Featured Fifty Poetry: Turned Out Nice

Chris Hardy's poems have appeared in the Rialto, Poetry Review, the North, Tears in the Fence, and many other magazines, anthologies, (eg The Forward Prize), and websites in the UK, Europe and elsewhere. He has won prizes in the UK National Poetry Society, and other competitions. His third collection was published in July 2012 by Graft Poetry (www.graftpoetry.co.uk). Chris plays guitar in the trio LiTTLe MACHiNe , performing their settings of classic poems. They are appearing at Literary in the UK and elsewhere. Carol Ann Duffy, Poet Laureate of England, has described them as "the most brilliant music and poetry band in the world."

Turned Out Nice

You get up from your mother's bed

and catch the bus outside her house.

When it stops you get off,

walk through a door and start working.

People come in and out,

you go away with some of them,

into the country, another city,

across the sea.

One day you find yourself

on the other side of the world.

You think for a while about how

it turned out like this.

You can recall what you did

and why you did it, more or less,

but each event is like a page

you wrote your reasons on

then lost, a trail of scraps

blown off tables in street cafés,

not a book beside your mother's bed.

And you know it doesn't matter

that there is no story.

The sun always sets in the west

even on the other side of the world.

The sea and sky change by the minute,

the records we have kept

fill miles of paper,

and we have decided

they tell us nothing.

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