From 1996 to 2017 (An emotional history off tragedies in Manchester looking at things from the outside)

In 1996 when the IRA blew up the Arndale
I was barely able to leave my house
After getting mugged the night before
Which left me with a major limp
For the next 18 months or so
And forced me to ring around friends
That I knew would normally be there
Praying they would be at home.

In 2007 I got led out of my works
Viva an underground tunnel
I hadn’t known about previously
After it was deemed unsafe outside
To walk around the corner as normal
When a hurricane dragged a bollard
Through the Chief Exectuive’s car
And other cars onto the next street.

In 2010 I ended up leading three women
I worked alongside at the Co-operative
To Manchester Piccadilly Train Station
Like James Bond mixed with the Pier Piper
Avoiding all of the bars laced with drunk fans
Just before Ranger’s Europa Cup final
At Manchester City’s Ethiad Stadium
Just before it exploded into chaos.

In 2011, I was getting drove back home
By a kindly Ambulance Crew
Hours after getting registered with Diabetes
When we drove into a gang of youths
And barely reversed out alive
Looting a shop I used to go in for
A sandwich nearly every morning
On the way into my work.

In 2017, I walked past
Manchester Victoria Train Station
About a half a hour before
A terrorist took the lives off
22 people including children
And left me barely able
To sleep for two days afterwards
Laid in complete shock.

Each tragedy or event
Staining emotions
No matter how close
I was to the action

Cherry-picking memories
Into frozen images
Across feelings
Stuck in time

Reprinting each day
Over and over
Into a compressed version
Of Groundhog Day

Shooting grief from my heart
No matter how close to the front I was
Or whispered in braille rain
Tapping in shadow like tears

Brining my eyes
Pushing my grief aside
And carrying on
Like so so many others.

Comics Unity Podcast

After a break after the end of NaPoWriMo, I am pleased to now announce a new project which all been well will be a new monthly audio podcast talking about comics and the comic TV / film industry with my friend Michael Bradbury.

I met Michael Bradbury around a year or so through the literture scene in the Greater Manchester in the process discovering that Michael also has a interest in Comics from Marvel and DC among other comic industries.

Recently as a few of you will have known, I did a podcast with Michael where we talked about him as a person and his writing (https://spokenlabel.bandcamp.com/album/michael-bradbury-spoken-label-may-2017). Less known on the way to record to the podcast, Me and Michael both decided it could be fun to record a podcast talking about comics and the comic industry with their involvement in the TV / Film Industry.

Comics Unity which came from that original discussion was recorded a week or so later will be a monthly (roughly) will be a new series where we will talk about comics news, films, a discussion over a comics related topic, reviews and a reading recommedation.

The first episode recorded in May 2017 contains as well as comics news - contains lengthy discussions on the trailers for the up and coming Defenders mini series on Netflix, the up and coming films on the Dark Tower and Wonderwoman and the recently released film Guardians of the Galaxy 2 as well as a discussion about the difference in relaunches between DC and Marvel and what works and doesn't work.

More links will follow over the following few months but initially it will be available to stream / download on

https://www.mixcloud.com/andynwriter/

https://comicsunitypodcast.bandcamp.com/

Conclusion of Ghost Story IV/ NaPoWriMo 2017

The more regular viewers of my blog will have noticed I’ve been quiet for a few weeks now knee deep in poems for NaPoWriMo (National Poetry Writing Month). NaPoWriMo (or National Poetry Writing Month) as a poet is always a challenging time of the year where you have to write a poem a day throughout April. It may sound easy to some people out there, but let me gently say it is not. I first attempted this in 2012 by following each one of the prompts on the excellent NaPoWriMo website on a daily basis throughout that April and struggled like heck with it. It didn’t help that was for sure I was working in a job at that point which left me exhausted some days by lunch-time and trying to focus to write sometime over lunchtime was let’s say was very hard work indeed and so in the result I produced a very mixed bag of poetry indeed.

2013 I followed the same rules again and although I found it hard again, I came away with around 1^st drafts of a good half a dozen poems which eventually made The End of Summer but like last time burnt me out completely, it took me about two months to actually start writing poetry again.

I changed my perspectives in 2014 in the middle of March by deciding to try to focus the poems into a circular narrative which became Ghost Story.

The origin behind Ghost Story was only slight. Although I had wrote a number of sequences by that point, for example the four poems that made up the end of summer, trying to do a thirty part poem was a challenge that goes without saying, let alone trying to tell a tale which I would have got away in a novel or a novella possibly better.

The names of both characters if my memory is correct didn’t reveal themselves to me until several pieces, and I can’t remember why I chose them both like I did. The location of course at the metrolink (or tram or light railway stop) near my works and I was stood there a few days before 1^st April and came up with the gory thought what if I was due to get on that next metrolink and a Ghost stopped me.

That first year was difficult as I didn’t know where the story was going, let alone who the characters were until halfway through the story and I treated it as a one off and gave them a strict one off kind of feeling.

In 2015, the origin of Ghost Story II came simply from walking across a certain major train station in the centre of Manchester a few days before, and I looked up at the roof and thought to myself why if a rifle man got up on the roof and started picking people off and Andy was in the train station and Michelle came to him again.

Last year 2016 and 2017, Ghost Story III and Ghost Story IV both were planned a bit more but not blogged until 1^st April in both cases, in the case of III with my brother buying me an excellent book about secret tunnels underneath Manchester and for this year, I thought about some over the top rock bands I’ve seen over the years and thought what they would be like as Vampires with their myths set among the Pendle Witches.

All been good, Part V will follow next year with the story at least starting in Altrincham and we’ll see what horrors I can drag the characters through but part of the fun with NaPoWriMo at least for me now is seeing where the story goes for myself as well as everybody who reads it and all being good, there will be at least another two or three years’ worth of stories to come for Ghost Story and then perhaps health permitting I’ll start something else.

