2017-04-30

NaPoWriMo - 2017 - April 26th - Space

I remembered the prompt I meant to follow yesterday...



Space

Between my two raised hands
I show just how much width
the coffee table takes
and that is space

not a huge amount of it
something approaching three foot six
but the same stuff
that separates us from the Moon.


You're on the far side
of the coffee table now;
no matter how I manoeuvre
I cannot bring you close...

...you say you need more space;
beyond you is the window,
kites flying in the park,
and beyond that, the Sun.




2017-04-29

NaPoWriMo - 2017 - April 25th - Antikythera and other mechanisms

Not really following any prompt here, except there was a prompt about "space" which prompted me (sic) to look through my notes for various terms and something I saw there reminded me I intended to write this.

This was all written in two sessions today, with minimal editing, so it's a bit "first draft" please forgive any built-in insanities.

I have used few Greek names and terms, not many.  I initially tried to get authentic ancient words but in the end decided the main thing I needed was two broadly suitable names.

The Antikythera Mechanism is this.  There is a theory that the ship that was wrecked may have been carrying loot from Rhodes to Rome for use in a triumphal parade staged by Julius Caesar.  I tried matching up the dates to see if that works.  It isn't clear it does, but I've incorporated that into the set-up anyway :-)  I've arbitrarily picked the time when Julius was a consul, there's no actual reason to think this true but I had to give him some title...

I do not speak Greek, especially not ancient Greek, so I have no reason to show off with it.  If I did I might have used some epigram such as:

Είναι εύκολο να ακούγεται έξυπνος σε ξένες γλώσσες

(thank you Google Translate).  Obviously I would never do that...




Antikythera, and other mechanisms


Captain Τιμόν(*) views the device

Caesar has ordered strictly, that no one turns
the handle
the technikós(***) Αλέκος(**)
staggers slightly in the swell, his hand upon
the opened cratenobody is to see
events from future time laid out.  The Gods
alone know this by right and the consul shows
due deference and decrees that no-one use
this thing save him.
  Much later when the man
was drunk, the whole crew heard him often boast
he had no choice but frequently to wind
the dials back to a century before
his birth and forward again up to today.
He claimed this as the only way to see
the mechanism hadn't suffered hurt.

(*-Timon; **-Alekos; ***-technician, modern Greek, I needed a plausibly old term but I also needed to imply the modern meaning, so this is a compromise...)


Αλέκος explains the dials

Upon this side are those things of the Earth:
above, progression of the months and years
laid out in spiral form, and more than that:
the festivals and Games at Athens,
Olympia and Rhodes.  Now lower down
another spiral shows eclipses: Sun
and Moon; dancing in the sky.  I'll turn
it round.  This side is for the heavens,
Gods, their wanderings across the night.

The Moon, its place in things, the dark and bright
phases, the motion of the Sun, through houses
of the Zodiac, and far beyond it all

fixed constellations rise and fall, throughout the year.


The sea captain's dream

Captain Τιμόν rests uneasy, his salt
and water blood uncalm, the mechanism
in his hold offers no direct harm, but a man
who's watched the heavens forty years can't
simply
sleep comfortable with ideas of gears
outside the sky.  The calendars that form
his life are woven from much softer things
the winds round certain islands, his son, his wife
and festivals that come because the town
gather; not because some metal pointer pins
them to a dial.  He turns in bed, uneasy.

Part of him knows the wind has changed;
within his dream the same unease: islands that move,
brass spins beneath the waves, a giant hand winding...


Unseasonable

The wind has changed.  The sea grows mad.  The captain
invokes Poseidon beneath his breath and grabs
the steering oar himself.  Beneath the deck
the oarsmen also pray, but Αλέκος
turns from the raging sea and guards instead
the precious crate.  Even technicians pray
but to what spirits, Gods or fates he's kept
his peace
part of the artisan's secrets
but whatever powers they are fail him.  Down
come the sails, and the oarsmen struggle more.  The lea
of any shore might save their skins. 
Τιμόν
tries first for Kythira but as fear grows
turns instead for tiny Aigila(*).  He knows
he's got there only when they hit the rocks.

(* transliteration of ancient name of Antikythera)


The technician's dream

Αλέκος sleeps so soundly when they pull
him from the sea, that all believe he'll die.
They try to keep him warm, burn sage leaves, ply
the fates with secret gestures, muttered words
they've heard the shepherds using for sick lambs.

This is no sheep, nor yet a man: technikós
who holds construction in his hands.  So deep
his charge has drowned, in sleep it takes him down

and he sees, unsurprised, a new dial: sea level
clearly marked.  The needle turns as all grows dark
around it.  In his heightened state he notices
also for the first time another gauge
"πολιτισμός", now well into decline.
He wonders for how long the dark will last,

when everything he knows has passed, how long
before technicians once again will build
machines to map the heavens?  How long until
they pull a lump of metal from the waves?

(* "πολιτισμός" - politismos: civilisation, modern Greek again...)




