1. |
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The poem that goes with it:
Aisling
The girls you meet in dreams
are smiley; they seem to float,
and they smell nice.
That fleeting look across a room
or meeting on a beach,
how soon you find you’re hand in hand
whispering in the lovely ear
destiny, ecstasy.
It never lasts;
the sky turns black
or you remember some
other, waking world,
and drowning lose your grasp.
Later, in the crowded shop,
or walking down the street,
you search the living faces,
hopeless,
for the one you loved
but couldn’t get to stay.
© Kenneth Wilson
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2. |
Song of the Birds
03:39
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The poem that goes with it:
A young man’s dream
Your dreams will kill us all –
your freedom, conscience, government.
Why can’t you be like other men?
Dream of me – or Bridget if you must;
or me and Bridget if it pleases you.
When I hear you groan, dreaming,
let me feel you grown, and reaming,
know you safe in someone’s arms –
not stirring up the braying mass
to freedom, conscience, government.
Too much to ask? Dreams will leak;
you’re grown too loud; you’ll be heard,
your freedom, conscience, government,
and hang for it. Leave it be.
Aren’t we free enough – you and me?
© Kenneth Wilson
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3. |
Carrickfergus
04:35
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A poem to accompany this track:
I live in fear
I live in fear that God
will punish wanton atheism.
Either that, or mindless
universe will raise
a fatal stumbling block
across my path.
I live in fear that this
safety – a warm
house, a civil life,
gentle loneliness –
is false, chimerical
and slippery.
I place my feet with care;
I guard my expectations.
But it’s not enough.
Some jealous unknown God
or careless vengeful universe
will hole me in the end
and I’ll go down.
© Kenneth Wilson
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4. |
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A poem to accompany this track:
There are women
There are women on my wall
like trophies framed all the women
I have ever loved ordered
on the wall still I love them.
Every day these women smile
I smile and think and murmur something
small about their loss and wish
I’d loved them better.
She who died then she who
left me those who grew
and moved away my mother wife
two daughters gone.
© Kenneth Wilson
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5. |
Sarabande, J.S. Bach
03:11
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A poem to accompany this track.
Yesterday
Yesterday fell upon us
from tomorrow
where it looked so pristine –
not the collapsed cliff it is now,
its so-long hopes all a jagged heap
of mud and broken stone,
its ripped-up roots dry
and dying in the cruel air.
Let gentle tides roll its stones,
up and down the beach,
and make them smooth,
and coat them with a salty wetness
until their dullness shines
and I remember those stones as a good day.
© Kenneth Wilson
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6. |
Lament for Roger O'Neill
02:55
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A poem to accompany this track:
Regret
Regret forever has to say
that I did not, not that I did,
rise and seize the living day.
The narrow path I wouldn’t stray,
the rocky slopes I never slid,
regret forever has to say.
The high, the deep, all far away,
beckoned by Eve, by Books forbid,
I did not seize the living day.
No lovers in abandoned play
found lost, or in the belly hid,
regret forever has to say.
What I know of fierce dismay
ss not sin done I wish undid;
I didn’t seize the living day.
If I could once have cast away,
if heart the senseless head had bid -
regret eternally must say -
I could have seized the living day.
© Kenneth Wilson
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7. |
Jasmine Flower
02:48
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A poem to accompany this track:
Lying warm
Lying warm, high summer’s shine
White burning, tight my shuttered eyes;
Black beetles track my stony spine.
The flitting breeze-blown butterflies!
Stop, breath, to hear, below the ground
The striving mole’s earth-shouldering power,
And warm-washed summer’s breeding sound
On untuned wing and bowing flower.
This is just practice. Summers end,
And hay is only briefly made,
And I should make warm ground a friend
Before the lovely day should fade
And brave suns sink and I lie old
Under ground that’s winter cold.
© Kenneth Wilson
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8. |
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A poem to accompany this track:
Lies, Bonnie, lies.
Lies, Bonnie, lies!
“Over the ocean”?
My Bonnie lies to me:
“Over the sea”?
Windmilling your arms at me
like we’re in a Victorian melodrama.
You texted him yesterday!
I saw you – see you Wednesday.
Next you’ll be telling me he’s
“Gone to make a new life in the Colonies.”
He lives on the f***ing Fulham Road!
With his WIFE.
Come back, Bonnie; come back to me.
We were happy – we’ll be happy again.
I promise. Give him up, Bonnie.
And I’ll stop all that other stuff, too. Promise.
© Kenneth Wilson
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9. |
The Swan
02:52
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A poem to accompany this track:
In the beginning there was love
In the beginning there was love.
But of course it wasn’t as simple as that.
In the beginning was also hesitation…
and there was fear, and uncertainty,
not to mention impatience, and jealousy,
and wild savage beastliness;
there was Mistrust, and Miss Ogyny,
and Mr. Wrong, who murdered Mystery…
there was loneliness, next to loveliness,
and some bad bargaining, married
to laziness, and presumption, and general
all-round hopelessness.
In the beginning, the stories tell, there was love.
And when it was all over
and everything was still and quiet again
as it had been before the beginning
the experts proved
that those who had appeared to pass
most serenely in Love
(cheating, some said this was)
had all the while been paddling
furiously underneath through the murkiest
of waters.
© Kenneth Wilson
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10. |
Syrinx
03:12
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A poem to accompany this track:
Syrinx
His goat-god’s danda up,
wild Pan, unchaste, untamed,
licentious, sets lascivious
eye on woodland Syrinx,
shy sprite, demure –
and maddened, chases down
through forest, field, the meadow
by the water, rape
in mind.
