Monday, September 1, 2014

Ben Graham- Two Poems

For Lou Reed
  
It is the season of rain
I remember
They spoke of the rain
They never said
The sun would always shine
If they had
We would not have believed
They never said
That we would never die
They spoke of death
With every line
And yet they lived
Like desperate Pirandellos
Painted, artificial
But so god damn real
And so we willed
They’d stay forever young

Is anybody still so real?
Now the days are getting
Shorter
Are we
Selling ourselves
Shorter
Now?
As we embrace irrelevance
The door
Is always
There



The Past is Hungry

The past is hungry
Fat as fuck yet faster than
A fleeting thought it swallows everything
Before it and I’m running
Keeping just
A step ahead
Not even a step but just
A breath, a whisper
The last fading cadence of
A laugh drawn by a joke
Already gone
The future that once infinite resource now seems
Significantly smaller with each second swallowed up
By history
The second being the currency paid ever back
Like third world debt the famine stricken future
Must constantly tithe towards
The rapacious ever-growing empire of
The past, annexing yet another territory
To its name
The monstrous supermarket chain of yesterday
Is opening another store
With everything you ever wanted neatly ranged upon its shelves
Processed, packaged, easily
Consumed, unreal
Tomorrow is that tiny corner shop
You stared into its great wide window wide-eyed as a child
Subject now to early closing, soon it will be gone
And everything will belong to
The past, it’s eaten everything and still wants more
Howling insatiable for you and I, the heroin hits of
Eternity, and yet when the end comes
The past as well will be devoured
As memory itself just disappears
And all you’re left with is the shrinking
Present moment
Present
Moment
Gone


Bio: Ben Graham lives in Brighton, England where he regularly reads his work on the thriving local poetry scene. He is also a music journalist (The Quietus, Stool,Pigeon, The Fly, Shindig! etc.) and is currently completing a history of Texan psychedelia for Zero Books.

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