The Red Planet Blues

 

Not exactly about David Bowie.  Not exactly not about David Bowie either.

If we've learned anything, it is:

1. embrace the ambiguity
2. reach for the future
3. never stop reinventing yourself.

Iain Banks wrote in Excession of the Zetetic Elench a faction split from The Culture who believe in investigating the Universe by allowing themselves to be actively transformed by the beings and cultures they meet.  The Elencher ideal is that if a member of another advanced civilisation, say The Culture, were to meet a member of the Elench twice, they would have no way of knowing it was the same individual.

Does that sound at all familiar?

OK, enough waffle, on with the poem that isn't about David Bowie.  I must have others that aren't about him either, but this is the one I remembered just now.

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The Red Planet Blues

Ziggy played guitar,
     jammin' good with Weird and Gilly...

There are no spiders
on Mars, spinning
in bone-cold canyons
to trap unwary space cadets.
There are no great domed cities, shining
pale in the brave red sunset. There are no get
of Edgar Rice burrows;
no green, six-armed warriors
riding thoats or laying eggs
in odd moments
out there in the rusty desert. No Martians for the chronicler
to document their steady decline
after the Earthmen came.

Earthmen must come.
It is necessary.
Pick up the pickaxe.
Start digging a canal.

Panicking by increments

A sense of despair,
earlier today...

This is a sonnet, and this is a common type of poem for me, where the only inspiration is a certain mood/emotion that I attempt to capture.

Some people may find these particular sorts of moods bleak, but I don't.  I absolutely cannot explain why, but there is a way in which the abstract contemplation of bleakness is not, in itself, bleak.

It's something like: although bleakness is bleak, bleakness is also appropriate to certain situations and so when considering those situations the bleakness isn't crushingly miserable...  it's appropriate.  It's still sad, of course, but a cool, contemplative, melancholy sad that's relatively sweet.

I said I couldn't explain.  Try the poem instead.

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Panicking by increments

The clock unchimed; its moment never came.
Coffee, skinning in the mug, and rain breaking
on the window. Hands trace the tablecloth.
Neither with a task and both quite lost, moths
without a flame. No blame attaches, but shame
stains things. She says she's glad he came --
a third lie for the day. She feels his pain.
It should be more. She wants to score, to regain

the initiative, but then he's gone. She
touches her face, hand to cheek, both cold.
Is that allowed? She's older, and there's less skin
upon the bone now. One day there'll be no she,
the bones unaccompanied. If she were bold...
she's not. She dusts. Unwatched, the clock unwinds.

Bottom dead centre

A bauble, earlier today.

I've posted this before but it is, as far as I can work out, my only viable Christmas poem.

OK, like Down time this is also in part a solstice poem, but it references enough Christmas paraphernalia to be acceptable.

As you may have gathered, it isn't the religious aspects of the season that matter to me.  It's the overall celebration of family and friendship and broad-spectrum humanity in general.

So happy festival-of-choice to all you broad humans out there!

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Bottom dead centre


Intake

Ice-path uncles, sliding, come
to top-up stockings, sip sherry,
be knocked unconscious by the Queen.
The old year has been dripping
through the cracks in December,
now only one festival remains.


Compression

Fewer and smaller,
the uncles left for us to visit
dribbling in their rest-homes.
What troupe remains to get festive?
To turn up, unexpected? To decorate the tree
and give you socks?


Combustion

I give you socks
to wear outside your boots
wending from the crematorium
with the path caked in icing, decoration
a drain-pipe dribbled through its crack.
We spontaneously scatter Uncle Clive.


Exhaust

All the uncles scattered once,
when you aced and raced the new sled
of younger years. Now the pagan tree
is baubed with tears, as you tear the ribbon-paper.
Another pair of socks—useful. At our age
the ritual differs. The engine hesitates,
one year unsafely dead, and drawing-in
one drawn-out breath we wait
to long-live the new.

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Also, as a festive treat, I've fixed the Search Box, somewhere up and to the right.

This box has been broken since the day I created the blog, so a certain lack of function has become traditional, but I've broken the tradition of respecting traditions and fixed the works up with a bent paper-clip, a nail and some sunflower seeds (don't ask).

So, if you've long harboured a pressing desire to know how many time I say "atom" (once) or "time" (all the time) now's your big moment.

Happy Christmas one and all.

Ian