Fourth Friday, a night out

Remember those months over the summer where, although I was trying to keep up to speed with the perennial marking, lesson prep (not half so pressured) and academic admin...I liked to take Fridays off and visit a museum or gallery, or, if I was feeling lazy, sit on the bed with a mug of tea and watch a film courtesy of our Virgin Filmflex package...how idyllic it all seems from here where I feel pretty anxious if I take an hour to monitor essential viewing such as the recent Doctor Who Special (and very dark it was too).

Anyway, it wasn't exactly an AWOL Friday, and given the pace of the preceding week if I was left to my own devices I'd have been early to bed with a mug of cocoa, but I went to an evening of poetry and music at the Poetry Cafe courtesy of Fourth Friday - and it turned out to be a really enjoyable night. I'd actually gone as a sort of work commitment as I felt the MA creative writing students should both go to a poetry reading and perform at one on the Open Mic if possible. Three out of the five did -and so did I.

The music was a surprise and a delight. The main players were Dave Arthur and Friends, who, on violin, guitar and banjo played folk/bluegrass/eccentric numbers, some with rousing vocals too. I'd done my one-poem floorspot reading and was warm with the heat of the basement room and the whiskey I bought myself and the music kind of hit a spot - a sort of cultural happiness spot, I reflected afterwards, as though this has been a rare experience recently in the waking, working hours. All credit to the reading poets too, Harry Eyres and the wonderfully eccentric Phil Bowen - though I guess I just needed a clear non-work, non-literary zone to relax in fully. One tune was composed by one John Clare, better known as the poet John Clare - apparently he considered, and only narrowly declined, a lifetime with the gypsies, telling fortunes and playing the fiddle; eventually deciding to stay in his village, writing poetry, instead. I wonder what choice I would have made myself.

Anyway, eleven thirty pm and there I am standing in the freezing cold outside Covent Garden Tube station, with a handful of merry postgraduate friends, a couple of them agitating to go on for a curry. I'd started the day with a three hour class teaching first years about basic Modernist ideas such as stream-of-consciousness, and doubting my own ability to explain a particularly abstruse passage of William Faulkner, so it might have been a nice finish. But I wasn't sure my consciousness could stretch much further, so took the sensible step of getting on to the tube at that point.

Here's the poem I read out. It documents a genuine experience I had several years prior to writing it. I'm still not sure whether it was a narrow escape or some kind of weird angelic visitation. Pleased to say I had no such encounter getting home last night.

An Encounter


He breaks into the carriage
at five past noon;

you are just thinking
how dirty the windows

look as the train creaks
on through sunshine –

Don’t you know (he’s loud)
where this one goes?

An old couple
turn their heads, murmur;

you ask yourself
if you should be afraid.

He doesn’t like your shades:
tells you, take them off

so you fold their mirror screens
into your lap.

Tell me, he says, the words
of the Lord’s Prayer

and you don’t miss a beat
but go: Our Father…

the man crumples opposite
and fits his voice to yours

until it finishes. Amen. And then
he lunges towards you:

raise your hands -
but you can’t stop his lips

connecting with your face.
God bless you, he says; his

breath is raw. There’s
light, and banded shadow

and then he is gone.