Ghost Story can be read at:

Ghost Story I   
Ghost Story II
Ghost Story III
Ghost Story IV
Ghost Story V (** Forthcoming April 2018 **)

Ghost Story IV Begins

It begins..

http://ghoststoryiv.blogspot.co.uk/

Anybody else doing NaPwrimo this year? (A poem a day throughout April).

Here is my blog so far. I am going to do as a 30 poem story. 4^th in a series.

Let me know your links if you are doing it and hope you like. 

World Upside Down (a short tribute to John Lever, Band on the Wall, 1998)

Pushing and shoving on the dance floor

We must have looked a right sight

Ducking and diving next to the waves

Of distorted guitars and tribal like drums;

Our Hair blowing wild in the over ripe summer air

As we laughed at the singer

Stumbling at his words for a few seconds

Before carrying on, pushing each other

Up and down the dance-floor

Your hair was punked up, dyed bright purple

And resembled Sonic the hedgehog a little

Whilst I ended up got stuck at jury service

I was attending up the road

Until just before we were due to meet,

Leaving me with no choice but to turn up in my suit

Which drew some curious looks

From the bouncers at the front door.

The first beer went down, a bit too well

In a full measured stroke

As we both laughed at the support act

Pulling time, with a casual swagger

With how I dodged a horrible case

In the morning, only to end up on a botched robbery

That went on and on and on and on

While you carried on moaning

About your boss who was about to leave.

By the time the band you wanted to see

Came on, we were both half cut

On three and a half pints of Skullsplitter

Which left us wobbling all over the club

Stitching our drunkness

In out of synch singing

When-ever the band started songs

You said you knew,

Ribboned in energy.

When World upside down came on,

I stuck my head up with a primitive yeah

Adding unwelcome backing vocals

With a drunken slur

Gliding over the guitars

And drums bursting into life,

Only for you to fall into me

And sending me spinning

All over the place.

Waking up afterwards

I was told I had fell backwards

Spinning around in a huge circle into

A small group of chairs

That could have seriously hurt me

If the drummer hadn't leapt from his stool

Like an Olympic diver,

In a frantic panic

To make sure that I was okay.

I found out afterwards

That was John Lever.

(John Lever was most famous for being the drummer in 1980’s and early 2000’s Manchester, UK band The Chameleons which was my favourite band but also played in bands such as Chameleons Vox, Sun and the Moon, Weaveworld, The Professionals, Wilson and others I no doubt have forgotten about. This story above was a personal memory put into a poetic form about a gig I saw at the Band on the Wall in Manchester in 1997 when he drummed for Wilson which has been wrote upon hearing of his sad passing recently).

New Write Up on the End of Summer

The following write up has appeared on the publication page of The End of Summer by Michael Holme (for which i am grateful for)

Right from the start of the first poem in this collection, I realised I was reading words penned by a writer very different to myself: “The first few times we met / was under a crossing of invisible bridges…” Whilst hard to picture, it seemed ironic, then not, crossing bridges separate, whilst it was established that a meeting had occurred. Andy’s words are sometimes simple, sometimes hard, and at other times plain obscure. I thought he offered a set of poems levelled at all manner of minds. My own poetry often mentions the season, more often spring than any other, and I like the seasons as a theme in Andy's poetry. Do not expect clichéd descriptions here though: “After Summer / autumn is always brushed / under the carpet / like a half baked afterthought…” Expressions such as “womb sunrise,” “forgotten shadows,” “splattered hammers,” “colliding motionless,” “like a postcard out of breath” and many more, make the poems the readers own. They offer an ambiguity that begs the book is reread with a different angle on previous suggestions. Some poems, for example, Out of Reach II, make me imagine parallels with the abstract painters, but not total abstraction. Again, there is left an offer for the reader to define the looser parts. In “Edge of the Flames” I recognised a poetry I was more accustomed to, and it’s presence in the volume only added to the overall richness. This, as an example, was admittedly, an easier read for me. But still offering gems like, “Before morning / the night was as vicious as ice / and the wind branded the windows / with a punk like sneer.” And the poet doesn’t always restrict himself to formal sentence structures, something I have never had the courage to do myself. Does it lack because of that, and the odd missing comma? I don’t think so. It’s like further food. For me the clearer works like “Divorced Memories” were favoured. Then I though, is that a laziness? And I loved seeing local references. I felt the last piece summarized much, in a hope and mystery perhaps?

Ghost Story IV

Ghost Story IV will follow on from Ghost Story I to III looking at horror over a series of at least 30 poems told in 30 days.

In previous stories, we explored horror through a tram crash in Salford where a ghost came to warn a man about the forthcoming crash to a shooter at a un-named train station and a poisoned rat king running amok, Ghost Story IV will follow a new theme and turn the volume up louder than before.

In this story, although the core characters from Part I to III will remain Andy and Michelle, a human and a ghost trapped in a whirlwind of a puzzle of a up coming un-seen horror creeping into play, Part IV will focus on a character who came into the forefront Ghost Story III right at its end, Mandrake with his war that was hinted at during Part III now boiling over and exploding from one point onto the streets and into the underworld.

Andy and Michelle will still be an important part of this story and the full narrative, as will Inspector Brooks and Ghana and all over surviving characters (so far) but Ghost Story IV will look at things at a slightly different way before spinning back into focus and dragging the reader on a gore filled journey

As always told over 30 days, Ghost Story IV will consist of short and sharp poems designed to build up the tension and by the end of the sequence will leave the reader battered to the point of exhaustion but filled with an excitement what next?

And where next?

Due to start: April 2017

More details here