2017-05-11

The Guide to Nine Utopias - introduction

The Guide to Nine Utopias - introduction


I have decided to bite the bullet and put up my second most ambitious ever poem...

This is a sequence of ten sonnets entitled The guide to nine utopias.  Ten sonnets is far too many to dump on you all in one monstrous post, so I am going to serialise them: a sonnets every three days of so, right up to the eve of the UK general election.  After that it will be only too obvious what sort of Utopia we've ended up with...

The idea for this sprang into existence, fully formed, while I was camping with my 60 or 70 of my relatives in 2011.  My relatives have nothing to do with this poem as they are far more utopian than the topics covered here.

This is going to be, of course, dystopian as you may be able to tell from my little logo at the top right.  Do not think I'm a pessimist or anti-progress person, however.  I am quite the reverse, fully believing in progress and technology and equality and liberation and all that goes with those things.  My message is more subtle and I'm going to build on a point I come back to over and over:


Many people are naive and overconfident.


For example...  it is very easy to take the exact Lego bricks needed for a utopia, and build a world-class dystopia from them.  The Universe is a complex and subtle place, and generally speaking our leaders are simple and unsubtle.  This wouldn't matter if they knew they needed smarter people to advise them, but usually they don't.  Our leaders really should be followed by a little man who, like for a Roman general, has the job of continually whispering "Remember the Dunning-Kruger effect" in their ears.

However we don't have that, so yes: our leaders really are idiots and no: it isn't an illusion caused by us not seeing all the difficulties they face.  I mean sure, that illusion exists, but additionally they are idiots.  The best thing you can do as a member of the electorate is work steadily and ingeniously to ram the facts of their incompetence into their faces as often and as thoroughly as possible...

Be that as it may, we had some poetry going on here earlier, or rather we're going to in a day or two...  Watch this space.  As I am having to future-schedule the episodes, I may not be sharing them as widely as I usually do.  So if you want in I recommend liking my @IanBadcoePoetry Facebook page where every one of them will be posted automatically, via the power of the internet.

2017-05-07

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.










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.






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

2017-05-04

NePoWriMo - 2017 - April 30th - You there!

This was inspired by the wonderfully abrupt way that a dodgy Facebook geezer approached a female acquaintance some years back...

I think he probably had romantic intentions.  So yes, "You there!" was the perfect opening line.



You there!

You! And thus I name you...
You are a "you" distinct from any "me"
you may encounter.  They say you stand apart
in a realm of your own devising
where he tells me that I would fear to tread.
She watches you.  Eyes haunt you.  I want you.
You are not beyond me.  You there!

You!  And thus I summon you.  Approach
and be known, friend.  Carnally or Biblically
I covet your neighbourly ass, come warm my guest chair
drink thin soup and wait for dark.  You there!

For "you" are "there".  I place you.  I locate
your self in the world of selves.  Unique and one,
individually rapt and indivisible,
inseparable from identity, your own sense of "yourself."  You there!

You!  I fathom your nature for you are there
by definition.  You're present but tiny
a seed at the heart of everything.  Embedded,
grit in oyster or gene in cell,
or minute caterpillar, asleep in the rose of the World.

You there, you!  I am talking to you.