MARTIN WARDLEY
Words on Wednesday (jan-jun '18)
You know you are
It's hard
Of course it's hard
It's impossibly hard
It will hurt, it will ache, it will take all your strength
It will sap all you are
It will drive you to stop, to rest, to whimper, to whine
Do you?
Will you?
Can you?
Dare you?
Will you drive right through it, regardless, fearless, battle scarred and weary?
Tear stained and tainted
Will you blow it pieces, leave it splattered and splintered in your jubilant wake?
Will you take all the doubters, the shouters, the moaners, the groaners?
Will you take all those and full with contempt and with half empty glasses?
Those poisoned souls who would drag you into their lair
Down to their level, into their haven, their safety
Into their vision of heaven, your painting of hell
Whisper no?
Say no?
Shout no?
Scream from the bowels of your blood and the depths of your anger: NO!!
Pick yourself up, pick up your coins, dust yourself down, straighten your cap, polish your boots
Mute
This needs no noise, this is not about words, about poetry or prose.
No alarms, no bells, no klaxons from you, no hullabaloo
This is about deeds
This is about actions
Doing and being
Knowing and seeing
Hard?
Of course it's fucking hard
Are you up to it?
You know you are
​
Martin Wardley (27th June 2018) 18
A heavy debt
This shroud I wrap around myself
These clouds of cotton wool
These blinkers thwarting thinking
To tame my tainted blood
This baffled, calm cocophony
These battles with bureaucracy
This pain that wells up ceaselessly
This procrastinating eulogy
This temporary antidote
To crush the mining microscope
And silence all the questions
And the dubious suggestions
But this deal for mediocrity
This trade, this pact, this pleasing pledge
This contract of necessity
Exacts a heavy, heavy debt
​
Martin Wardley (20th June 2018) 17
No words (on Wednesday)
A self-imposed time-line
But no words, no meter, no subject, no rhyme
Nothing forthcoming
No flow, no enlightenment, no bristling
No humming
No jostling of ideas or images or sounds
Inspiration deceased
No feast
Simply famine
I examine my paint and my pallete
Nothing but a blank white page
Saying a big nothing
Yet bulging with frustration, indignation and pitiful protestations
These deadlines we set
To get
Us to move
To prove our worth
To get
Us out of bed
Or out of the battles enacted in both hearts and heads
They lay in wait like some dark anti-artistic demon
Guarding the gates of the creative
So down with the pen
Meander
Saunter
Wander a while
In the spirit of opening the senses
Of seeing, hearing, tasting, touching and listening
To reinvigorate
To stimulate
Or is this
Simply
A lack of the requisite discipline
​
Martin Wardley (13th June 2018) 16
How many seconds?
One gone. And did you do enough?
Did you grace the peaks of human achievement?
Did you kiss our collective, selective bereavement?
Did you nudge a nerve? Did you stoke our love?
A dead small crowd and did you make the grade?
Were we close enough to feel the pain?
Did you share our God as you were slain?
Is our moral code aligned, does it point to blame?
The death toll tiptoes towards a stirred-up indignation
The anger igniting a flame of questionable condemnation
No need for understanding or calm contemplation
Summon up the masses in a public show of vitriolic protestation
Just how many seconds of silence are you worth?
Does your demise warrant a line of someone else’s heartfelt verse?
How many seconds of silence for a loved ones hurt?
How many seconds of silence are you really worth?
In a limb-strewn pool of blood in a corner of some far flung foreign field
Lies a quiet of deafening depth
Ignored and overlooked by the orchestrators of our fickle feelings
The silence here now cynically stretched
Just how many seconds of silence are you worth?
Does your demise warrant a line of someone else’s heartfelt verse?
How many seconds of silence for your loved ones hurt?
How many seconds of silence are you really worth?
