NaPoWriMo - 2018 - Day two - A voice in the crowd

A voice in the crowd



I - I

That's a number and a pronoun,
in case you are confused and if it puzzles you
imagine how it has to be for me:
the me that sits here writing.

I know who I am: I'm me;
and you know who I am:  I'm the person you're reading;
and neither of us knows a thing.


II - Narrator

I know who I am, and am the speaker
and everything I say is speech and you might ask:
Why aren't you quoted?  Why aren't you italic?
But that would never do

I'm not a speaker in the scene
but am ever removed, distanced
seeing everything, uninvolved.


III - Inner voice

I do get italics, when I say:
I get italics,
because I am when the narrator speaks,
the author speaks, or when

the author reaching into your head,
gentle reader, puts words right there
instead of on the page.


IV - Author

I am the voice behind the voices
everything you hear is me
and everything you read
is how you hear it's me.

I still am not reality, you understand,
I'm your interpretation
of my projection, of what I want you to think...


V - Author (on podium)

...and here I am again, saying:
when I wrote this poem I wanted to show...
and there you are in the audience, lapping it up
because you've paid

(at least in time if not hard cash)
to hear me say this and you wish,
you really wish, I'd just get on with the poem.


VI - Character

Ignore me,
I'm just someone
that one of him
made up.


VII - Poet

So I'm the sum
of all of the the above
or if you like I dissect into
the crowd of them

and yet, here I am again,
typing, with no mind on any of this,
just typing words.

NaPoWriMo - 2018 - Day one - Evil medieval rabbits

Evil medieval rabbits


What cunicular Hell? You may well ask,
lurks in the margins of otherwise coherent
medieval documents and it's not apparent,
to twenty-first century eyes, quite why

the bunny-eared crew should freak out so
completely. When leporines attack!
Do peasants stumble back: their former
food and fur supply rotating on the spot

and reaching out for weapons. The world turned upside down
is pretty much the message here these 'drolleries’
or ‘grotesques' as codicology explains
are symbols for our base biology.

Characters of cowardice and innocence; helpless,
and sexual. However, let's be clear
there can be nothing evil here
because rabbits don't do evil

(even when they eat their young). There is no evil
to preying on the leaves of grass
and even though medieval sex talk
has the wolves jumping on rabbits:

there was no fall there either. Animals
get on with it and don't reflect
on whether they are good or bad
or saved or damned. Those thoughts belong

in only the human version
of the story and even when the fox dines
there is no misbehaviour there.
That way of seeing's purely our perversion.



Reference material and some words taken from: Why Are There Violent Rabbits In The Margins Of Medieval Manuscripts?

NaPoWriMo - 2018 - Day minus one - To begin at the beginning

To begin at the beginning


There must have been a creator, or possibly not
we do not know.  The creation of universes
is not a thing we've seen.  No-one rehearses
that moment of becoming.  No-one has got
any cosmic remote control to wind
back to the start of time and watch again
and again.  We have no frame in which to frame
such ultimate questions.  The start of time

is far outside our scope...  and yet there's blokes
(of any gender) even as we speak
who peer into their telescopes or screens
and with imagination, maths and hope
they make that leap.  They read the antique light,
and say they see just how it must have been.