2017-04-27

NaPoWriMo - 2017 - April 24th - Cassini explains perspective

The (alternative) prompt I followed for this was "a place you've never been".


Cassini was an Italian "mathematician, engineer, astronomer and astrologer".  He discovered the gap in Saturn's Rings and it was this photograph which I saw today and which inspired the poem...



Cassini explains perspective



Everything you know;
everyone you know, have known, will ever know;

everywhere you've been;
everywhere you've never been;

everywhere you could be,
including even, if NASA would only play along,
the Moon;

every song that sticks in your head
all through some rainy afternoon;
every balloon, released accidentally
by any toddler;

every toddler;
every teen;

every thought you ever think;
every meme, you cut and paste on Facebook;

every face;
every book;

every member of the appropriate sex,
who has that certain styleall in

        In the sixteen hundreds, Cassini explained --
        for those travelling a long way --
        how to measure longitude with two clocks,
        the Sun, and careful observations
        of eclipsing Jovian moons.

        Cassini also observed
        the gap in Saturn's rings
        through which we today fling
        a careful dart and have it, looking back,
        photograph

that one pixel : this island Earth.


So I say: stuff your rather pointless election campaign,
pour your new recipe hair conditioner down the drain,
smoke or do not smoke, if you keep it away from me
because none of that matters
let me tell you about perspective.



2017-04-26

NaPoWriMo - 2017 - April 23rd - A spell to prove there is no magic

The official prompt for this day was a double elevener, which didn't grab me.  One of the alternative prompts I'm following said:

        "Must rush!  Do whatever you like!!"

(I'm only paraphrasing slightly...) So I dug this out and finished it.

I really believe there really isn't any magic, folks.  A Universe of this size and incredible complexity genuinely operates on automatic with no sort of mumbo-jumbo at allwhich is real magic.


A spell to prove there is no magic


The eye of the newt, a lens of half a billion years
making; drop it in your stew, and I
shall never bow to you, the charlatans
who do not know. So...

this graveyard dirt collected by what light
and on what date, and in whose reference frame?  The stars
behind that ball of rock are many cold light-years
away and this dirt here is just the same
as it would be by day, or be it colder.

Of course there are some quite cool microbes here
but I see you've boiled them.  So much
for bacteriology, and for geometry
while your circle here with pentangle inscribed
is topologically complex, for all of that
I had one on my folder back in school--
nobody turned into anything.



NaPoWriMo - 2017 - April 21st - So, I said

The prompt here was a poem with overheard speech in it.

Sonnet again.  It is my default setting when I do a form.

Interestingly I have known people like this, not diplomats, but who use rudeness as a form of affection, and who even use it to test new acquaintances if anyone takes offence: well you don't want the effort of people that difficult anyway...



So, I said


So I said: you are a diplomat, are you?
Because I had by chance happened to hear
him call the Finish Attaché a weird-
arsed hybrid of a reindeer and a shrew
and he said: I'll tell you, since we have a while.
My brand of statecraft is my very own
and amongst the cognoscenti I'm well known
for slandering my best friends with a smile


and I can never change because all like
me how I am.  I can't be too correct,
except... just sometimes when I want to crack
their composure, well then I need to go icily
polite -- never fails.  I know he'll be a chum
'cos as he went he said I was plain dumb.



2017-04-24

NaPoWriMo - 2017 - April 22nd - Alice through the mirror-plane

This is, of course, a sonnet -- although I've sneaked an extra rhyme into the penultimate couplet.  The prompt here was for a mirror poem and like every other living human, I love the tone of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland...



(Does Liddell rhyme with fiddle?  Probably not, but there's the competing constraint of the text making some sort of sense...)



Alice through the mirror-plane


A rabbit and an anti-rabbit, go
around the tree and down the wormhole.  Where
can such a transformation lead? Please show
your working as you think it through.  I share
your nervousness around the silvered glass
and note what care we're taking with the frame.
We pause and whiskered heads are asked to pass
their eyes across each step as we arrange

the kit.  We all wear white gloves on our shift
and antique pocket watches we have found
provide a way to check your drift.  Keep cool!
You're near normal, still grounded in old-school
reality—you'll find we never fiddle
our safety checks: we all recall Miss Liddell.



2017-04-23

NaPoWriMo - 2017 - April 20th - Identity Cards

The official prompt for today is a poem using the imagery of a sport or game.

I'm not 100% this one works.  It's not using the imagery so much as the rule structure of a trading card game and as the rules on the cards take effect, the protagonist's life gets changed.

It's yet another one I've had around for a while.  It's been sort of "finished" for a long time but I was never sure whether it needed completely rewriting, e.g. maybe with a different outcome or even a different conceit I have wondered whether the framework could come from a scriptwriter changing things about the events in a drama, rather than a game...  but for the moment it stands as it is.

I would vote for Edward, any day...



Identity Cards


Set-up
deal sixteen Terrain Cards into the city grid.

            The city is warm tonight.


