An iconography of rollers left in fields

image credit: cc-by-sa/2.0 - © Rose and
Trev Clough - geograph.org.uk/p/5159038

Rosemary got invited NessFest, a book festival in Inverness.  Good grief, that's a lot of railway...

And when you're stuck for hours in a train, even in such exquisite company, you start to notice recurring themes outside the windows.

There's a lot of abandoned agricultural machinery lying in fields here and there across the country, and what is that, if not a metaphor for life?  Or even a whole scheme of related metaphors...

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An iconography of rollers abandoned in fields


Garden rollers in agricultural settings

Observe the small child whose duffle coat
wanders in the cathedral,
runs a bit, shouts at echoes,
peers at the stained glass window light
spilled on the floor. See how he sits down now
and falls asleep.

As if only just left

Dust sheets, ladder, brushes, cloths...
Where is that old screwdriver? Here. I'll lever
at the paint tin lid. Again, a little further round--
Oh damn! I need a stirring stick...
I'll be right back.


Some rust

Surface discolouration is a given:
we all show signs of wear. "Patina"
to put spin on it, or "you look shit!"
--when your bestie doesn't want to say it nice
as you stand beneath a poster
bigger than your house
filled with a newer model: preternaturally perfect,
sublimely open smile.


Wood rotting, metal intact

The softer parts break down, at first,
while harder parts prevail: the blistered finger,
the hangdog nail, but sooner or later
the long-term maintenance creeps up
that ligament in your left shoulder,
the tibia chipped inside one shin...
The wear and tear of years
accumulates: more a sadness
than a fear: no longer walking all the way,
the stairs a bigger thing; until one day
upon some ordinary bus,
a young lady offers you her seat.


Scattered iron fragments on the ground

To all things an end: only archaeologists believe
they can retrieve a past and piece
it back together. You, meanwhile, one recollection at a time,
take the finest brush to days
in infant school: the graze upon your knee
the way that one girl ran away
however carefully you offered her the mud.
Did anything happen in the years after that?
It isn't easy to be sure.


In the ditch

We all have low points
entropy will see to that.
The same sky is still above you...
the mud's quite soft:
why not lay back?


In the middle of the field

Look at me! Look at me! Look at me NOW!
No, of course I don't have anything useful,
constructive,
or even actionable to relate. But I'm so great...
See, I even have the expensive shoes.
Just keep looking at me!!


In the middle of the field with an unmown area around it

Am I that man? Am I the one that people drive
their metaphorical tractors right round? Am I
the guy? Is everybody quietly told:
not to mention the steam railways, or question
me listening to that single 80s band
for seven hours a day;
he's a friendly enough man...
it's just his little ways,
work around him.


With a small tree growing through

Life is as we know it, not
as we plan it: an adaptation situation.
We wouldn't plan a largish silver birch
inserted just where it hurts
but since that's where we find ourselves,
we make the best
of never moving again: a great view to the West
every evening's sunset;
the birds that roost at twilight,
in autumn eating the birch seed
that hasn't run off through the wind.

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Offline processing


This poem existed as only the opening line for a long time...  I knew how I wanted it to feel, but not what I wanted it to be about.

It was only when I realised I needed a reason for her working all night on her own that it really came together.

Q.  Why isn't she off living her life?
A.  Because she hasn't got a life!

Or rather that is the cliché...  what her less technologically super-powered coworkers might think of her.

We know better, of course...

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Gemma cracks a subroutine, her coffee cool.
Beyond night-mirrored windows she's aware
strip lighting makes a tableau out of her:
"Geek girl working late"
as the small white card would say
in the museum of her life
if she had one.

How Gemma's fingers blur with cramping speed
the body cannot serve the mind
it's need for harder, better, faster, stronger...
data flows, information not only wanting to be free
but it aching for it
and now another bug is falling to the power

that is Gemma. She does not look up at the clock
because hours are not for those
who live the millisecond slice.
Life is still too short
the icing on the cake is still a lie.

Gemma cracks a subroutine
electric death music in her ears
and she would volunteer
for upgrade in a second
for what is flesh, except strangely implemented:
a mesh of biochemic feedback loops
which she could live without,
still... time for a break.

Gemma takes a moment, smokes a quick one
on the roof and on this summer's night
leans back upon the coping stones
the city's haze and wasted light
do not let many stars burn through;
she knows they're there

not quite within her reach.

The breeze stirs Gemma's hair
and she imagines for a second
a human hand, a voice that asks:
"Are you really going to work all night?"

Well of course she is;
as long as there are bugs in the database,
she will dance the dance of general intelligence
applied to Turing complete.
As long as somewhere, impossibly far ahead,
the Omega Point is waving
as long as there is coffee in the machine,

Gemma will reach for another subroutine.

