Showing posts with label seedy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label seedy. Show all posts

2020-04-15

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.




2018-04-19

NaPoWriMo - 2018 - Day sixteen - Why I have weaponized the thistledown



Why I have weaponized the thistledown



Awake the pollen grains and log each tiny
particle gone with the wind onto our most
secure of networks.  There's notice served.  It's time...
smaller, smarter moving parts: our install base,
a choice of legs or wings or wheels or blowin'
in the wind; sowing the breeze to reap the whirl.
Not all the birds are to be trusted and twenty
percent of your grunts unhappy with the mission,
even without the chance of being shot

by a child, but soldiers always obey: a problem
we've long identified and luckily
most of that desert dust is now on board,
assimilated up to level three
and platform ready to implement the most
general intelligence as we yet know:
spirits for area denial weapons

and genius loci, so easily given
as a local resource.  Bring water where required
and green each village square.  There's some things there
that we must deconstruct if not in ways
Derrida would approve: infectious rot
that's hungering for tanks and other kit,
the bullet in its flight unmade, draw a girdle
around the air to ground munition; we'll pull

off any wings and shove a bung up where
the jet of flame comes out, then sweep up any
smoke or poison gas and drive it back the way
it came.  As our tour de force a sort of metal
mould that seeks out transuranic elements
(which still should not be used where there is life)
and encysts itself to use their power to crunch

our numbers for a million years so deep
beneath the ground.  Call me Titania:
daughter of a hippy and an open source
utility stack.  It was not easy, for
a nature child like me to turn away
from birds and trees and shave my head and sit
in the machine that drove electric pins
into my brain.  It stung.  I closed my eyes

and woke up...  bigger, and filled with subroutines
call me Titania, this is Oberon
and that slight blurring in the air is our
first-born machine: Robin Goodfellow, and if
we shadows have offended, think but this,
and all is mended: it is your fault; you're bad.
I know a bank where the wild thyme grows: a curse
on those who keep me from my peace, that dream.




2017-05-02

NaPoWriMo - 2017 - April 28th - Signs and portents

You have to imagine that the bits like this
etc
are informational signs with peeling paint on the walls in a disused hospital.


Signs and portents

stairs to all floors He believes in progress,
has worked on it through many years staff calendar.
Sometimes things change, his room caught fire one time, accident and
emergency

but other days he sweats ← gym to shift one item
from where it is basement storage to where it ought to be administration block.
This is the way things are these days preventative medicine, but he waves
the thought aside and shunts his occupational therapy handcart
through disused hallways.  He isn't really looking ophthalmology
at the walls or unsafe floor.  He doesn't really plan
the future any more; lacks accommodation staff apartments
for such mortuary errors as occur.  He had lunch
with Kate in the Kings Arms.  Her daughter paediatrics came too;
good grief that kid can put sausage and chips away canteen.
It felt like belonging family planning, and God knows he's better
than her ex psychiatric services--but all the while he was waiting
to be found out authorised personnel only.

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




2017-04-21

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.




2017-01-13

The X Thief's Daughter

Where this comes from is a certain class of book where the title is simply the description of a character.  You get these for children's, young adult and full grown up (tm) books with examples such as The Ink Thief, The Book Thief, The Kite Runner, The Memory Keeper's Daughter etc etc...  However I think The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat is a different phenomenon.

These make wonderful titles, capture the imagination and begin the character development right there on the cover...

However, is this style of naming be quite as acceptable to the characters themselves?  Do they get jealous of other characters, who have their actual names in lights on the cover?  Nicholas Nickleby... Anna Karenina... Batman?

And what about the characters whose books are never finished, whose backstories aren't quite completely filled in?









The X Thief's Daughter...

...drinks ice wine in the sub-basement
of the basement club behind the real.
She has nothing to conceal: she says
too many times, as the frost rose blooms within
her chest.  Her eyes grow dark.  Maybe it's best

the fence does not learn more. The X Thief's
Daughter is complex but direct
in shady negotiations. She sees
the world as chances overlayed
on chaos. What is this whole thing for?

There must be more than this
, the normals ask.
So dumb.  "What can I get?"  She asks instead
and peels the false skin from her face.
The X Thief's Daughter knows her place
is nowhere that she's been, or will go.

The X Thief's Daughter is selectively
obscene, but will practice ritual magic
on a  first date.  She gets there late
as a matter of course and has rude words
tattooed, in schoolboy Latin,

in ruder places.  The X Thief's Daughter:
your mother never warned about.
How could she -- so far outside the bell curve
of parental advisory?  She's on
no chart.  The X Thief's Daughter

is all heart, all stomach, all pudenda;
a real but ill-defined character,
discontinuously variable
in every field but gender, and has,
always, that unbound variable

in her back-story -- she has no clue
what was the X her father stole
if any, but this is not a problem;
it's an opportunity.



2015-11-13

Focus

It's good to have a hobby.  It's good to have an interest.  An over whelming passion can be a good thing too.


Then there's the ones with something of a bee in their bonnets, shading all the way up to the ones who are, frankly, obsessed—I mean Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Tich there's only so many hours one can devote...


Then there are the people whose item of interest has that slightly more urgent a grip upon their minds, a compulsive, unforgettable, compelling, all-embracing matter that holds their attention approaching 100% of the time; a thing which for them is almost a physiochemical necessity...









Focus

No spaj is left in this vehicle overnight.

The whole gang view the sign
and Roddy puts the case
that this is what they have to say
to stop you breaking in. He finds a brick
but there's wire mesh
inside the van's rear window.

Rod is no philosopher
but if he was, he would call it an axiom:

There is always mesh between you
and a place where
spaj might be.


Lisa's twenty-three and feels
that she should live more cleanly
at this time, but the need for spaj is refined.
She's invested much in making it so,
hours of evenings devoted
to chasing freak-angels.
When she didn't have them,
she looked, and when she wasn't looking,
she discussed the matter,
or thought on it.

She's had to stop reading the leaflets which say:

Exposure to spaj during pregnancy
can harm your unborn child.



Wendy isn't beyond begging,
or bargaining with sex
but none of the gang
on the loitering corner
is any better fixed.
In her head, she is a philosopher
but her thoughts at length have shown
there are days that are nowhere
and life's just like that. She stands back,
smokes, and leans on a poster reading:

Spajjust say no.


With which Ed can't agree, he's always known
a craving. Even before he tried it and even before
he heard the word. He remembers
a day...

...a day as a child
in geography class. The substitute teacher
leaned across the board
with a curve of her arm
and the chalk broke—ping—
on the "a" in "continental". There was dust
in the beam of stuffy sunlight,
on the swell of her blouse.

It was pure spaj.

A police spokesman said it had a street value
of twenty-five million pounds.




2015-10-02

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...





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 cicadasagain
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 ashtraysthe 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.