Soap Bubble (a somewhat different take...)

Soap Bubble (a somewhat different take...)

Hallam London has been busy again with my poem "Soap Bubble" and this time has teamed-up with the wonderful Reentko (also here) to produce this equally wonderfully different version...

It's not the end of the World, it's just a soap bubble...

Please take climate change seriously...

 

NaPoWriMo - 17/04/2020 - Things Christina Knows

A bit of a cheat here, this was originally the first song that I wrote for my collaboration with Hallam London but he didn't feel comfortable identifying with a teenage girl so I put this aside and wrote Dance Crime instead.



Things Christina knows

Anne is in a coma, everybody says;
Christina hears but can't speak--too soon--

to Beth through Friday's endless afternoon
of double chemistry she tried and failed.
What can you say when someone's nearly dead
and all you want is never dying dance,
too loud, too bright, too fast; a crowded chance
to step out of control.  Perhaps enough is said?

And now tonight Christina knows that Beth,
locked-in upon a mission of her own,
took something hard and white.  She's in a zone,
unblinking, where nothing like a friend's near death
can interrupt her all consuming hunt
to find the perfect boy-stroke-girl and dance
enmeshed in rhythm, sweat and sideways glances--
she never takes them home, but surely wants...


...and so Christina knows
that everything is possible;
but also she knows
nobody's words are true;
and now she sees
the rising Sun eclipsed by tower blocks,
and this is life :
the trick is not to fuck it up.


Today through morning's shopping/washing turn-around
Christina struggles, wanting not to think
of how a body hovering on some brink,
might turn either direction.  Might be found

tomorrow morning asking after bacon
or might...  the nights are so long this week
and after she'd not slept she had to freak
Bethany by dragging her to visit Anne...


...and so Christina realises
that anything is bearable;
although she must admit
that everybody fails;
and she has seen
that stolen cars still smoulder by the underpass,
but she still knows that there is hope :
the trick is not to fuck it up.


Christina stands up now to dance, the World
is subtly rearranged, and she needs more
than strobing light against the dark.  She's sure
she never felt this way before.  No walls
seem relevant.  She walks through rain barefooted,
towards the hill of trees, towards the high place
towards infinity, and the clearing sky,
where she will dance as if everything is looking.


Christina knows
that anything is possible;
and thus she knows
the stars are in her reach;
and though she's longed
that simple friendships might endure,
she'll take each one for however long it lasts :
the trick is, as ever, not to fuck it up.

NaPoWriMo - 15/04/2020 - The Engine Subcommittee

The Engine Subcommittee...


...meets, occasionally quorate,
and every Thursday evening
in the longtime beer spill backroom
of the Dog and Gun.

They consider the case for turbine rotors
the glasses of beer, the ceramic or titanium alloys
the questions of low, high and optimum temperatures
and whether the peanuts should be salted

or dryly roast.  They consider the boast
of Nigel of the Flat Cap, that he can route
all the required pipes and wires
around the belfries and spires

without making a single decorated Gothic
flinch.  Watch the Master of Combustion pinch
out his cigarette and say
for the thirty-seven thousandth time

that he is certain all engine components
should be situated in roofs and crypts,
and not disturb the bats, or visitor collection box flow patterns,
in any significant way.

The subcommittee has been meeting for fifteen years;
the cathedral hasn't moved an inch.

NaPoWriMo - 01/04/2020 - The only way to be sure

Not brilliant, but a start...



The only way to be sure


How can you know?  How does it go?
After that third date, does he start arriving late,
or does she ghost you
and move to a new town?  Secondhand,
the car you now own,
is its wiring quite OK.  Its tyres?  It's tiring,
trying to achieve certainty,

and the mortgage provider needs
two references, six months of old utility bills,
and a letter to prove
you really do work those twelve hour shifts
in the call centre from Hell.  As if
anyone would want to fake that.  Nothing lifts

your feeling of distrust.  Nothing moves the dial
beyond the line marked "dubious" and note
there's no guarantees for you, no test
for if the bank is wholly staffed by crooks.
I mean you look on the internet
and everybody hates them, but then...

everybody hates all the banks
so say "No thanks." to the crowd-sourced
alternative to actually knowing.
Are the shares you bought going down
and is that really an opportunity
to buy more at a knocked-down price?
This vitamin supplement tastes nicer than the last,

of course
they are expensive, and that job on the flyer
would pay more, if you got it
if it lasted,
if they didn't prove worse bastards
than your current lot.  What to do

that's for the best?  You don't know about the rest
of bulk humanity, but to you it always seems
that the more critical the decision,
the more the less information you have.
Buy some shoes?  Sure!  Check fifty detailed reviews...
Buy a house?  There's just this one report
from a guy you'll never meet...
Find a mate?  Beats me pal, probably have to wing it.