Gods’ bollocks, madam, run,
the chorus wails in fear,
while sagely shaking heads,
gods will be gods, say wiser
counsel, watch the fun;
she’ll likely quite enjoy it.
Hirsute and pressing pants
Pan, pursuing, fast
and gaining.
Syrinx, chased beyond
enduring, falls dead faint
at river’s edge, face down,
and wills the water drown her.
Pan, unbuttoned, roars
and grasps the floating hair.
the curving rump, his prize.
More roars – his hands are full
of reeds.
Me too, me too, the wind
blows through them, mocking him
and his desire to have,
to hold, to take, possess
those things, those living beauties –
surely just the rights
of gods in Spring, he moans –
a feral moan, his force
denied.
© Kenneth Wilson
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11. |
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A poem to accompany this track:
Happily Ever After
He was the slam of my door,
the short of my fuse,
the sting at my tail,
and the flash to my point.
He was the spectre at my feast,
the cuckoo to my nest,
the snake in my grass –
the arse at my elbow.
He was the mote in my eye,
the plastic in my ocean,
the storm in my tea-cup,
the dark night in my soul.
But you – you are the Dark Knight of my shining,
the swell of my ocean,
the ginger in my tea,
and the tonic of my gin.
You are the leaves on my tree,
the apple in my eye;
you are the snow, and the beau, of my ball,
the feather to my nest.
you are the dew to my grass,
and the salve to my sore,
the moat to my castle,
and the beam to my face.
You are the lead to my pencil,
the ink to my well,
the truss to my roof,
and the thrust to my play,
the flash to my quick,
the tingle to my skin,
the short of my breath,
and the slam of my dunk.
You are my fairytale ending,
the happily of my ever after.
© Kenneth Wilson
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12. |
Apres Un Reve
02:18
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A poem to accompany this track:
After a dream
I’m after a dream
“as seen on TV”,
dream home,
dream holiday,
dream kitchen,
dream team, cream tea dream,
American money dream,
dream on,
clean dreams.
But these aren’t the dreams I have.
My dreams are filthy, brutal
chaos and confusion:
panicked skating, mid-river,
the beautiful ice just
slightly moaning
before the water’s roar
rips it up.
A quiet street darkening
with menace,
moving, swallowing.
I’m burying the body after a fight,
compounding the guilt,
discovery inevitable.
The inquisitor
laying out his tools,
explaining calmly that he will
believe me
before the end.
© Kenneth Wilson
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13. |
The Spailpin's Regret
03:45
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A poem to accompany this track:
How shall we converse?
When it’s over
and there’s no more “us”,
how shall we converse?
How navigate the space,
how tell, and how conceal, its secrets?
How shall we converse?
In passing will I touch you lightly,
pretending accident?
And will you look that way,
to say you noted it?
Will we speak in code
for the sake of gentleness –
The moon feels close;
the Spring is late – no, early;
did you smell the rain?
How time flies!
How shall we converse, how navigate?
Will there be a sunken island,
unmoving?
Or more an iceberg,
diminishing,
susceptible to drift?
When you come to stay
will you walk naked to the bathroom?
Will I tell you small things?
Will we speak in code
for the sake of gentleness
will there be silence?
© Kenneth Wilson
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14. |
Song of the Books
03:13
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A poem to accompany this track:
Song of the Books
How many books have you read?
How many books do you have, unread?
There are 8 million in the Cambridge
University Library.
You could read one a day there
for twenty-two thousand years.
That’s a lot of books;
and you know what the prophet says:
Of making many books there is no end,
and much study is a weariness of the flesh.
But I find I have a worse weariness;
I rowed my currach slow across
from Portmagee too late before the storm
and all my books were lost.
I am set adrift, bookless,
and very far away
from that beautiful
library.
© Kenneth Wilson
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15. |
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A poem to accompany this track:
In Sally’s garden
Witching, once, in Sally’s garden
loosely handed, late at night
we heard a frog
croak: croak, croak.
Sally stopped, loosed our hands
and sighed, my oh-so-handsome Prince!
I – charming – smiled;
I turned to take her kiss.
He was, once, she said; what days those were –
and nights – the royal house of somewhere –
I forget.
She waved her pretty fingers.
Easy, take it easy, Love,
I told him, over, often, but…
he wouldn’t listen,
foolish, foolish man;
thinking he was young, he went
and came the way young lovers come,
and go, until –
she flashed her eyes, and sighed again,
her wand-like fingers willow waved
and caught the pale moon’s light –
she said some spell
just broke,
and handsome
though he was…
he croaked.
© Kenneth Wilson
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16. |
Ashokan Farewell
03:12
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A poem to accompany this track:
Ringless
Every day for twenty years
she wore a ring,
except in labour
when her fingers swelled
and smelled of strangeness.
There was a strangeness when she took it off.
When I saw her yesterday in town
she was ringless.
She passed me like a stranger.
There was a strainedness.
© Kenneth Wilson
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Kennethwilsoncello England, UK
Kenneth Wilson is an ex-vicar, failed property developer, and reformed vegetarian, who once ran an Indian travel company.
Now, as The Poetical Cellist, he plays a wide variety of foot-tapping, tear-jerking – and just plain sexy – solo cello music, with an arresting and acid poetical commentary.
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