Populate
draw a Neutral Card and place in each Terrain.  As you place each card, perform any special actions.

            The lights are on, and Edward Wu walks tired
            but overall content, through rising dark;
            echoey conversations from just a way
            away, traffic, someone bounces a ball

            against a metal shuttered door; and all
            of this is far enough removed.  There's peace
            in the canal-side market, it's intimate;
            warm summer air, the idea of crushed flowers,

            a hint of rotting food.  Ed loves this mood,
            this end-of-day-and-all-work-done moment
            although the latter's not entirely true
            he has much homework still to do

            the grading on; a weight in his backpack,
            a thought in his mind of kneeling sipping tea
            at Auntie's low down kitchen table, bright
            lamplight circling the paper as he marks.


Dimension Door draw a card, deploy for free in any area you control.

            Moments are moments and suddenly
            happens not in the moment, but half a second later
            when mind wakes up.  Edward's brain acts all surprised;
            lightning punctuates the sky and by the time

            he realises something's up, the dark-
            cloaked figure blocks his way... very tall,
            quite female, dressed Sunday Best Lord of the Rings;
            she seems, behind her furrowed brow, also confused.


The Sorceress
when played, draw three cards.  You may immediately deploy any of these (at usual cost) adjacent to the Sorceress.

            Everything happens at once: a second moon,
            a dragon drifts in front, briefly it rains
            clockwork men...  A wagon of police arrive,
            take turns to shout incomprehensibly

            through bullhorns.  Tasers are brandished; a weirdling mist
            creeps in; there's howling; ultimatums; an angry
            and extended speech nobody understands;
            a mobile incident unit parks; a shout...


They don't know what they do When threatened by a neutral card: you may destroy one artefact, then every player draws two cards from the Random Deck and plays them immediately.

            the haft of a staff slams on the ground.
            How often does a moon fall down?  How frequently
            is your young adult world unmade; remade;
            flayed by shrapnel; the sudden change of life

            or heart.  The world has many moving parts
            and every single one of them hits Eddy
            in just a minute and a half.  It's a kind
            of Armageddon.  A werewolf eats his homework.


Promote Leader move any friendly or neutral card from controlled space into the Palace.  Usual promotion bonuses apply.

            Edward runs the city now: there's more homework.
            It is an indeterminate time later;
            which is the only kind of time he owns
            the clockworkings with which the ticking men

            repaired him in the ruins of the fallen moon
            keep perfect beat but do not feel the moments
            as they fall.  This must be what it is he says
            to be a mountain with a million drops

            of rain upon you every day.  Each drip
            exquisite and unique, but you barely feel

            the river.  You don't know change at all.
  Edward
            keeps the city safe, best as he can.  He keeps

            the mutants in the broken lands. He stamps
            quite carefully but firmly down on crime,
            and once in four years finds its time to tell
            the voters once again.  I am stability,

            he says, I tick.  I am reliable
            as only clockwork minds can be.  A vote

            for me, is a vote against moons falling ever
            again this is my oath: not on my watch.



 

NaPoWriMo - 2017 - April 18th - Possible taxonomies of the 1957 Yorkshire coast

I went to a writing workshop, some years back now.  One of the exercises was to watch a "British Transport Film" similar if not identical to this:


-and write a poem in response.

It's the "poem" part that may be dubious here.  Sometimes my response to something is more to its style than its content and seeing this I was struck by how much it was unique to the period.  So I started thinking about how people might present the same information in other styles...  and I hit on the idea of an overly abstract and academic study.

So what I am saying is that there may be nobody else in the world except me who gets this...

...but it is a list poem and you could imagine it came from the introduction of some dry-as-bones volume that a tweed clad professor has been labouring over for the best part of a decade..





Possible taxonomies of the 1957 Yorkshire coast
  • those involving sun hats
  • those involving beer
  • those involving knobbly knees
  • those involving simple foodstuffs : apples, sandwiches, cheese
    • as above, but also fish and chips
  • those involving model ships or boats
  • those involving racquets
  • those involving balls
  • those involving young ladies
    • excluding the most popular of all
  • those involving sand
    • with buckets and spades
    • with towels
    • with sandwiches
  • those planned a year in advance
  • those involving dance with various degrees of skill
  • the subset involving omnibuses
  • those involving ice cream
    • the subset with also small children
      • and the subset of those in which a seagull features
  • those involving other creatures:
    • donkeys
    • crabs
    • minute fish
  • those in which you drink too much, and wish you hadn't
  • those featuring special boys or girls
    • appearing at just the wrong moment
    • or where they don't arrive at all
  • as yet to be categorised:
    • sea temperature
    • sunburn
    • chilblains
    • lower back pain in the context of luggage
    • all the grades of rain




2017-04-22

NaPoWriMo - 2017 - April 17th - Of tea and politics

The challenge here was a poem about a closed door.  I've taken that figuratively again.  The real door in this poem is glass and the characters can easily see what's behind it.  What's unknown is the door of the future, but it's slowly creaking open on disturbing possibilities...

