LONDON MAGAZINE LAUNCH: THE POETRY READING

If you're in London tonight, I'll be reading a poem (or two) as part of the launch of the Oct/Nov issue of London Magazine, in which my tribute to William Burroughs' Naked Lunch appears. It's at the Opera Gallery in New Bond Street, at 7:30pm....

Here's one of the likely candidates for reading, a poem called 'Wave', which takes its title from a song by Antonio Carlos Jobim. I wrote it on a napkin one night at the Pizza Express in Dean Street, while listening to the great Al Cohn play his arrangement of 'Wave', and it came out virtually fully formed, as it were, from that wave...

WAVE

The sun sets twice into the same stretch
Of water; small fish hop out of the waves &
Walk on shore. In a cafe set under the only tree in sight
The tableclothes are folded; everyone is going home.
It is the dead hour of the morning; there is nothing
That is not either ending or beginning now.
With nothing else to think of or to do I fall asleep.
In my dreams, the sun sets only once each night.
In my dreams, no fish can walk.