you’re sad doesn’t mean you’re a poet. You can’t drink or think your way into poetry. Believe me, I’ve tried. I’ve done the research so you don’t have to. That’s part of a poet’s job. Doing the research. Going out there to the edge-lands, dancing in the mist, coming back with nothing [ … ]
31 MAY 2025
In parting company the Italian ‘arrivederci’ translates literally as ‘until we see each other again’. It does not imply an ending, rather in the going it sends a hopeful message of future reconciliation. The same can be said of the French ‘au revoir’ and of the German ‘auf wiedersehen'[ … ] MORE
24 MAY 2025
Enrico called. It was strange. I’d just been thinking about him, thinking that I really oughta call him. Actually I’d been thinking about him a lot and for a while, or rather I’d be thinking about something that he’d said. Thinking about something I thought he’d said [ … ] MORE
17 MAY 2025
You are either walking away from something or walking toward something. Or both. I was doing both. I was pretty sure I was doing both. I wasn’t entirely sure what it was that I was walking away from but I knew what, or rather who, I was walking to. I was walking to you. Yes, you. I was walking to you [ … ] MORE
10 MAY 2025
Marcello is three. He hands me a drawing that he has made. This, in itself, is an act of trust. It is even more trusting when you consider that a year and a half ago I had tried to “set fire to Christmas” (his words) a traumatic incident that is indelibly scorched into the story of Marcello’s short life so far [ … ]
03 MAY 2025
Dear etc, Thank you for etc. Unfortunately, on this occasion your submission was etc… You may be familiar with letters like these. You may have gotten a lot of them, you may have received none or one or some. Stephen King famously stuck his to a wall until the nail he’d used “would no longer support the weight of the rejection slips impaled upon it.” [ … ] MORE
JAN NOBLE 