Take off, and nuke the site from orbit,
it's the only way to be sure.

The Arc of Modern Political Thought

The Arc of Modern Political Thought



I – Do not confuse me with a fellow traveller...

...do not make that mistake
I won't be manning any barricade
or spray-painting your slogans
on unattended walls. I am not breathless

for the state to fall. Evolution
trumps revolution, ninety-nine
point nine percent of the time
and for the other fractional percent: well...

we're so screwed anyway. Rebellion serves
only rebels, who—great though they are
at stealing jeeps, and wiring parcels
to explode—are not so hot in power

distribution, at bringing people light;
or heady freedom for the sewage
to flow in drains... no, theirs are not the brains
for that, for careful use of power

and fuse—how can they be? They need believe
such silly things along their way
such as all men are equal,
only our stance is doctrinally robust,

or even...
that they must prefer the electrodes
inserted here and here
to any tea-and-biscuit chat today.


II – Media rhymes with "eediot"

You do not understand the world
and let me make it clear
that this is you, you with the "Press" card in your hat,
who understands so very well

the breaking of a story like
a wave of noxious fluid
through everybody's living room,
it's you who just doesn't get it.

The world is not the news,
the dead are dead without your stare,
the bereaved still sad; and when
El Presidente bravely takes the town

from behind and rebels are all rounded up
I will admit you stop atrocities
for just so long as you look that way
and don't run off to the human interest piece

about the dog that saved the boy.
And I'm sure you say: we give the people
exactly what they want, to which I say
oh yes, you spin a world for those whose minds

don't let them find their own, and every word
implies what you narrate is what matters,
and what you don't ain't real. You'll claim
you don't conceal but every day

your untidy desk selects what's best for "news",
for folk to know: it's in the public interest,
you insist, while typing quote marks around
what the TV said the radio said about the other paper's views.


III – A plague on both your second houses

The problem is belief. Belief is stupid.
Belief it is that makes you make mistakes
and then it takes your errors,
brands them heroic victories

and makes you make them all over again.
If there is one thing that I know,
it's the stupidity of me.
I know, my brain is wired with

its tiny neural liars and systems
which conspire to enact a holy fool.
Cognitive bias, it does what it says
right there upon the tin, and which

you did not read,
because the idea was uncomfortable
but all you with the one coloured shirts
are committed to your ideals, which makes shits

of them there in the other coloured shirts
and all of you line up to grasp
opposite ends of one long rope
and grunt and pull and hope

to shift it just one inch
in your preferred direction
and you monopolise attention
for you, and your rope, and how

the other bloke is pulling the wrong way
while all around the horizon—boundless
and magnificent and essentially free—
stretches toward infinity,

but we're not allowed to look,
or speak, on that.

---

---

This was sitting on a back burner for a long time, not going anywhere.  Every now and then I would take it out and work on it a bit, but it didn't arrive anywhere and I had to put it away again.

Then I saw a call for contributions to The Commons by Waterhare Press and this was obviously exactly what they were looking for, so I picked up the poem, dusted it off and was delighted when it was accepted.

Poems like this are difficult.  This, if anything, is what I am about: that, in bulk, we look at the world in damaging, stupid and shortsighted ways—but it can tread harshly on other people's beliefs.

However the degree of stomping need not be as violent as might first appear.  Belief, I say in this poem, is stupid and I really think that, but this doesn't mean the sorts of thoughts which feature in beliefs aren't just as laudable viewed with cold hard reason.  Should we be progressive?  Obviously!  Should we be kind?  Definitely!  Should we eat the rich?  Let me get back to you on that one...

The problem is not what we believe.  The problem is belief itself.  The world is deeper, gnarlier, and more complex than we comprehend.  Layering beliefs on top helps us get by in the short term, but it doesn't help us confront the difficult questions, and it doesn't help when we encounter people who believe differently.  Belief allows no position there except that they are wrong; and when they won't change their beliefs, it usually decides they are evil.

Belief is bad.  Believe nothing, neither political nor religious.

You'll be  better person for it.