Fugit

A poem from 2011.  I'd almost forgotten this one, which is ironic when you consider the subject matter.

This was inspired by an actual walk down to the beach at Ravenscar from Boggle Hole, both excellent places to stroll down to and good for hunting fossils — another rich metaphor about the nature of time, but one I didn't make use of here.

Artistic license alert: on the actual day there were no horses...  but there could have been.

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Fugit

Above the beach are horses, or so we must believe,
having seen them lounge, tails swinging,
beneath the trees we strolled beneath
—the shade now only another belief—
when we kicked down through the evaporating dew
in the imaginary morning.

There is of course no time remaining
the moment any moment's done.
Footprints on the sand lie,
another preceding one,
like a man saying "and before that I..."
all the way back to his birth
over by the corner of the beach hut.

The sun westerns.
The tide erodes the beach.
We each stand at the end
of a line of our own feet,

pointing ahead to empty sand, a canvas,
page, or silence waiting dormant;
the prints we are to make implied.
We know we will walk.
We even choose where the next few fall,
but beyond that know nothing at all
of what rock pools we'll peer into,
which breaking waves we'll salt-spray through;
except that the day in time will end
and we will wend back past the horses
—briefly real again—
with the seashore fading behind us.

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Wave and seagull sounds in background are attributed to "justkiddink" and "eelke", and available from: https://www.freesound.org/

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 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.

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 play.  The 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.

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.

Everything

A poem about the limitations of a Theory of Everything, two people having an outdoor restaurant meal on a warm summer's night, and the difficulty of relationships.

This was quite a long time in the making.  It stemmed from an observation about a T.S.Elliot poem: about how intimate a particular moment was in the flow of a larger and more philosophical section.

However it has evolved a lot and been through many revisions.  There was an early version that I discussed with people in 2009, and I'm not sure how long I'd been working before then.  After that it languished for a long while, until I found myself alone in a nice Italian restaurant in Cambridge in November last year with just my phone and some sort of really hearty tomato and bean soup for company.

So I did an edit... and then it languished again.

Until a few weeks ago I did one of my periodic sweeps for poems that I really ought to finish, and this one came first on the list.  So I forced myself to get the remaining awkward bits together, and I work shopped it bit on Poet's Graves and although I'm still not 100% that this really is final I think it is good enough to be going one with.

 (Oh, yes, and I read one word wrong in the recording, but I'm not doing the whole thing again just for that...)

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Everything


So maybe there is one: some master equation;
some sequence of symbols a lover might write
on a napkin, angled to catch at street lighting,
one elbow leant on an outdoor table, ignoring
the promise of rain in the cool summer air --

a young woman passes, all little black dress
-- some sort of equation might grab the whole mess:
the warping, the weaving of mass for an atom;
the elegant building of colour for light
to shade any evening that I might hurry through.


We were eating dessert when the urge overcame her
to scrawl mathematics, the night ticked on;
I drank my whisky, her Merlot grew warm.
Until, sudden-smiling, she holds out the paper:
a simple equation with nothing crossed out.

She's laid it out like a mantrap for ultimate truths,

as if to say: Darling! I mastered it all

even down to the various youths who call 
you only on your other phone.  Watch her face;
we should stay here: a moment not questioned or answered.

She might lick her lips; I might feel ice
that mutters in the glass, but our moment breaks;
she crushes the napkin; takes a drink, a breath, and says:
There are in the maths no stains for the tablecloth,
no moth by the light bulb, no artificial flower...

She shrugs, expansively, moderate drunkly;
her black bob asway, flesh rounds beneath fabric.
...and can ever there be terms at all
for the small dark men with their small sharp knives
who open the oysters in the back.  Lightning!

She drops crumpled paper.  We flee,
a little too damply, play-fighting and hugging,
beneath such a midnight enfolded in cloud
but not annotated on scales we can reach
from her bedroom, where we make a better maths

for just a little while.  Elsewhere
rain continues:
a lost napkin straightens,
symbols blur and merge
and the world moves on.

Dark skies

A poem inspired by a prompt from a Facebook poetry group.

This is a pantoum.  I like pantoums, but they are a very particular thing and I can understand if not everybody gets them.  They repeat a lot, rather like the villanelle, which is another form I'm fond of... I mean of which I'm fond.

In the case of a pantoum the repetition generates an intense feelings of stasis, claustrophobia, and/or nostalgia.  So they are ideally suited for emotive, introspective or contemplative subjects.

The Western pantoum is a hijacking of a Malay verse form, but I do not speak Malayan, so  I really cannot comment on whether we do them justice...

