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Matt Merritt |
Matt is 35, from Leicester, and works as a journalist in Uppingham, Rutland. He’s had poems published in Anon, Borderlines, The Coffee House, Iota and Worm and in a couple of small press anthologies. He also won the 2004 Plough Poetry Prize. He'll admit to weaknesses for cricket and country music, and even worse, for trying to shoehorn them into poems on occasion.
Go-Betweens
The past’s not a foreign country –
it’s the homeland we fled from,
victims of a system that wouldn’t let us stand still.
And the promised new life? Most days now
you can find us, swapping stories in side-street cafes,
eking out espressos with other exiles,
or kicking the same old anecdotes around
on the dogshit-covered basketball court.
One day of course, we tell each other,
we’ll return to the scenes of previous defeats,
wander through rooms heavy with the dust
of history, laughing or crying with relief
that everything’s just as we left it. And sit tight,
for the knock on the door in the middle of the night.
Englyn
It’s our secret to keep, to carry close,
the alchemy complete.
No words, but throwing out heat,
our eyes, not lips, indiscreet.
I’m Your Man
I saw you again last night. The warm wind
was breathing summer into everything
and your face had caught the sun, so I sipped
and crossed over to where the windows,
facing west, were wide open. A Leonard Cohen
song, the one that begins “if you want a lover”,
was winning its battle to be heard against
what passes now for bedsit angst. You could
spend your whole life trying to make those
lines fit, but you just walked on, needing
nothing. Not a driver or a father
or a boxer or a doctor. Still, here I stand.