RAY

he woke up from a dream of life
riding bikes in egypt, smoking
tea with bum boys in tangiers,
romancing anne by the acropolis.
he woke up, and he found himself
an old man with a failing mind,
locked up in a care home
run by someone half his age,
who'd never known such freedom.
women who hadn't left their hometown
bursting in at eight each morning
chiming "time to get up!" in the
busy singsong voices of the culturally
vapid. prey now to his sisters, who
he left behind a hundred years ago,
who make him shave, who cut
his hair against his will (he
stumbles over words, he can't
articulate objection); who dress
him in cheap sports bottoms
when it used to be torn jeans
smeared in patchouli oil; who make
him wear polo shirts like young
kids off the estates, and grandads
trying not to look like grandads.
they even threw away his
suitcase full of classic porn,
pronouncing it "disgusting". how
he misses it on long nights
hiding in his bedroom from the
reality of where he is. what he
wouldn't give, just now, for one joint
like the big bombs that he used
to smoke. but all he gets is fruit
juice in a plastic cup. the belt
he tightened around his neck that
time surprised everyone but me.


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WE HOLED UP FOR DAYS

we holed up for days like outlaws,
curtains drawn on the streets,
back door open to hear
the chaffinches and the sparrows.
the phone was unplugged.
we let the clocks stop
too. we had our own rhythms.
we had light and dark for clocks.

using pots of black coffee
i wrote poems, many poems,
and she wrote plays drinking
supermarket wine. the sun blazed
down. but i stayed in, slept
when the writing wouldn't come.
there was no time for action.
just waiting, waiting to be
hunted down, or to sprout
wings and become immortal.

LILLY ANN

when she's bad
she takes a razor,
and she cuts holes
in her body.

sometimes she looks
like someone rolled
her in barbed wire.

poor kid. i can't
do anything, just
look, and not leave.

if i said life
gets better, my
eyes would probably
betray me.






Bruce Hodder was born in Ipswich, Suffolk, England in 1964, son of journalist Martin and painter/ activist Sylvia. He wanted to be a comic book artist as a boy, inspired by early heroes Jack Kirby and John Buscema, who drew the Marvel comics his parents used to buy for him on Saturday shopping trips to town. Later he heard Bob Dylan, and read Ginsberg and Kerouac, and decided poetry was his medium--though early efforts didn't show much evidence of a literary gift (he had always been a good cartoonist). With uncharacteristic dedication, Hodder hacked away until he started to produce--periodically at least--publishable work in the late Eighties/early Nineties. Never having been one for record keeping, he will have to leave the precise whens and wheres of his history to someone else. From those first few publishing successes, he went on to place work in a number of print magazines in the UK, becoming most notably a regular contributor to Bryn Fortey's legendary underground/ post-Beat magazine "Outlaw". The arrival of the internet in his life, significantly later than it came to most of his contemporaries, enabled Hodder to begin publishing worldwide.

In 2004 he established--which is a grand word for the scale of the operation--Blue Fred Press, producing the print magazine Blue Frederick, and literary blogs Suffolk Punch and The Beatnik. Beatnik attempts to mix the best in contemporary poetry with uncompromising investigation into the legacies of underground/ counter-cultural heroes like the Beats.

Hodder's poetry has recently been included in an anthology from Cross+Roads Press called "Other Voices".

Last update : 21-09-2007 12:45

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