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August 2025
HP Poet: Nick Moore
Age: 50+
Country: UK


Question 1: We warmly welcome you to the HP Spotlight, Nick. Please tell us about your background?

Nick Moore: "I was born in Knutsford Cheshire; my parents split up when I was 7, so me and my mother moved to the North of England, this affected me greatly, influencing many poems. I didn't like school very much, finding it too restrictive, going straight into work at 16, into the university of life (a well-used saying at the time) working with adults with a learning disability for many years. I moved to Cornwall 10 years ago, never missing a day on the beach."


Question 2: How long have you been writing poetry, and for how long have you been a member of Hello Poetry?

Nick Moore: "Since 2011. I was in a band for a while, around the age of 20, writing songs, when I felt some of the songs seemed like they could pass as poems. My daughter was born a few years later, she sparked something in me, that just had to be expressed; the first poem I wrote was about her, what a child sees."


Question 3: What inspires you? (In other words, how does poetry happen for you).

Nick Moore: "Just about anything: philosophy, science, comedy, music, people, nature; but I have to let the idea grow in my mind, it's there in the background, and when it's ready, it will make itself known."


Question 4: What does poetry mean to you?

Nick Moore: "As a child, I was fascinated with the lyrics to songs, certain ones really spoke to me; for example Daniel by Elton John, the emotion in those words really got to me, so poetry was inevitably going to come into my life; so for me, it's a way of expressing thoughts and feelings that are hard to just bring up in a conversation."


Question 5: Who are your favorite poets?

Nick Moore: "Mark Bolan, was the first poetry I read, think the book was called Warlock of Love? Jim Morrison, Bob Dylan, Edgar Allan Poe, W.B. Yeats, C.S. Lewis and the many poets on Hello poetry."


Question 6: What other interests do you have?

Nick Moore: "Growing my own food, reading, surfing (not very good), listening to music, watching films from the silent era to recent ones, and walking my dog."


Carlo C. Gomez: “We would like to thank you Nick, we really appreciate you giving us the opportunity to get to know the person behind the poet! It is our pleasure to include you in this Spotlight series!”

Nick Moore: "Thanks again."




Thank you everyone here at HP for taking the time to read this. We hope you enjoyed coming to know Nick better. We most certainly did. It is our wish that these spotlights are helping everyone to further discover and appreciate their fellow poets. – Carlo C. Gomez

We will post Spotlight #31 in September!

~
Here we are
       this and now  
          never turn your heart away !
Hear the song
that comes out strong
                then sweet ...
pure upon your lips of red

Birds of paradise
              fly high
           as they soar towards
                         the sun !

Here we are
                you and I
                        living for the other
                            as if we'll never die !
Can you smell
the life that you live?
What sort of sense
does it give?
I sprinkled cinnamon outside my door,
whispered to the frames,
"only let in warmth,
keep their laughter outside
in the cold, where all things mournful
belong".
I wrap myself in a fisherman's cardigan,
Making clay out of tear-dried salt
and this divine earth that raised me.
I hear them jeering while I'm carving
all these stones with blistered hands,
Chisels rusted - they spent too long
curled, sleeping, unused in the moss.
They say I'm just shaping rocks
in silence,
for a game nobody wants to play,
a forlorn girl
trying to conjure gold
in a foundation poured strong enough
to hold a coliseum,
its rotunda gleaming with hand stacked dreams.
I have to believe,
if you just... keep... building,
someday, someone will see.
Even if the beauty is found
in a solitary, once lovely column
...when it's ancient.
When it's crumbling.
I set at the edge of the bed
with a blue floral spread

waiting

for the sun to blush
the sky

as the minute hand on the wall clock
quivers

the ice bucket
sweats

and breakfast  

will be soon
but is it really breakfast

if you haven't slept
 Aug 2 Mike Adam
Karen
Still
 Aug 2 Mike Adam
Karen
Cool breeze on my skin
Night drifts in to fill the room
Comfort to my dreams
A broken heart is–

a poet's greatest treasure.
 Aug 2 Mike Adam
Malcolm
I stood again where my breath vanished
on the edge of speaking
the air too still to carry even grief.
Around me, the world held its posture,
like it too awaited a reply
that would not come.

No flame descended, no tremor rose,
only the pressure of unbroken silence
folding itself around the questions
I hadn’t yet learned to stop asking.

Somewhere above, thought gathered
in a form I dared not name.
Not presence. Not absence.
But something in between,
watching itself through me.

I opened my mouth,
but what escaped me was not prayer, nor song
only the echo of unspent meaning,
a voice shaped more by question
than knowledge.

There are rooms in the soul
where even memory is forbidden.
In those, I build altars of fallen breath,
stacking each exhale like stone
to bear the weight of waiting.

If this is faith,
it does not comfort.
It requires no belief.
Only that I return each day
and listen for what I know isn't there.

Still, I do.
Not because I expect the silence to break,
but because I am part of its shape now
a line in its unwritten sentence,
the soft space between words
curled at the edge of speech.
02 August 2025
Between The Words
Copyright Malcolm Gladwin
A follow on poem to 'In the Sunroom (Suicide)"  (1)
writ many years later...
~For MWK~
<>
A stray thought. a burring burrowing, thorny tawny:

A wish, yet to get, but vetted for each of us.

This within, this redoubt, a contemplative oasis,
my indoor poet's nookery rookery sanctuary
each one, each is, deserves, all, one such,
a place holy filled, with lice and dirt of a life,
strained and trained for emission and transmission
of the best of the worst, and the triumphant emergent commission of
our individualized most excellent fresh best

where crumbs of apple crisp pie solidify, vanilla bean ice cream
melt offsets the oven heated warmth, and from this interactive
contrasts combative,
a poem pie reborn, newly disguised, familiar words,
yet unheard and before this very never,
went unspoken and now goes forth
svelte and unbroken

rhymes of yore, forgot from a before, but making up the walls
of the here and now,
a sunroom to spread out the lit lights of egress and entrance,
of fire door no exits that now are chiseled closed,
lock in, lock up, and somehow, one, stills to learn from
the stilling quiet solitude.
to penetrate the prostrate kneeling grinning grief,
how to expel and spell the words
that grant
relief

visit my sunroom, though no fiction.
the sun rays *******, create the friction
of that which cannot ever be withered nor contained,
and your mouth opens wide and a poem birthed and delivered,
pastiche paste composted of truth and dreams of fiction, fine diction,
with a shrug, a smile, a satisfaction extracted extraordinary,
you garner moments of satisfaction but cloud cover returns,
and the process of sunrise exposition recommences,
and one revisits the elemental sequencing of
all the predecessor pain, but this time,

for gain, for gain,
<>

written this sabbath Saturday
12:38am EST
Sat Aug 2
2025
in the sunroom,
on Shelter Island
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