Brian Cox says
everything is falling
in curves,
forever in space-time.

always falling,
collapsing, expanding,
fusing
a 96 chemical everything.

Falling in curves
that look like orbits.
Einstein
worked it all out;

collapsing, like the bloke
on the steps of The Midland,
dropping
to his knees like James Brown;

everything slumping downwards,
with the exception of
his pint,
which stays steady as a gimbel,

even whilst falling
he still fights gravity,
struggling
to his feet for a fag.

Does anyone in The Midland
give a flying fuck about
Einstein
or his Special Theory?

A poet passing in a car
might see them instead,
falling
into a clichéd grave

and toss handfuls
of words onto the sinking
coffin.
But poets don’t know shit,

otherwise there’d be pubs full
of them, creating
meaning
from collapsing language,

words sucked inside out
by the massive force of
dying
brains, desperate to escape

the gravity of knowing
that even this
poem
is running out of time.

 

 

 

“Normanton” was written in response to driving through the eponymous quaint market town and seeing people frequently falling over, especially out of pubs.  Jimmy wondered if there were some immutable force responsible for this, as he had been watching “Wonders of the Universe.”  However, he thinks we all must resist the temptation to look down on anything or anybody as we’re all made of the same stuff.

Jimmy is on Soundcloud and on Facebook with Northern Beat Poets.