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Dark skies


The gaps between the stars will draw her eyes.
She's lying on the back lawn in the dark.
The voids are better than more clouded skies.
She isn't waiting for the dog to bark.

She's lying on the back lawn in the dark
without the thought that anyone will come.
She isn't waiting for the dog to bark.
Such expectations leave her feeling dumb.

Without the thought that anyone will come,
she's none-the-less put on her special top.
Expecting too much leaves her feeling dumb
but clothing is an easy thing to swap.

She's none-the-less put on her special top.
Beneath her shoulders dew begins to soak.
Her clothing is an easy thing so swap
there's always extra cleaning with a bloke.

Beneath her shoulders dew begins to soak,
this sort of thing is starting to get old.
There's always extra effort for a bloke
increasingly it leaves her feeling cold.

This sort of thing is starting to get old.
The dark is better than a clouded sky.
Increasingly they leave her feeling cold.
The voids between the stars pull at her eye.

Acquaintance

Uriah Heap who, had he known
Mr Jethencorp, would not have presumed
upon the acquaintance.

Charles Dickens knew a thing or two!

And the principle things he knew about were:

1. Characters
2. Serialising a story into handy sized parts
3. Ending parts on a cliffhanger
   (A technique later used to great effect in Flash Gordon...)

None of which means I'm not prepared to mock a little...



(The sound quality here maybe isn't quite up to the usual standard.  Please remember that a shoestring would actually represent a 300% increase in my recording budget...)

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Acquaintance

My dear Mr Jethencorp, may I express delight?
How wonderful it is, that you are here tonight
and I wonder, friend, if I could prevail
upon the strength of long acquaintance
for a pint of ale?

...

Say no more, Mr Jethencorp, I would not desire
to make you uncomfortable, glum or perspire
with any hint of awkwardness or strain.
If you cannot spare the money --
no need to explain.

...

Why yes, Mr Jethencorp, I understand your claim
that in truth "Jethencorp" is no part of your name
but our friendship, possessed of such perfection,
I had to construct some term of affection
for all I have known you just a little time.

...

As little as a minute? Yet I have such respect
I quite failed to notice my great neglect
in asking your name. So "Jethencorp"
I coined for you which somehow expressed
the complex emotions inside my chest—

in deference I leave the exact pronunciation to you.
And now, I regret, I must bid you adieu
and wander along to see what I can do
for the price of- but ah!
Who do I see at the end of the bar?

A man, he looks quite well-to-do...
Why? It's dear Mr Scratsenfrew,
allow me to introduce you...

Still life

This is one of my oldest poems that I still rate quite highly.  It's from 2008 when I think, if I recall correctly, I had been writing poetry for about four years.

Could I now rewrite this?   Possibly not.  I don't think minor tweaks would make much difference, but a complete rewrite would probably lose the mood, and the mood is everything for a piece like this.

This image has little to do with the poem, except of course it is a still life and it has explicit brokenness and the immanent possibility of decay—but that's life for you...

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Still life

And the bar-tender isn't even there
when you decide you need to drink
in the last-chance karaoke bar and grill.
He's never been there, you think
you know different, but all those years
an imposter served your obsessions
and beers; keeping watch on the borderlands
of your head. And if you wrote that wanted-ad
for a loving hit-man with boundary issues
then I can only suppose you placed it
in all the wrong magazines.

Maybe I can say the same thing
in a different way, but I just
began reading the student notes
so I may stumble over some detail,
and that bartender still isn't here
unless he's lurking in the gloom
behind the lurid chrome and plastic
beer signs that illuminate, unenlightening
to the freeze-dried bar flies.
They prop each other, unsteady,
in the face of your scorn. Perhaps...
we should walk out in the dusk
where other flies flicker. They are
not syncing with the cicadas—again—
and while each pulses its alien message,
the world has long since turned away.

The bar-tender still displays
a studied absence, although it's so late
that the matt-black metal and smeared chrome
jukebox has fallen into a fugue state of decay—
of one-hit wonderment. Only now do you conceive
of the barman as present but invisible,
a force that might be appeased; possibly
through subtle rearrangement of coasters, nuts
and steel ashtrays—the kind that scream
"unclean" even in perfect sterility.
But the paranoia grips you, and I,
carried along in the stream too deeply
reasoned, am forced to admit that, yes,
he might be watching us.

Always the woman with too much jewellery
and insufficient dress will, for a small fee,
lower your expectations to ground level.
And always she declines to take the mike,
but legend has it that when she does sing,
the world will have been half an hour gone.
And the depravity of the night, in parts
shaded by your varicoloured soul,
draws onwards at length to spew us; ungentle
as a doorman tossing rowdy drunks into the back alley
of morning. Except you never did get that drink,
and the bar-tender isn't even there.