NaPoWriMo: Dan Holloway take two!

April is National Poetry Writing Month. In celebration of poets everywhere, and to encourage those who are just embarking on their literary journey, I will be posting poetry (not mine) each day for the month of April. Please take a look and enjoy this special art.

Dan Holloway

My poetry roots come from a mix of the Beat poets, certain strands of contemporary performance poetry and to a certain extent the Brutalists. In other words it’s a bit of a mish mash though the emphasis is on lyricality and emotional honesty and rawness. It would be truest of all though to say that my main influence is the confessional wing of Young British Art, in particular Tracey Emin. I like art that reaches deep down inside the artist, wriggling under every layer of artifice to get to the red raw truth whatever that may be.

My solo show “Some Of These Things Are Beautiful” will be premiering at Cheltenham Poetry Festival on April 24^th.

 http://danholloway.wordpress.com (where you can download my current collection “i cannot bring myself to look at walls in case you have graffitied them with love poetry” for free)

http://twitter.com/agnieszkasshoes

http://facebook.com/danhollowaywriter

http://eightcuts.com is a literary project I run that combines online exhibitions and spoken word shows

http://79ratpress.blogspot.com is my experimental publisher, launching 6 collections by new poets this June.

Hungerford Bridge

 Remember the day we lay under Hungerford Bridge

And London stopped, just for us?

Like balletic bullets in a John Woo film

We toured the stillness.

Skateboards and blades played our private soundtrack

Scored from the clacketing

Backbeats of the Thamesside track.

We played hopscotch on Bankside,

Poured pints of London Pride

And downed them on the docks in Rotherhithe,

Embraced in the space between Bridget Riley’s stripes,

Defaced the latest White Cube canvas hype

With lines of lust typed blind on absinthe

And declaimed them to the planeless skies from Trafalgar’s empty plinth.

Neon flared through our Soho lair.

Electric reflections glared.

We spotted pimps and toms in strip joints coming up

for air

And in clip joints frotted by despairing gimps and johns,

The silenced timpani of Dean Street’s daily song.

We stole tubes of lube and 90 percent proof,

Got pissed on Chelsea rooftops,

Fisted, lay on Wembley’s centre spot

And kissed till our lips were blistered

And our minds went missing.

We met them by the river,

An army of the alkies and the dispossessed,

The depressed, repressed, the not so easily impressed,

The inconsolable and unconfessed

Who repossessed their lives for just one night

Howling Baudelaire like loons

And raving by a quarter moon,

Piping crazy tunes across the water –

A glorious guttersnipe Brigadoon.

Forget the lazy days,

The backward gaze, the haze, the sugar glaze we paint

upon our yesterdays.

We tattooed London in our veins,

Inked in electricity and linked up to the mains:

Its maze of urban arteries,

Its winding streets that bleed from us

Plying meths to find the key to us,

Suppress the lethargy that hides our dreams from us,

That lies against our sighing breast to squeeze from us

The dying breaths that wheeze from us

And leak into a lullaby that pleads with us –

Remember the day we lay under Hungerford Bridge

And London stopped, just for us.