Poems and plays

The man on the bus
looked like Clint Eastwood
short greying hair, blue eyes
and a furrow between his brows.
But then Clint Eastwood went pear-shaped
as in a dream when something’s not right at all
and all that was well becomes a horror....

He sat in his blue tee shirt that
matched his eyes
in a slump on his coccyx
his chest sinking
his shoulders rounded,
and it mattered not
he put his sunglasses on
he simply didn’t look cool anymore

and I was glad when he picked up his backpack
and got off at the next stop.

21.5.10




On the bus

The little girl with long dark curly hair
and a cute nose and freckles
dangled her feet from her seat.
She wore Indian sandals
flip flops with fringed fabric colourfully slung between the straps.
She smiled intermittently at
her mother who sat nearby
as she licked her ice-cream....

Her little arms were resting on the
giant arm-rests and her shoulders
were up by her ears

and I had a vision of her as a young woman
smiling on reception,
pretty, shy, friendly
her shoulders still up by her ears and wondering why
she had a pain in the neck
by Friday afternoon.

21.5.10

Do you like them? They are the sort of thing that this Alexander teacher sometimes thinks of when travelling on a 214 bus from Old St to Hampstead Heath for a walk in the hot sunshine (the world and her husband was there this Saturday!)to Parliament Hill before catching a train to Brondesbury to meet Alexander friends to watch 'Shrunk' by Charlotte Eilenberg at the Cock Tavern. Charlotte trained in AT at LCATT in Highbury and was an assistant at ArtsEd with me briefly when she graduated. And clearly she still writes plays! Very very clever - I won't give the plot away, but not unlike a fantasy I had once about a student who suddenly turns into a terrorist in my teaching room and challenges my assumptions about inhibiting reactions to stimuli. 'INHIBIT THIS!' as she pulls the trigger....

Happy days!

On the subject of poetry another student of mine, Peter Daniels won the TLS poetry competition with his poem The Pump. http://extras.timesonline.co.uk/tsl-pdfs/poetrycompetition.pdf

Creative lot my Alexander colleagues and students.