Loose change (with video)

I've made the effort to resurrect and revamp this old one of mine.


This is my single poem that attracts the most attention, and this is because I originally created it as an animated GIF and placed it in posts on poetry forums.  As people on those forums were unused to a poem that suddenly edited itself while they were reading, I managed to catch quite a lot of people by surprise.



You can see the original, e.g. here on Poet's Graves or you can just play the video below, where I've reworked it with narration.  The original plan for to release it as a niche art-house film fell through when my backers realised the niche was less than an atom's width across.

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Go go gadget poetry magazine!

Antiphon, Issue 14

The War of the Words

No one would have believed in the early years of the twenty-first century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various compositions they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a degree in literary criticism might scrutinise the transient creatures that declaim and versify in a drop of water. With infinite complacency men went to and fro over this globe about their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over rhyme and meter...

...Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded our poetry with envious eyes, and periodically and excitingly published their on-line magazine.

Shameless plug

A plug, earlier today, and on the other side of the Atlantic

A while ago, Rosemary (my wife), Nash (internet-based friend) and I edited together a poetry collection from work contributed by members of the Poet's Graves Poetry Forum.  Ben (another internet-based friend) acted as publisher...

Skip forward three years or so and three of the above mentioned individuals meet up, quite by chance (and nearly a year's careful planning by Suzanne; another internet-based friend) with another seven or so members of the same forum, in the upstairs room of a central London pub.

Here we planned our inevitable takeover of Planet Earth.  Much eating, drinking, and poetry reading ensued.  And I also volunteered to plug the book.

Making Contact (Amazon)

There are great poems from twenty-five fascinating poets in there, including four from myself.  Just to prove the quality, peruse the following sample.

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Bottom Dead Centre


Intake

Ice-path uncles, sliding, come
to top-up stockings, sip sherry,
be knocked unconscious by the Queen.
The old year has been dripping
through the cracks in December,
now only one festival remains.


Compression

Fewer and smaller,
the uncles left for us to visit
dribbling in their rest-homes.
What troupe remains to get festive?
To turn up, unexpected? To decorate the tree
and give you socks?


Combustion

I give you socks
to wear outside your boots
wending from the crematorium
with the path caked in icing, decoration
a drain-pipe dribbled through its crack.
We spontaneously scatter Uncle Clive.


Exhaust

All the uncles scattered once,
when you aced and raced the new sled
of younger years. Now the pagan tree
is baubed with tears, as you tear the ribbon-paper.
Another pair of socks—useful. At our age
the ritual differs. The engine hesitates,
one year unsafely dead, and drawing-in
one drawn-out breath we wait
to long-live the new.