Matt Harvey
In 1992 Matt Harvey began performing poems and is now a veteran of the UK’s festival circuit.
He is President of MIND in Exeter and East Devon and helps organise its regional Off the Wall comedy festival.
Matt writes songs too, celebrations of the trials and triumphs of hope over experience. Whimsical, perceptive, affectionate and above all, funny, his effervescent poems chart one of our oldest, essential quests: to love and be loved. Along the way, he tackles issues such as lonely hearts, teabags, religious conversions, gradients, gigabytes, curtains and free verse.
Headlines May the 3rd (be with you)
Victory for the SNP
Salmond summoned by Destiny
Setback for Labour
– New neighbour
As for me
I caught the sun today
But you should have seen the star
That got away
How could you?
How could you? How could you? (How could you?)
I spill my tea. I splutter it in your general direction.
Words fail. Lips purse.
How male. Or worse. Male European
There wells in me there swells in me an old-fashioned outburst:
Brute, bounder, scoundrel, philandering cad
So, the blood rushed from your conscience, travelled south…
…Show some restraint!
Whoa, steady – the ready rush to judgment is so heady
Though you’ve not lived till you’ve tasted the intoxication
Of full-blown adult moral indignation
But now to go cold turkey
And admit my moral knee might just have got a little jerky
If I show restraint myself
Put the black and white paint back on the shelf
And reflect – before I cast my first or umpteenth stone –
Is this a tale of unchecked testosterone - a clear-cut rut?
Or, in mitigation, one of simple desperation
Have I failed to see a tangled tale
Of love and human frailty...?
Morality’s a strange and many-mirrored country
It’s not for me to police its shifting border
(Though my first thought was, Oi! Bang out of order!)
This is the place. But not how I remember.
All memories are made up (though I must add parenthetically
I’m not talking false memory - I mean made up cosmetically)
A bit like ‘wash and go’ our double-action memory
will slap a ‘g’ on loss - add ‘gloss and glow’
‘It relishes and embellishes’
When we time travel to memory’s sites
It’s technical trespass - we’re caught bang to rights
We step into a cramped inverted tardis,
Like the grey-haired baby-boomer heard in Argos
saying ‘I remember when this when it was all Green Shields’
and yet the grass back then was greener
the air was surely cleaner
and the thought of sex obscener
our bodies were all bendier
the clothes we wore were trendier
the libraries were lendier
the germoline calendula
the good days were more buen dia
small cotton squares were hankier
the hanky then was pankier
slices of wood… were plankier
down under was Australian
crop circles were more alien
footballers’ thighs more muscular
pimples were more pustular
and ecstacy was mescalin
and vicars were more masculine
and no-one had a barbell in their eyebrow
and radio 4 was still considered high-brow
Nothing looks or sounds as luscious now as then
except, bizarrely, this programme on Listen Again…
I have found the poems now - Thank you!
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