There is obviously nothing.  Nothing whatsoever.  In today's world that makes me feel like this.

Move on citizens.  Nothing to see here.



Of tea and politics



They have now hanged the suspect spy
just outside the door.  He's swinging
from the cast iron sign
shaped like a teapot.  It creaks alarmingly.
This afternoon is waxing quite complex.
The police chief's voice still thunders from the kitchen.
He's on to topics wide as loyalty, respect for law,
and macaroons, and fear.  I beckon the waitress near
and ask:
Could I just have another scone?
The afternoon moves on towards an evening,
which no-one present dares to guess.
The hanged man stills.
I shall bury him, he was my servant.



2017-04-21

NaPoWriMo - 2017 - April 16th - Language does not exist…

Language does not exist…


Language does not exist…
not in the sense of something we can touch,
engineer, pass from hand to hand, feel the grain.  Language…
the shared delusion is an illusion.  We understand chocolate cake,
a concrete thing: we agree the broad idea
but only one of us recalls Paul, at two years old,
smothered in the stuff.

Less agreement with abstractions: my love
is not your love; and my sovereignty
doesn’t exist at all.

How much worse when we get to something you don’t know.
You mention that you like to go kayaking
but I have never experienced the sudden cool
of near ice water running from a paddle into my sleeve
or the semi-resonance of millimeter-thick fiberglass
rebounding from submerged geography.


Language does not exist…

although the dictionary says otherwise.
The words in the book of lexical lore
will claim to, with precision, pin a meaning on every
possible utterance. They do not and cannot;
Dictionaries do not exist…

Language isn’t definitive or declarative,
it isn’t even functional at heart. It’s metaphorical.

Let’s get high!

We can do that here on the hill,
with the stepladder,
and you are very tall;
and the guitar solo goes up and up;
and you've been promoted, by a higher power;
your salary is now so much,
but this meat’s off;
the electricity is strong;
your church is formal;
and your fashion sense is very sharp today.

All these things are someway “high”
but the only way in which three octaves above middle C
is like a piece of rotten meat,
is buried deep
in our psychology/neurology.


Language does not exist…

not as something fixed
which you can grasp with thought or pen.
Continual flux is all there’s ever been:
spellings, meanings and usages
shift beneath our tongues
like extreme sushimi.

You, I hope, understand me.
Shakespeare, however, would get me less
and Chaucer might think I was speaking
a foreign language.

I take my words back,
I take them back in time until,
somewhere maybe in the 9th or 10th century
there comes a point where they have no meaning at all...


...
because language does not exist.
Not even in the other direction.
My words are of course
recorded for posterity, but after I die and as they age
what anybody understands fades out.
Until there comes a moment
when my great, great, great, great grandchild
factoring, loneish in the interspace
wonders what planet I was from.

If I was truly great,
people would update me
once per generation,
but we can't all be Shakespeare
—if nothing else Shakespeare's already done that.
So there that's us evolving once again.


Language does not exist…

Je suis un éléphant.  I might say,
if
I was French,
and an elephant
. Those who are the sort
to understand French elephants
would shrug
expressively
and wonder why I stated the obvious

but my words would be gibberish
to the differently linguistically endowed.
English exists,
French exists,
and they’re langages…
but they’re not language itself, which does not exist.
English/French dictionaries, in particular, do not exist.


Language is a maelstrom, language is a storm.
People think they pin it down, control it...
define it;
but they may as well bottle the hurricane.

Grammarians will claim they can explain
and lay down every part of speech in grammar books.
Grammar books do not exist
and as for the people who write them:
I've never met one.


Language does not exist…

so set yourself free!
No ploddy, tetrapody emphraslement for me!
No momentary ding.  Talk toboggan listen
all everness towards myself true wordy
and ultimatum infiltrate the thing
of do magnificence, superlative, and evermore unstopped.

Nobody can stop me doing this
and nobody can touch me for it...

because language does not exist.

NaPoWriMo - 2017 - April 15th - The impossibility of Elspeth Spangler

This one languished for a long time as just the first strophe and the idea of releasing the mice.  However on the train yesterday it got its moment to shine...

Elspeth doesn't shine...  she glows gently if she thinks nobody is looking.

I'm not vegetarian but I like vegetarian food.  And I'm not a cat person, but I'm even less a dog person so I get Elspeth to that extent.



The impossibility of Elspeth Spangler


The woman can't exist.  She does not work
for all hours in the whole-food shop.  She won't
arrive at six to clatter shutters down
and shove the drawer back firmly in the till.
She never checks the racks for misplaced packs
or things that need refill.  She has no chance

encounters with her oldest friend or lunch
outside the vegan café opposite,
and they don't laugh round cauliflower bake
or snort latte at what the teacher said
that day when they freed all the classroom mice
in the unreal childhood many miles ago.

