armstrong live in germany!

sounds

SOUNDS IN THE NIGHT


Learning from others
I grow.
People fill my body
and my dreams.
They shape me.
Old friends’ words
stir my own lips.
Moving, in the street
I collect the scent
of coffee and past lovers.
I scan the faces for a glance I know.
Girls I sleep with
scar me.
My skin stretches
to make room for fresh news.
I read bulletins and lines
mass on my forehead.
Voices inside my brain
stay and sing in my ears.


These sounds in the night
make my blood
dance.
I go laughing with others.
I go teaching with others.
No one is ever self-taught.
There are millions of people
in every single thought.




KEITH ARMSTRONG

off we go!

TUEBINGEN WEBCAM


Look down from the Rathaus
and you will see me plodding
over cobbled tales.
I traipse though the clear night,
eyes stumbling across discarded dreams,
toes aching with raindrops.
My eyes sore with forgetting,
the old square undulates with the rhythm
of catcalls and pigeons
pecking at old folk’s bones.
Ancient crows swoop
on market remnants,
the scent of forgotten summers
lingering in the winter’s gutters.
I bowl
down the hill
lurching with words
that spill with slush
and the glitter of ice under the moon.
We are but Swabia’s leaves,
blowing about in a hushed city
that baffles our loves,
scattered
on the flow of the Neckar’s infernal gurgle.
We are grinning away
in our urge
for survival,
in our endurance of boredom,
the hint of romance.
Scan my breath
for more joyful moments,
pan across the skyline
to pick up the Lufthansa throb
in the beautiful clouds.
I will sing again in Tuebingen.
I will kick out the glass on Melancholy Street.
I want to hear Uhland breathe in the daft breeze,
see Hoelderlin brood on a raft.
This world is crazy
and my mind
rejoices in it.





KEITH ARMSTRONG

porthole blues

THOSE PORTHOLE BLUES AGAIN


It’s Tuesday again
and the sun in the Stella is shining.
Yellow dust fills
the dappled Porthole
with a Golden Fleece
and the jazz, hot jazz,
belts out
raging
from this pulsating lounge.
The saints and ghosts of ancient seamen
go marching in.
Let the liquid trumpet
pour out,
my legs slide to the floor
with the trombone lilt.
Cry me this river,
lurch for the ferry.
I will ping the dart
of a blue note
through your soul.
I am only a poet,
a saxophone with words,
an improvising shantyman
thanking the landlord
for still serving me:
despite all
this poetry slurping,
this lovely drivel
dribbling
from my wicked Geordie tongue.






KEITH ARMSTRONG