​
Martin Wardley (6th June 2018) 15
Davids dream interrupted (part 1)
​
She camped on cobbled corridors to reach the core
To decipher and interpret all the hate they saw
And hanging onto coat tails In the driving rain
She dealt out sugar coated assorted sweets to ease the pain
​
When blood and bone and pride collides on Tarmac yards
She kissed the open sores and saved the blood in jars
To return to over years to steer the caravan
Though dusty dirty thirst of just a broken man
​
And playing loony tunes upon his off-white pipe
He summoned up the syllables and notes and rhymes
To occupy the criminals and vagabonds
Until crime and aimless wandering had all but gone
​
The butter bowl of cherries on the ferry here
Was laced with trust and troubles and bad atmosphere
It floated sort of indecisive and unclear
But made sense when defences dipped or disappeared
​
And in the heaven of another's underwear
The truth was soon determined and the juices shared
Thus the lessons of the infant were all blown away
In a moment of the union on the interstate
​
And flying on the hillsides of gods holy land
There came to pass a sorry ass and cavalcade
While sitting all alone beneath the planets plan
He dreamed with David fuelled on cream and lemonade
​
With right hand on the wheel and both eyes on the road
She willed him to agree the pact in sign and code
But he lost the plot and promptly forgot both he said
And fell beside the roadside in another's bed
​
The masters of the brush all rushed to save his fate
From dragging life and limb into an early grave
They threw away his needles and his alcohol
And fed him bread and clowns but took away his toys
​
He thanked them for their empathy and elegance
But sensed that he would see them on the continent
When leaving all the jingoists and ignorants
To the vile bile of their hatred and their ignorance
​
In a large room in the small hours of a balmy moon stroon day
With pen and mind on overdrive and so much left to say
David had a dream - it seems it's still as real
Although now interrupted as the day it was revealed
​
Martin Wardley (30th May 2018) 14
From leftfield to mainstream and repeat (People watching in Portland – US time)
People watching from a pock-marked pavement in Portland, pre-dark
Or is that a splintered sidewalk on SW Stark?
And is this Shoreditch?
Or Hackney?
Or Williamsburg?
Watching the anti-establishmentarians
The rule breakers
The mood makers
The thrill seekers
The code tweakers
The ne’er compliers
The thrift shop buyers
And although devoid of intent
They have paradoxically re-established the establishment:
The bearded
The bespeckled
The tattooed
Clad in this now well used
Look
Uniform
Bound to the manual
The H-book
These skinny men in skinny jeans
Sporting shorts, backs and sides
Bare ankled and brogued
Lumberjack en vogued
Larger men poured
Into skinny suits
And leather boots
And ill fitting shirts
Wrestling with their girth
Beanies and fedoras
Lounging with craft ales on perfectly positioned leather sofas
The flat white male middle classes
Direct from tech jobs
With Soya milk splashes
But what when the instigators
Those who spawned
The initiators
The fashion forwards
The trend setters
The left-field go-getters
The non-geek geek-lookers
Tire
Fatigue
Grow weary
Of their own once random aesthetic
Reflected on the frames
The skin and the bones
Of the followers
The sheep
The sleep walkers
The semi-apologetic
Where next? What now?
What after the masses take from the individualist
The monetisation of the non-conformist:
The Westwood Punk
Or the All Saint Goth
The present day Carnaby street Mod
Or the Belstaff Hells Angel
The HMV Heavy Metal tee
The Catwalk to Top Shop manipulation of the creative
All belated
And underrated
I ponder
And I scan
For the people who will rekindle
Burn and start a-new
A fresh view
Those who will steal a slither of time
And make it theirs
Invent it
Build it
Own it
A man in a kilt
Bringing machismo to cross dressing
A nod to Jean-Paul
Perchance a Perry blessing
Just a bloke?
In a utility skirt?
Could it be he?
A woman in a Mohawk
Suit and tie
Adorned in an assembly of accoutrements
Thick socks
And high heels
Could it be she?
An androgyne
In strawberry and lime
In wool and lace
In denim and leather
Wittingly revealing sheer
Blurring a far from binary body
The loose-tight fit
Could it be it?
I scan and continue to scan
To observe and to wait in wonder
To see what depths of the imagination can be plundered
By these pioneers
As they steer
Their awaiting generation
What comes around goes around?
From left-field to mainstream
And repeat
​
Martin Wardley (23rd May 2018) 13
​
The city sleeps (San Francisco on UK time)
The city sleeps
And I meander through her silent snoozing streets
The revellers have all but revelled
And the committed early risers not quite risen
I've been given this window
The brief opportunity
By a disrupted body clock
Time zone tampering
Physiological tinkering
In a few hours she will scream her existence
But for now she lies in slumber
The number of walkers can be counted
The open doors too few to mention
All closed but for the extension of welcome
From those selling coffee to the sleepy, the dreary, the needy
The need for a pick-me-up or a bring-me-down-gently
The need
I slip inside
I join a construct of construction workers
Visibly highlighted in high visibility
Ordering the enormous
The gigantic
Men ordering man-size
The self conscious me
Averting eyes
With my dainty pastry/coffee combo
And the blistered little finger
Of a writer, a singer
Framed in semi-shame
The wandering wordsmith takes his leave
To once again
Weave
Himself
Into the tapestry of her tired but waking bussom
To observe
To document
The muscle of construction workers meanwhile take their tattered tool belts, their polished power tools, their weighty bait boxes and their coffee vats
To demolish
To recreate
To build
To rebuild
I stroll
I amble
I stumble
Through the exponentially expanding bustle
The daily population explosion
The motion and emotion
The resistant and the expectant
The clean and the infected
The disillusioned and the dejected
I wend my way through both her triumphs
And her mistakes
The city awakes
​
Martin Wardley (16th May 2018) 12
A beacon for the times
She walks within the patience of the shadows
With need for neither show nor shallow petty pride
Her calm and quiet confidence speaks volumes
And her Aura glows a beacon for the times
The science in her silence
And the kindness of her smile
Leaves me done and dusted and defused
Her sexual complexity
The subtlety seduces me
And renders me both baffled and bemused
The comfort of her solitude
Her soothing muted tones
Pave a way for studied repetition
Her certain introversion
And the way she carries burden
Lean heavy on her modest exhibition
For all our self-promotion
And our publicised emotions
The line we tread is circular at best
Can we learn from her endeavours?