And now she doesn't wander, weary, home,
the day of problems not quite out of mind,
although the ones now gone feel so well done.
There isn’t any hint of rain to damp
her slightly battered funky hat. There’s no
absence of boy or girl back in the flat,

boiling the kettle ready. She doesn’t need
to keep her coat and scarf on while the place
warms through. There is the cat, who adopted her
so many years ago and who awaits
the ceremonial filling of the bowl
as if the World were a real and reliable place.




NaPoWriMo - 2017 - April 14th - Haunted

An old unfinished one I dug up and converted to electricity.

Quite by coincidence this (almost) fits of the prompts I saw elsewhere for April 14th: A poem about friendship I think that ever-so-ever-so-long-ago friends are still friends, aren't they?



Haunted


Somebody steps on the creak-board now.
The door is closed, bolt unthrown
when someone treads that selfsame creaking board
so forty years just come undone and blow with my smoke
through the empty window pane.  There was a time

when from that single tread I could have told
exactly which of the three of them
the other three haunts,
the other three-quarters
of the definitive clique
the high school slightly ahead of the curve
but not so geek squad: Becky, Dave or Edward

was stood on that selfsame creaky board
but no more those four decades
will not be put aside. Time goes in a moment
but the moments then remain, elapsed,
forever.

I've always known that I must come again
to haunt this ghost-filled building in the trees
but who in turn is haunting me
what spectre, childhood or young adult,
stands now upon the landing.  Why don't
they push the door?

Time was, we four, came here
to drink and smoke, snog
in various combinations
Dave/Ed is the only one they won’t admit to
and talk about how the World will be
when we’ve drunk from the secret cup

of growing up. And here I am
fast-forward to this moment
forty-odd years and no leagues hence
when all dreams are no more
and how our lives turned out are now well know.
Somebody steps on the creak-board now.
Please do not push the door.




NaPoWriNo - 2017 - April 19th - The mythical creation myth

The prompt was to retell a creation myth.

First time I've used "wang" or "tits" in a poem, but then your typical creation myth is going to get a bit earthy...



The mythical creation myth


They say they say the universe begins
in fire, of all things; massive growth in white hot
techno-commercial foment or else some moment
of some old godhead cutting off some other
old god’s bits. The sky-father’s wang. The earth-mother’s
tits. The separation of the light and dark, water
and land, the casual combining of whatever
elements might come to hand into first life.

First life, first light, first thought… first criticism
the creation-creator held up for inspection
and to account. Is this the only way
the World can be? Is there enough infinity
or family values? Is the climate wrong
in late September? Has the climate model
come undone, dropping her pointer and spilling one boob
in front of the green-screen projection

of the home counties. What country is our home
in the world we less than intentionally create.
Do not pause at the gate but hit the commuter train
on time. Newspaper tucked firmly beneath
your Sure for men armpit and daily in it
the word-smiths push their
sempiternal spin
there is such detail still
needs construction
for the creation story that never ends.



2017-04-18

NaPoWriMo - 2017 - April 13th - While you wait

There's prompts for each day this month coming in from all sorts of sources.  This one was on Poet's Graves:

"Vessel Poem: Write about a ship or other vehicle that can take you somewhere different from where you are now."

As ever I've taken the prompt loosely...



While you wait...


Free transportation to other planets, while you wait...

...watch that dot, in the middle of the screen
maybe it needs a wipe, do you see it now?
It is in fact quite hard to keep things clean
over this sort of elapsed time.  Watch that grow
as we approach the star: our engineers
have said we should see something change
in merely twenty thousand years.


Other dimensions, right here!

Transhape frilly nuberances in their own domain...
Fract with the janslers and coil the cube for sure!
In fact do anything you can't explain
to your dear spouse or agents of the law
be free to do exactly what you feel
however frankly wrong or sick
by law these other worlds aren't real


Be the self of your dreams

At last!  A painless way for you to be
the person of your secret dreams.  Just use
our Cabinet de Personnalité
and you can then develop traitsor lose
the ones you hate.  Ease gently past your blocks

precisely tune your brain, until
it's time to come out of the box.



2017-04-17

NaPoWriMo - 2017 - April 12th - Recital room on the edge of forever

Blatant cheating now, this isn't one I wrote for the occasion, but one I've had half finished in the pile forever.  So I dusted it off and forced it to reach some sort of conclusion.

This describes, pretty non-literally, an actual evening of Elizabethan music that we enjoyed some years ago.  The unlikely characters listed are caricatures of the people in the audience (including myself, guess which...)

The 'king' didn't actually die, but did fall asleep, and the time-machine wasn't visible but you could feel the possibility in the air.



Recital room on the edge of forever


I This is not historically accurate.

The time-machine is off.
The lighting dims.  The audience contains:
one child, adhesive with toffee, snot and cough;
one king, broken as veins in his nose;
one faerie princess, warlike, but with boots off currently;
one sister, handmaiden, or clone;
one disembodied mind, chilling;
and full supporting cast of students, spies,
more musicologists than mind can face, journalists,
and surely an assassin.

 
II Diagram not to scale.

