Fragments and Reflections

By Ben Williams

A collection of poetry for every facet of life and for every emotion. Poems for lovers. Poems for dreamers. Poems for wanderers. Poems for those who simply want to rage against the world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Jun 30, 2015
• ISBN: 9781326319090

Ben Williams

Dr Ben Williams is a politics tutor at the University of Salford. He completed his PhD at the University of Liverpool between 2009 and 2013 and has written for a range of books, magazines, blogs and journals covering British politics.

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Fragments and Reflections

Fragments and Reflections

Poems 1990-2015

BEN WILLIAMS

Ben Williams is a former political adviser who has always harboured a secret passion for writing. Fragments and Reflections is his first collection of poetry and is drawn from his writings published on Wattpad, where he writes as Requi3mX.

Copyright © 2015, Ben Williams

Lone Crow Publications

www.wattpad.com/requi3mx

Ben Williams asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

and all works of poetry herein.

ISBN 978-1-326-31909-0

Lone Crow Publications
3 Gernons
Basildon, Essex, SS16 5TL

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of Lone Crow Publications.

Dedication

For Laura

Acknowledgements

Thank you to all those who have encouraged me in my writing. I want to pay particular tribute to the wonderful members of the Wattpad poetry community who have been nothing but an inspiration. The quotes on the cover came from fellow Wattpad members. Among those whose works I have admired, and whose reflections I have taken to heart, I would like to say a particular thank you to the following wonderful Wattpad poets:

@ShannonKellie, @OwainGlyn, @MajorSeventh, @seasofme, @Ikrice, @joy_reid, @sloanranger, @grapher, @Wyrder, @RedHare, @JoeCottonwood, @_sanity and @AngelOfDarkness_X.

I have no idea where she went, but the talented @ForestDreaming was also very dear to me. She is missed.

Thank you to my former colleague Zeba Khan for translating Dinner With Friends into Arabic. Any formatting mistakes are entirely my own.

Thank you to Mum and Dad, both of whom encouraged a lifelong love of books and learning. I had an idyllic childhood, brought up surrounded by countryside and with a tight-knit family and church community that still mean the world to me.

Thank you to Seth, Ellie, Matt and Sarah for all the years of fun and madness: Men of the Hills. Thank you to Stephen for telling me my poetry needed a wider audience.

And lastly, I want to reserve the most special thank you for @mudkickerkicks. Without her, I wouldn’t have pulled these poems together. Without her, I wouldn’t have written the best of them.

Preface

I was particularly lucky to be encouraged to write from an early age. In primary school we wrote about everything and anything, our works carefully mounted and displayed on the walls before being placed into scrapbooks.

We were encouraged to love words and make them our own. I have a vivid memory of a school play that demonstrated the meaning of the word obsidian through the discovery of Ob the alien by two friends: Sid and Ian. Myron Morgan, the then headmaster of Lincewood, is responsible for a lot.

I remember, too, in secondary school, an English teacher telling me that I should write romantic fiction for women’s magazines. I had penned a tale of a ranger on a volcano rescuing a damsel in distress (inspired not least by Willard Price’s Volcano Adventure). Subsequently, I was given a job lot of Bella. I am yet to make my first submission.

At university I traded poetry and fiction for essays on international politics, theories of political violence, political philosophy and subjects as obtuse as the social history of the machine gun. Later, in politics, I traded essays for complex briefings and myriad emails.

And somewhere along the way I lost my voice.

It wasn’t something I planned or intended. It wasn’t what I wanted. I just stopped writing for me and writing became something I did for other people. With only a few poems penned, I put away my notebook and concentrated on using my writing skills very differently. It was only this year that I rediscovered those early poems, most of which, with a little judicious editing, have made it into this collection.

As is so often the case with those of us who are maudlin romantics, it was an intense and ultimately ill-fated love affair that caused me to pick up my pen again. Those poems can be found in Part Two: A Wrong Turn. The experience of that relationship rekindled my love of words and my desire to explore and explain my thoughts and emotions through word pictures.

However, picking up the pen is one thing. Finding the confidence to think I might put my scribblings in the public domain is something else entirely. That only happened when I met Laura, who, as a professional writer, encouraged me to keep writing and showed me how to self-publish. This collection would not have happened without her.

In any field of creativity, we are encouraged by those whose works speak to us and encourage us to consider our place in in the world. I have been a voracious reader of all sorts of writing since early childhood. With poets, the language they use, the way verse is constructed, and even how words appear on the page, all combine to create a picture that extends beyond mere visual imagining to an emotional landscape that tempts us to put on our intellectual walking boots and clamber across.

The poets that have inspired me are too many to list completely. These are just a few of those who have caused me to think again about the world and I would urge you to spend a little time in their company: Louis MacNeice, W. B. Yeats, Rupert Brooke, e. e. cummings, Allen Ginsberg, Pablo Neruda, R. S. Thomas, Adrian Mitchell, Robert Frost, Walt Whitman, John Keats, William Wordsworth, Emily Dickinson, John Betjeman, Elizabeth Smart, Sylvia Plath and Philip Larkin.

This collection of poetry covers every facet of life and every emotion. I write about everything and anything, just as I did when first starting out.  Fragments and Reflections draws together my six separate collections on Wattpad as they stand in June 2015. It covers a period of twenty-five years, though much of my writing is from the last nine years (and, A Wrong Turn aside, mostly the last three). I’ve not added dates, but I suspect the few early pieces stand out.

Love, loss, family, contentment, nature, the city, loneliness, the sea, politics – I have never been able to restrict myself to a particular theme.

Some of my poems, particularly in Part Six, make for difficult reading. The language is occasionally crude and the imagery shocking. I do not intend to upset or offend, but it feels somehow dishonest to edit them to make them more acceptable.

I also realise that some of my formatting choices are not necessarily standard. Instead, capitalisations, line breaks etc. are how they are in the original pieces. I’ve not edited them for publication. For title formatting, I have tried to follow the advice found in The Chicago Manual of Style.

Thank you for reading. Poetry means different things to different people. Some of these are highly personal pieces. Others, I hope, speak to universal themes. I hope you can take something from at least some of these verses.

Ben Williams

June 2015

Part One

Fragments and Reflections

A Cold Morning’s Journey in