And cut clean through all these tethers?
The lesson to be learned here: more is less
So she walks within the patience of the shadows
With neither need for show nor shallow petty pride
And her calm and quiet confidence speaks volumes
While her Aura glows a beacon for the times
​
Martin Wardley (9th May 2018) 11
But I have learned
But I have learned
The child-like simplicity
Of nature’s duplicity
The tenderness and anger
The outrage and calm
Split only by seconds
And the wave of an arm
Or a butterfly’s wing
When a Mistle Thrush sings
Or a coal Ravens caw
On a weather-beaten door
Scything rocks like corn
The disdain, the scorn
Poured over men
Over beasts
Over earth
Over trees
No way to control
To cease
To negate
Bend and await
For the force to abate
For the child to smile
For the screaming to die
From the bully of thunder
To a pacified slumber
But have I learned?
Martin Wardley (2nd May 2018) 10
Soldier On
“Soldier on”
Said the battle-scarred, tedium-tainted wife
As her pacifist spouse
Wearied a while on the way
“Best foot forward”
Came the mumbled retort
Aimed squarely
As they walked
At his one-legged
Time-serving bride
From his lips
Slipped
The driest of wry smiles
​
Martin Wardley (25th April 2018) 9
The perfect me
I can see the perfect me
If I close my eyes
And view my gait as I stroll
Flawless as I walk
Through my controlled and sanitised environ
I wend my fault-free way:
No apple carts to upset
No tears to cry
No battles to be fought
No boundaries, fences, walls or defences to dismantle
No scandals to surf
No secrets to keep
No sleeping demons to suppress
No stresses or strains, no passion or pain
All that remains is an unblemished, impeccable nirvana
The heaven of heavens with me at the core
At the centre
But as I open my eyes from this idyll of falsehoods, fact-free
I see
Mine is the anger that wells
And the endless energy needed
To stem
The flow
Mine is the thin-ice patience
On which I delicately
And with extreme caution
Tip-toe
With only a modicum of control
I balance light with dark
Dry and damp
The delicate with the weighty
The sedentary with the stirring
The erroneous, the unerring
And when the balance is lost
I call upon solitude
To rejuvenate and recharge
I am, it would appear
Miraculously, marvellously and mercifully flawed
These flaws
With their constant associated baffling battles to overcome
To improve
To rectify
To remedy
To redeem
These flaws
They mould
They shape
They define
I can see the perfect me
But he, thankfully, is not me
​
Martin Wardley (18th April 2018) 8
Time for tea
Cup of Tea for me?
No for her with no teeth
Her dentures by nighttime do steep
Dentures in jars?
No, a tumbler full of stars
To reflect on a lifetime of scars
Physical wounds?
No not memories on view
But a lie to disguise the truth
Fabrication?
Not quite, and no morbid fixation
Wasted faces in different locations
Abroad perhaps?
Perhaps China, perhaps France
Perhaps smothered while taking a stance
Smothered you say?
Left a mother this way
And another to dawn on the day
Another arrives?
To bring hope to her eyes
And comfort and tea to her side
Ah tea? Not for me?
No for her with no teeth
Then later perhaps
For you and for me
​
Martin Wardley (11th April 2018) 7
Another form of friction
For every minute of unadulterated, unfettered and random elation
He gives two back to the affliction
All can be cured with pretty pills
And potions
Controlling emotions
And life-style changes
Or so they say
But would he have it any other way?
Like a stubborn head-wind
Or a pock-marked tarmac surface
Like a delicious incline
Or an inconvenient inclement element
Like a rusting transmission
Or a harsh and bitter word from a work of dubious or devious fiction
Like an internal monologue of doubt and self-derision
Or a surface strewn with the most imperceptible of obstacles
Like a debilitating indecision
Or a pointless all-pervading distraction
Designed to stagnate imagination and to deter all action
Like all
Or like non
Simply another form of friction
To feast upon
Martin Wardley (4th April 2018) 6
Self-aggrandising my art
Does my certainty make it so?
And will my surfeit of self-centred portraits uphold this conviction?
If I shout it from the heavens does it mean that it is thus?
And will the profusion of my rantings support this questionable non-fiction?