The ensemble assemble and arrive.
They sit, to some applause, the lutenist,
recorder player, countertenor, viol...
as archaic arrangement as ever was desired.
The needle on the time-machine is hard
against the twenty-first century, but now
they start to playThe lutenist perspires.  Flow my Tears,
as Dowland said and maybe they can flow
into some place where Queen Bess isn't dead
so much as lost around some corner neither mind
nor eye can see.  Perhaps we hear a hint,
musically, of a place that time misplaced.


III There is no history.

The King is dead,
the music must move on, journalists
mutter into phones, and recorders:
descant, tenor, piccolo flow smoothly
through musicians' hands.  Everyone
counts strings on the lute.  Students,
spies, and surely the assassin are flown
back to some safer, more-familiar timezone
and the needle on the time-machine
without seeming to have moved
is clear of the end-stop.

2017-04-16

NaPoWriMo - 2017 - April 11th - Towards a theory of knowledge

When I put up my April 9th poem, I was only a few days late, and I was very pleased because I'd nearly caught up with the alleged one per day nature of NaPoWriMo.  Since then I've not done well at all, I've been quite busy and also quite tired and poetry just doesn't seem to happen for me when I'm tired.

I've also not been very inspired by any prompts I've seen, which I suspect is another aspect of the tiredness.

Anyway I have now managed to write this.  It's not from any prompt but rather six lines of notes that I've had around for years.  I'm also not very happy with the character "she" as she's a bit of a cypher, even allowing for the fact that the two characters ("she" and "you") in this are only really caricatures.

However it's what I had time for, so here you go, a belated poem for the 11th.


Towards a theory of knowledge


Everything you think you know is wrong
or at least grotesquely out-of-date.  The speed of light
crawls, glacier-urgent, towards you past her empty plate...
Whole nanoseconds pass, she starts to frown,
and do not get me started on the sluggishness of nerves:
ion gates creak open, electric charge
only just starting to move
and maybe, in some previous life, you were unwise
to criticise her shoes.

Everything you think you know is wrong
or at least statistically poor, you've sampled her
at most four times this weak,
a fistful of data points and who's to say
what subtle changes may have happened
beneath the resolution of Student's t-test
for a population of this size
while you were off working on another dataset.

Everything you think you know is wrong
and philosophically suspect
solipsism cannot be disproved
and if you're moved to say
the Universe is vast and so complex:
it is no thing you could express
and thus you claim you cannot be
imagining reality, or even just the slope
of her nose -- well, sure, OK, there's something there
outside your skull, but still no proof
that she exists in anything like the form you hope.

Everything you think you know is wrong
your brain is built of only one device
-- the neurone --
and yes, you have a billion
but I know no proof
that says precisely what the wetware
can or can't embrace.  We know, for example:
face recognition is strong,
you did not kiss her sister for all that long
but there could be so many things
you cannot ever grasp --
although that slap was fairly comprehensible.

Everything you think you know is wrong
your base psychology is tuned
not to experience reality, but rather
to focus on those bits of it that get you by,
that get you fed, that get you sex, healthy children,
a seat closer to the fire, avoid pain,
and maybe another younger woman on the side
-- which is really just the healthy children thing again.
Oh yes, protest you understand
politics, economics,
the servicing of the small, about-town cars
but you don't know, you really don't
if your core program only goes this far...
and way beyond there lie the deep, bleak truths
that you will never see
or, more subtly, be able to accept:
like those things that she just said.
Were you even listening?

Everything you think you know is wrong,
quantum physics stringing you along
with the idea that the world makes sense
but underneath and not so nice
it seems to roll dice
and there's a chance, tiny but real,
that at any moment it might
rip off the concealing overlay
of sensibility and start to play
with the whole non-local,
anything-might-happen, no consistency thing.
And now she's talking to her ex?

Everything you think you know is wrong
and the quantum serves us also up another mystery
the past can only be explained
as a sum over histories
where just as anything might happen next
with some probability
however small, then in the other direction
in the past, there's nothing at all
which didn't happen
it's just most of it has a magnitude so small
that it can be neglected
and this is why you feel you can explain
how Friday night, is not as she suspects.
You weren't out with the sister again
but home all evening with the phone off the hook
and no lights on.

This really could have been the case, after all:
everything she thinks she knows is wrong.

2017-04-12

NaPoWriMo - 2017 - April 9th - Nocturna -- unquiet

The challenge was to write a nine line poem and some examples of form were given.  I've never written a nocturna before, it's nine lines, iambic pentameter and has an ada bdb cdc rhyme scheme...


Nocturna -- unquiet

I never should so late at night eat cheese
although that Stilton is so fine on toast
I can well do without such dreams as these

I started trying to take you to the park
I thought to buy ice-cream, play perfect host
but now we're in the graveyard and it's dark

and creepy, gloomy, all in mist bedecked
but this is my dream, I could be the ghost!
I'll jump out on you for the best effect...

