At comprehensive school, 1979-1986, I was hopeless at reading and writing. It took me three attempts to pass English Language O' level, which I needed to study chemistry at (York) university. I still describe myself as "functionally illiterate" because my reading is very weak for an adult.

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However, I started to write in 1997. I'd just began working at Manchester Metropolitan University as a Computer Research Technician and I bought a Psion 5mx palmtop word processor/computer, for use at lunch breaks. Not knowing quite what to write I began my roman à clef. The quality of the writing was poor and I never finished it, but I joined the Writer's Bureau poetry course in 2000. It took me ten years followed by redundancy from MMU to get going, but I stuck at it and I became a prolific and often published poem writer. (Try searching "glenn evans" (my penname) and "michael holme" with terms like "poem" or "poetry", etc.)

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Later on I turned to prose, see especially the "I am" book on this website, and my Blogs, also here. But my poetry writing has recently been returning. I write in an existential tack about life in my mancave; unemployed in my late fifties..., because that's my life.

For example...


 

Airband

 

It’s Ground hog day but worse:

no improvements.

Today a recording of Chopin’s Nocturnes

made minute moisture from the miniature filigrees:

harkening back to a different life; a previous wife

and other reasons to live.

 

Words like tango, delta

and foxtrot periodically emanate,

from expensive hardware,

via wires and a stick.

Someone speaks. Someone’s with him.

 

His piano’s on a wall,

almost its width, black and silent,

everything said.

 

“Hotel, Yankee, four…” and stuff; always stuff:

unclear not mattering,

in the mancave.

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There’s no plan, except to bide his time,

“Alpha, Charlie, seven” on the Airband.

 

19/1/26
 

Painting a Saturday afternoon with Stella Artois

 

His radio antenna hears Oldham hospital,

from just a few miles.

 

His daughter was stillborn there, in the Butterfly room,

with us oblivious to the DJ’s choices.

 

They’re today’s company, in the techno mancave;

something to do.

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He drinks at a debatable afternoon time. Dopamine

fools him. That’s Okay near 60.

 

Stella smooths the anxieties and insecurities.

The clock rotates his remaining life away,

whilst hardened to its preciousness

that once stressed him.

 

24/1/26
 

Boxed

 

Three yards by four

of coffee-stained carpet,

and Edwardian high ceiling, sandwich

an oxygen depletion

in the mancave, with a S.A.D. light on.

And time has less value when light lobbies affect.

 

Sound enters, calm, raucous, or self-produced,

and the window opens for air or childish broadcasts.

There’s pride’s bastion even in depression:

particularly depression.

 

Then it clicks: mindless simplicity

isn’t waste. His cave’s Himalayan and facilitates

a discovery

of what was buried

under chaos.

 

3/2/26

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Mood monitoring

“One to ten?”, he replied,

“a five”,

but he thought

it’s worth holding like a pair of kings,

 

and he could park them,

even if another king lay on the next level.

I guess that’s being that five.

 

Micro disruptions bombard his middle-ness,

like realising he’s not used his S.A.D. light.

Or is it the actual realisation?

Either way, each has impetus and anxiety,

the latter held tenuously by a gravity of awareness,

or not.

 

Walking is a pause: life won’t “see” his hand.

He’s no longer his enemy.

Strolling at 5.a.m.

he’s not alone, but not for words,

that would be somewhere between intrusive

and dangerous.

 

The spring’s coming.

15/2/26