William Oxley, born in Manchester, lives in London and South Devon. A poet and philosopher, he has also worked as an accountant, gardener, and actor. His poems have been widely published throughout the world. Following publication of a number of his works on the Continent in the 'eighties and 'nineties, he was dubbed 'Britain's first Europoet'. He has read his work on UK and European radio and is the only British poet to have read in Shangri-la, (Nepal). Oxley was Millennium Year poet-in-residence for Torbay in Devon, edited several anthologies and is the founder of the Long Poem Group. In 1999, his autobiography No Accounting for Paradise came from Rockingham Press.

Quelle: poetry p f


The White Table, 4 am.

You are asleep my hope-and-all
in the guest room above the night wind
while I, at the white table,
ponder nervous sounds of yet another night,
a wakeful speck of metropolitan thought.

It is the hour of the burglar
and the anxious father, of late lovers
and tragic drinkers — and we
who shuffle the endless pack of words
share the fever and fret of them all.

There is no silence outside the mind
but revealing noise: the bitty tick of clock
scratching the wall, the wailing
identity of police cars pursuing
their morality through suburban dreams,

and, if I listen hard enough,
beyond the screams of insecurity — no,
not the scrunching of death's heel
on gravel! — but something more: always
the murmur of impossible truth, blank
and white as this table on which I write.

Golders Green, 22.10.94
published in The Green Crayon Man, Rockingham Press, 1997