NaPoWriMo - 2017 - April 8th - modern love an iterative algorithm

The challenge here was to write a poem that used repetition... but I wrote a poem about repetition.  I'm tricksy that way...


modern love an iterative algorithm


find_hearts_content:
define: coffee in coffee_shop;
    define: Joan is old and Joan is flame and Joan is barrister;
    if April not in cruellest_months then
    if April is young and April is lady and April is barista and April is here then
    while not Joan not here; watch April; sip coffee; repeat;
    greet Joan; begin conversation;
    set topics equal weather and family and work and events(local)
        and not feelings;
    talk about topics until Joan say "Well, must rush..."
    say "Goodbye"
    send love to Michael and Claire;
    look at window; wave at Joan;
    while not heart not satisfied; watch April; smile;
    goto find_hearts_content;



2017-04-10

NaPoWriMo - 2017 - April 6th - You need to have a plan

You need to have a plan


You need to have a plan and its first part
must say the cutting edge of the state of the art
can't hold a candle to you.  Investors love
that short of thing.  Secondly, say you'll move
the goalposts, redefine the market, break
the paradigm, already have the stake-
holders saluting ducks all in a row
and never show your working.  Although, you know

that faking rumours of a prototype
can rocket-boost the most slothful share price
and drive your competition into fits
so that is when you sell off all the bits
then make some sort of statement in the press:
how federal regulation caused the mess.

NaPoWriMo - 2017 - April 7th - The rough guide to peri-apocalyptic travel

The challenge was to write a poem using: translucent, black, ride, stuff, house, strike, purpose, yellow, peace, road


The rough guide to peri-apocalyptic travel


I am become translucent on my horse
and yet must ride, the desert not too far
behind, the desert not so far ahead;

its stuff and substance blow around your house,
as I pause to drink and strike some sort of pose.
What is my purpose?  You do not want to know

the desert will be on you soon, all sere
and grey, and it's late within the day, and I
imagine yellow bricks upon the road:

it helps me go, my name was never Dorothy
and I am grown translucent on the horse,
which is still black.  His name is Acceptance.  Peace.

NoPoWirMo - 2017 - April 10th - A cricket ball at seventy...

From a prompt to write a portrait of somebody important to you...


A cricket ball at seventy...


...diving for it like a teen,
but even that was long ago
and the most abrupt of angels long since called
one Monday in the home which is not
there are no homes, in the post-modern
Post-Kathleen Era, where a pad might be incontinence
or else for YouTube on the move
and at least one grandchild is married
to a MOTSS.  There is still sun
such as warmed Lino in the kitchen in the back yard
of the terraced house where the loo came indoors
in the sixties and the dog slunk off a final time
in nineteen eighty-two.
We who are yet to die...

we miss you, the cloth cap and the grin
the lunatic spin, and diving for the cricket ball
when you were seventy.  We miss that you never complained
not once
and were proud to pay the income tax
which meant you'd earned some money.

Mother says that you made shoes
as a necessity
and reared a pig as a luxury
and a Christmas meal.

They say in time
every wound will heal
but this one
brought its golf clubs.




2017-04-08

The Attics of the Dead

I've got stalled on this year's NaPoWriMo, I think because I'm still really tired following Rosemary's book launch on Thursday.  So I've dug up this old one from last year's poetry writing month.

This is an attempt to capture the mood and strangeness of a real recurring dream I used to have.  Where I'd be wandering the attics of some building which in real life didn't have any, and there would be and shelves and shelves of interesting boxes.  Not that in the dream I every got to open any of the boxes...

There's a reference to my Granddad in this, and that is how come this poem is "of the dead".  His and Nana's house was a common location for the dream, although not the only place it could be set.

All my grandparents are dead now.  You can never go back, can you...







The attics of the dead


I no longer dream the attics of the dead
but I recall the qualities of dust
and light and wooden shelving where I pass
my unshod sleep feet silent on the boards.
There are always more: more boards, more boxes,

suitcases, cabinets and old wardrobes...
more attics.  Up some turning stair, or through
a low door: a further shelfscape; hatches
in the ceiling through which unpainted ladders
climb higher still to attics which by rights

should be much smaller than the floor below.
They're not, of course, there's always more and I
will wander rarely distracted by a beam
of skylight cutting through or a corridor
window through which I peer to see forever

roofs and tiles and access ways and never
a hint of any world below.  Through windows
sometimes I will glimpse another distant pane
of glass though which, enticing,  I'll see the backs
of other shelves all filled with such exciting

packages, but which I know I'll never reach.
There isn't any lesson for this place to teach,
I am not lost, or trapped; I'm just aware
that granddad knows of every item there,
but still, somehow, my exploration
does not posses an end.




