Author: Daniel Greenwood

Landscape photographer with a focus on woods and trees, fungi, and macro photography

If I am not in love

Daniel Greenwood2 Comments

If I am not in love
I can be found,
tearing pages from children’s colouring books,
letting them into the dock.

If I am not in love
I can be found,
mugging schoolboys
for their headphones.

If I am not in love
I can be found,
sinking rowboats
in Regent’s Park.

If I am not in love
I can be heard,
speeding past your house
blaring funky house.

If I am not in love
I can be found,
burning plastic figurines
in midday alleyways.

If I am not in love
I have been known
to throw stones, at the windows
of the Sefton Palm House.

If I am not in love
I can be found,
pouring thick black oil
into my sleeping neighbour’s pond.

If I am not in love
I can be found,
belching in the cosmetics aisle
of a monolithic supermarket.

If I am not in love
I can be seen,
picking my nose and sat at this desk
by my bedroom window.

© Daniel James Greenwood, 2010

For Anna

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From her sickbed she
heard the cranes cry
and flee, from the
dry autumn field.

She listened
to the golden oriole,
singing in the spring,
she knew of where they flew.

It was her willow
and nameless trees,
felled along
the avenues of her childhood,

they opened
and taught me how to be,
to sense the life of the land,
and its song.

© Daniel James Greenwood, 2011

Liverpool is

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Liverpool is baggy black tracksuits and bristled haircuts
Liverpool is tight blue jeans and flowing hair
Liverpool is a man suckling cigarette stubs outside the Adelphi
Liverpool is a falling crane
Liverpool is a gale halting you on Renshaw Street
Liverpool is Blackburn girls, Burnley girls, Shropshire girls, Derby girls
Liverpool is kissing on hot midnight slip roads
Liverpool is your arm across your breasts in the dark
Liverpool is the volcanic dusk
Liverpool is the smell of microwaved animals
Liverpool is pigeons eating chicken wings
Liverpool is the old violinist of Bold Street scratching out a tune
Liverpool is jobless and underpaid
Liverpool is a street of abandoned houses
Liverpool is an open sky.
Liverpool is Old Swan: aunts and uncles, cousins, scouse for dinner, lots of kisses
Liverpool is cinema: scaling rooftops in the dark/the juice of putrid pigeon flesh/stalactites/decade-old popcorn still for sale
Liverpool is pissing in the sink
Liverpool is Allerton and artificial football pitches
Liverpool is eleven-a-side in deepest winter
Liverpool is lolling my calf muscles in the back of your Dad’s car
Liverpool is blood in the corner of a bedsheet
Liverpool is coming into Lime Street
Liverpool is cracked paving spitting murk
Liverpool is cathedrals like ships anchored inland
Liverpool is an open sky.

© Daniel James Greenwood, 2011

The Feral Youth, The Unemployed

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The feral youth,
the unemployed,
a mob of laughing teenage boys,
are burning towns to black.

The feral youth,
the unemployed,
a gang of hooded teenage boys,
they’re turning up in packs.

The feral youth,
the unemployed,
these fashion-conscious teenage boys,
they’re looting what they lack.

The feral youth
are now employed,
they’re robbing houses,
malls and stores,
and they see nothing wrong with that.

© Daniel James Greenwood, 2011