Oh my noisy narcissism
Go elevate my art
But my confidence and competence
Are cutlasses crossed
And though I hold onto a thread of hope
For harmony twixt the two
I secretly fear that it is lost
That the balance is tipped toward vanity
In preference of the desired and requisite quality
Oh my poisoned pride
Come crown my compositions
But how will I know?
Do I have the capability of objectivity?
To step back?
To observe?
To achieve this most enviable of equilibriums
Before
The joke
Falls heavily on my pride
And both me
And my art
Disappear
Into the grotesque
And the insincere
Oh my ardent arrogance
Please heed my hushed humility
Self-aggrandising my art
Martin Wardley (28th March 2018) 5
7:30am coffee shop, pre work
The low hushed murmurs of work before work
In the sanitized, neutralised ground
Of the coffee shop
The barista is keeping score
Impartial arbitration
Upholding manners, etiquette and law
For a slice of his minimum wage
Cutting deals and sharpening pencils
Digital connections
Converted into physical acquaintances
Two monologues intertwining their arrogances
Dialogue disappearing up orifices
Each with agendas
Each with a tendency towards self-interest
Investment in the singular person
An eye for an I
Leaving quietly with handshakes and knowing looks
The cooks leave the kitchen
The movers and shakers
Now moved and shaken
The big hitters depart to hit big
Scrubbing their carrots and polishing their sticks
The cafe revived
Awakens to the noise of the uninitiated
The great unwashed with their stories
Their whys and their wherefores
Their worries and woes
The barista now released to feast on the trappings and tips
Until noon
When the lunch-time shift kicks in
And dinner deals stretch to mid-afternoon
​
Martin Wardley (21st March 2018) 4
Flight of fanciful fancies
The man with the mouth
Screams and shouts
Like he believes
We're all in fits of laughter
At his brilliantly articulated banter
And the couple at the end
Of the isle and their tether
Bored to tears
As they jockey for position
Galled by their indifference and indecision
The fully made up dolly
On the half empty trolley
Dishes out the anaesthetics
And smiles at the repetition
As the gin kicks in with timely and noisy precision
I sit plugged in
And zoned out
Untouchable and uncommunicative
With my natural six degrees of separation
Narrowed to a simple inch of desperation
And the blissed-out bride with the large colliding drunken entourage
Smiles with the impossible weight of expectation
Tearing up the skies
Taking us away
A fleeting moment in time
To reinvent, rejuvenate or resuscitate
On this flight of fanciful fancies
Dancing it's dubious way
With it's belly full of pilgrims
Each with their unique and extraordinary normal journeys
Separated by historic and future frustrations, confrontations, celebrations
And a voluminous variation of passing or singularly sedentary stations
Bound only by their current and shared destination
​
Martin Wardley (7th March 2018) 3
The incumbent incurs a cost
The incumbent incurs a cost
From the slow erosion and the painful decay
He sits and he waits for nothing in particular
Ground down to his elements of dust and yawns and tedious disarray
Lost in the dreams of the extracurricular
The energy to stand and walk out long since stood and walked out
Shuffling around the shouts and jockeying for a position
Of all creative thought he is increasingly bereft
Devoid of all action, any kind of traction or description of decision
Anger angles in on hope and bitterness subsumes all
Blind to his predicament and blind to his fall
Where once there was fight and commitment and drive
Now sits a sedentary stack of bones hopelessly life-deprived
She wills him to move, to love, to laugh, to feel
She holds him close
Her self-appointed sentence of dedication
Unlike he
She
Will stand up and leave
She
Will take a hold of this relentless, unforgiving situation
The incumbent incurs a cost
From the slow erosion and the painful decay
The incumbent incurs a cost
Only he can redress, only he can repay
The incumbent incurs a cost
​
Martin Wardley (14th Feb 2018) 2
Deafening negativity
You may not hear a thing
You may sit in this silence
Secured deep within your sleep walk
But hush
HUSH!!!
Listen
I hear a cacophony
A clash
A clamour
A stutter
A stammer
An assault on the senses
Of up-beat pretences
Debilitating
All pervading
More than just a little
Irritating
The noise of defeat
Of towels throw in
Of retreat
The clinking sound of hapless half-empty glasses
The silent glances of whining
The muted tunes of moaning
The wilted words of whingeing
Not quite acquiescence
Not quite acceptance
No action to change
No will to rearrange
Only long drawn expressions
Dour impressions and withered looks writ large upon sullen faces
A whole barrage of exhausting pessimism
Engorging a million threadbare excuses
Immersed in pointless
But far from peaceful
Passivity
The violence of this deafening negativity
Assaults the core
Affronts both history and dignity
Insults the soul
HUSH!!!!
Listen
Martin Wardley (31st January 2018) 1