2017-04-05

NoPoWriMo - 2017- April 5th - Our correspondent interviews the famously private poet

Our correspondent interviews the famously private poet


Question: You have before said, which is to say
that people quote you expressing the idea
and you've elaborated on other occasions
that this idea, or conception, I should say

has seemed to have a life, a meaning beyond
its origin.  Would you comment on that?  But first...
Question: In your work, as received by the audience
there often seems to be an almost pause

a moment of collection before expression
where as a reader one is forced to look
for alternative interpretation.  How
do you imagine all that we imagine

sitting as we are so... figuratively
remote from you there with the pen...?  Which makes
me recall!  I have to ask, when ideas strike
-- sorry, this is a different question --

as an idea is dawning in your mind,
what do you gasp of it at first?  A shadow
a mere imagining with every part
to be filled in, or is it more Athena

all springing fully formed with rhymes and scansion
already there in place?  But I see we're out
of time and I wanted to ask about your book!
Never mind, I have enjoyed, it's been my privilege.

2017-04-04

NaPoWriMo - 2017 - April 4th - A blue star rises, and who of us can say

From this prompt about the Enigma Variations -- although as ever not directly from that...  I came the long way around.


A blue star rises, and who of us can say

out by the horizon, electric blue ink
a sky uniquely annotated dawning
its own way and who of us can say
what a day like this may mean

one pale, bluish star, low in the brightening sky
I watch you stir your tea I watch
you watch my eyes we're drawing nearer
covertly, through a fall of hair

a blue star might rise unprecedented
just there in its own way on a day
with the horizon not so far away
you tie your hair back firmly with a string

out by the horizon
I greet you properly, a public display
what passes as normal, we're unaliened
and our funny ways strange no more

a blue star rises and all unmanned,
unwomanned, freshly peopled...
we walk out hands held
into the new world, bravely

2017-04-03

NaPoWriMo - 2017 - April 3rd - Did you grow up in a literary family?

The official NaPoWriMo prompt for today links to this interview, in which the first question asked is:

Did you grow up in a literary family?


Mother was entirely fictional.  So dad had
various girlfriends and some of them, pitying us,
would sometimes read out extracts from her life.

My sister and I would argue about who was
the protagonist.  She always thought it her while I,
uncertain, dithered over people met that day.

My uncle lost his appendix, and later on the plot,
eventually misplacing all the contents pages
for his mind, his life, and his wife: Aunty Peggy...

who lived, we thought, for forty years in the mad attics
with the first Mrs Rochester, and a portrait
of Doreen Grey -- now into her second childhood.

The old die old, the good die good and, they hope, well
and all my pages grow sepia at the edges
while my spine stiffens and small print blurs.

My sister failed to become the villain, married badly;
tried again, with a book-shopkeeper's son called Sid,
and now swells well with a kid and a sequel to come

and what have I done.  It seems I am the focus
character after all and I hope I haven't bored
my readership along the way.  Did I grow up

in a literary family?  Well actually
I haven't literally grown up at all.

2017-04-02

NaPoWriMo - 2017 - April 2nd - There's a certain formalism in these things

There's a certain formalism in these things


When she is willing, or even keen, she strips
the flowers from her hat and scatters them
upon the treacherous back step.  For him
he'll try to get her attention, by reading, silent,
in the outside loo.  There's other things they do:
she smokes a cigarette -- some hours before
and far away -- which weaves faint smoke smell through
her hair; he moves her chair an inch, no more;

she wears that old torn dress, that still a bit
reeks of sweat and other fluids.  He picks fights
over small things.  She invites him to fuck off,
cordially.  Eventually they will both hit
upon the same room, mood and time, and minks
would blush.  Usually ten minutes is enough.

NaPoWriMo - 2017 - April 1st - The Impirator's Trending Clothes

The Impirator's Trending Clothes

Twenty-Three Thousand People are talking about this,
and of course you want to Save the Bees, so click:
the simplest act which in an earlier
and less gratificationally now
regime would have seemed as if it could at best
form just the smallest part of the process, the start
if you will, or perhaps the end.  New on your feed
what do you want to eat?  Where and with who?
How can you know what to do without ratings, reviews,
the telling clique of stars beside each name.
She clicks the link, you won't believe what happens
next
...  You've had a text from a so-called friend
amused that trolls beneath the bridge have told
the goats and sheep that you're a freak (though they
of course used your wrong you're: their stupid).  Click
to save sick kittens -- but where -- trending now, click here
to learn this simple trick
-- but where in all
this maze -- suggested page -- where did you leave --
why don't you want to see this ad -- where did
you leave your life?  Be first to comment on this.

NaPoWriMo - 2017

Every year at this time, the international poetry community takes part in NaPoWriMo — National Poetry Writing Month.

"National" is now an inaccuracy, it happens everywhere, and the idea is to write one poem a day, every day, for the whole of April.  They don't have to be great poems, or polished, or even necessarily complete...  there just has to be something poem-like that you can show to your fellow poets.

Many of my favourite efforts originate from this exercise, like this or this so I make a point of trying to participate every year.

This year I think I'll do it naked — by which I mean I'll post the poems here, unedited, as I turn them out.

Expect a poem for every day, not always on the day in question, I do have a life and it would be unrealistic not to allow a little give and take, but expect 30 brand new poems in roughly the next 30 days.

I have the first two already, watch this space...