Warning

GEO

Poetry noise from the basement.

Darren Hobson

 

Published by Darren Hobson at Bookrix.

Copyright ©2020 Darren Hobson.

As this book is written by the poet Darren Hobson it is most likely to contain foul language that most adults use in their daily life, but when these fucking words are written down in a cunt of a book only then do these words become offensive. It is obviously not the poets intention to shock without a proper reason but as this poet is actually writing about real life and it’s daily dark dose of cruel reality then foul language will be generously sprinkled like parmesan on your warmed up overcooked dinners.

The Basement

Darkness has never been the brightest friend on the block, yet darkness has always been linked to everyone that has seen the light. Geo linked, hand in hand an equilibrium of dark and light, night and day, some days have more light and some nights never to seem to end.

In the basement that is never well lit, maybe just one ancient light bulb to eliminate one hundred metres square, the spiders roam free in the corners that hardly ever get bathed in the artificial rays of light, the air is damp and stale, fresh air does not breeze through this area, the stench of old books left to rot in the bulging cardboard boxes, the only eyes that rummage through these boxes are the earwigs and other small mites that have happily set up home.

This is the basement and this is the foundations of you and I and the whole of humanity, this is what was and what remains of our memories, here in the endless boxes our most prized possessions are stored from the fluffy teddy bear to the old Etch-A-Sketch , discarded records and squalid love letters, the ink has smudged the words, the telephone number is still readable but thirty years out of date. Unceremoniously dumped into the basement just like the rotting idea of romance.

Nothing belongs in the basement, nothing should be stored in the cellar between the damp walls and the lath and plaster ceiling that is slowing peeling away showing the darkness between the laths what creatures lay beneath spying back at me? The guardians of the bric-a-brac and the warriors of the dust that collects and forms little dunes on the cellar floor.

Every human has its cellar, everybody has a million memories stored in filthy tea chests and old baby plastic bath tubs, other items which were once a collector’s item until the corrosion set in, in the cellar fifty years ago was were the coal was unloaded by the chute coming from the pavement, a huge porcelain sink which once was the centre of attention, now discoloured and full of broken glass, the shards just waiting to slice the first toddlers hand to reach in from below.

Here in the semidarkness strange noises gurgle from odd angles, it could be the downpipes , it could be the wind, it could be a memory coming back to haunt you, obviously distressed at being abandoned for half a century with the broken clothes pegs and unwanted MFI furniture.

Many a person has fled this house to buy a smaller compact Barrett’s house paying back huge sums in interest for their breeze block built semi-detached wooden coffins, that had no soul and when the wind howled you could feel the breeze on your knees as you sat and watched Tiswas , when it rained in the English Summer you had to run up the plywood stairs to find a leak and stop it from destroying your wall to wall carpets. You loved the new central heating that dried you out and infected you with new sneezes every winter, in the end you missed the old damp walls of your crumbling Victorian townhouse , it’s character and the way the wooden windows closed badly and so it snowed in your bedroom every February.

You missed the cellar and the fly tipping that comes with it, the new house had a garage with a wonky aluminium door that always resisted to close in the frequent downpours, the garage was never big enough or wide enough if you were lucky or unlucky enough to own a car, so the garage started out as fathers workshop then in six months became a maze of junk and misfortune.

Not everyone was lucky enough to own a decrepit Victorian townhouse or a Barrett’s house with half a garage, some people lived in the tower blocks on the outskirts of town, swaying in the numerous gales, the lifts never worked and the rubbish chutes frequently blocked and stank like hell, in the end what I am calling the basement is not of bricks and mortar, or even breeze block or wood, the basement is somewhere deep inside of us, a dark corner where the old memories are laid to rest in ridiculously oversized tea chests, if we did have a cellar or a garage this is how we imagine this space, cold and dark, spooky and intriguing where we buried so many feelings, lost keys and empty purses, our demons playing with the playful spiders, our fears caress the earwigs, and the spring cleaning is just a dirty word.

This is GEO – poetry noise from the basement, would you like to explore every corner with me?

Stairs.

But it’s dark down there

Dark reminds me of so many bad things

Reminds me of my past

Those memories I buried without a tombstone

I can’t go down there again

I can’t face those mounds of problems ever again

I locked the wooden door, you know the green one

With the cute cylindrical door knob that I pretended was gold

That was hard to twist and sometimes jammed

I know if I went down the stairs

Turned on that light

I would be so scared I would run back up the stairs

Tripping and cursing and getting agitated

I would have left the green door open

But when I returned the door would be closed

The latch would be jammed even though I had adjusted it

Time after time I

Impressum

Verlag: BookRix GmbH & Co. KG

Texte: Darren Hobson
Bildmaterialien: Darren Hobson
Cover: Darren Hobson
Lektorat: Darren Hobson
Tag der Veröffentlichung: 14.05.2020
ISBN: 978-3-7487-4088-9

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Widmung:
Dedicated to all those people who visited my basement and suffered from it.