What makes us think that when the old year clicks its heels and gives way to the new some switch is thrown, some pattern changed, some gravitas is born? Time, once a mighty monarch, used its influence on man's affairs, then Einstein relegated it -- An adjunct now, half lost in space, it has no arbitrary switch to change the outcomes year on year -- nor would we profit if it had. The year is dying, let it die, * but mourn its passing, do not cheer. Bad though it was for me and mine, it still deserves its due respect. The bad was never down to it, of good it too was innocent. Ring in the new! Same as, same as... It's true, we'll hope with one accord the New Year will be magical -- and hope should be revered. So foster it with peals of bells and ring the New Year in! ............................................* Alfred Lord Tennyson. here
Popular Posts
-
The moon petals the sea. Rose petals the sea. Stone sea. Stone petals. Rose petals of stone. Stone rising before me. Sea moves. How moves...
-
It all depends, you see, how you go about it. And that I cannot tell you, for that will be dictated by you and by you knowing your friends...
-
extract from the poem Koi by John Burnside All afternoon we've wandered from the pool to alpine beds and roses ...
-
Hello everyone who follows David King (My Father). On behalf of the family this post is to let you know that Dad sadly passed away, peacefu...
-
Amazed at the level of interest shown in my recent images of hands and feet, though less so in the question of whether they or the face bes...
Monday, 31 December 2012
just don't blame the New Year when it all goes pear shaped ...
Sunday, 30 December 2012
Change and Decay
It might have been the same bench -- only, no, surely not the one we sat on years ago... if so, it's weathered well... the rest has not... the spot where Jake and I played rounders -- gone. I see us clearly, though: padlocking our bikes... is that the tree we chained them to whilst we -- heroes in our own conceit -- made for the beach? We trusted precious life and limb down concrete steps. Precarious and steep. Wind-blown. A hundred plus. And then as if that was too little, leaned far out across the rail into the void, to photograph the strata in the rocks. We hardly saw a soul the whole way down. I've called the halt to let my eyes adjust, to let the brain catch up, adjust to all that's alien here. Jake and I lost touch a lifetime -- going on -- ago. Married now -- a girl and boy who think this place is grand. But even so, I can't help wondering what Jake would make of it if he were here... the hurdy-gurdies, gaudy signs, the loud amusements everywhere. Where once the steps, two cable cars -- Come on mum, Dad, we're going down on them. Come on! Wow, great! Come ON!-- But Jake and I would never find the strata now. They're hid away behind the cafes, gift shops and fast foods. Blocked off by this NEW VIEW VIRT--UAL EXPERIENCE IN COLOUFUL 3-D. But as I look, I see the two of us, the beach games and the surfing that we did, the cycling and the climbing on the cliffs. And what I see before me fades to insignificance beside the changes that I feel -- the frailties of flesh, the changes taking place in me: things I did and can no longer do: the cataracts for two, the loss of puff and legs that will not go as far or fast as then. ........................................................Written for the prompt Change and Turns by Claudia in Poetics at dVerse Poets Pub
Saturday, 29 December 2012
Why the Revolution Failed - or the dubstep goat challenge
My tale is one not widely known of Citizen Smith* in battledress performing for the overthrow of known society -- Oh yes! Installed upon the glass roof of the public lavatories for men (strategically placed, please note on Tooting Broadway's thoroughfare) with traffic surging all around, and clad in khaki battledress, loudly there he did proclaim the day of revolution come! Oh, yes! Alas, he'd gone a step too far -- Oh, no, my friends, not the glass roof...! but requisitioning that new phenomenon, the dubstep goat, promoting it to brigadier and making it the mascot of his rag-tag, hip hop, bob-tail gang. The poets -- 2-step garage; UKG; and jungle, loaded up with bass -- and artists of all kinds, performance and the rest from Tooting's Steppe lands -- Broadway to the likes of us -- as as far as Figges Marsh** and beyond, gathered in a protest march calling to the dubstep goat by name and using certain words they knew he'd understand, asking him to dance. And dance he did (for long ago the goat had joined the hip hops and aligned himself with them) beginning with Rose Madder's Studio for dance -- where it was found that having four good legs he could pull off a solo pas de deux. The fashion spread and he was in such great demand, he added to his repertoire: duos for jig, for jog, a new drummed dubstep, hip hop, hot spot, pot belly roast and more... Oh yes!! Boast as he might -- and boast he did -- our mighty Citizen, the revolutionary Smith, was quite unable to control his so-called mascot. Every roll of military drum just made him dance more off the mark. He had become a filament, free of the bulb that once had hemmed him in. He burned, he sizzled, flared, contorted, turned; he flipped and flopped. he leaped and dropped, crouched on the floor, flew through the air and all who saw him thought him taught by D.J. Hatcha or Fred Astaire.*** Without the dubstep goat, Smith knew the Revolution doomed. Nor could he use a goat with such poor discipline. He called his council to their final meet -- his H.Q. located in the box room of his mother's neat and tidy semi- with views across the Lido. and there he deemed the enterprise defunct. ........................................... * here ** here *** D J Hatcha hereWritten for The dubstep goat challenge at Imaginary Garden with Real Toads.
Friday, 28 December 2012
WAR AND PEACEfulness
I am writing a novel in which nobody speaks. Also, in this novel nobody acts from any particular volition -- which is to say, that nobody does anything which might possibly be construed as having some significance for plot or for character development. But when I say that no-one speaks, I mean just that: no more and no less. Each and every one of my characters moves like a shadow, has no discernible motivation imparted by the novel. Here then is the first significance: no language no volition -- or is it vice versa? Here then is the first conundrum -- not that it matters or will take anybody very far. There is no music, so no backing to accompany their slow drift to... perdition? (Recall: the novel is not yet finished, will not at the present moment resolve all questions might be asked of it.) There are no tele- phones... but then again, why would they want them? Here then are chapters one through to ten of thirteen, shortened, but otherwise as I have penned them -- as I hope you will rwlise in 3D -- superimposed on top of one another. (You have realised already that with no volition, no essential motivation, even warfare will be peaceful, no?) Before a row of houses sits a rabbit on a burned out car peeling a Jaffa orange with a Bowie knife. Other rabbits sit on other vehicles (tanks, tractors, tricycles and the odd barrow) peeling a variety of other fruits - and vegetables (apples, grapes, bananas, pears and radishes) with other knives. As they peel they watch with interest the magpies and the crows pick over Christmas debris. In the sky above them wheel back and forth two flocks of starlings, but always flying in the contrary direction to each other. Therefore, from time to time they fly full tilt and through each other. There are casualties... yes, of course there are, as birds collide and fall, as dead as stones, down to the ground, disturbing the more peaceful rabbits as they peel. Disturbed, but not essentially concerned. Chapter thirteen cannot be written until the issues raised in ten and then elaborated in eleven are resolved. As of now Chapters ten and, to a lesser extent maybe, eleven, seem quite unpenable. Here, though, are those issues about which I have been compelled to write. .............................. Written in response to Anna Montgomery's prompt Postmodern (Experimental) at dVerse Poets - Meeting the bar: Critique and Craft
Saturday, 22 December 2012
Déjà vu?
It always sounds like déjà vu but did not feel that way. We were on holiday, had cycled far, my friend and I, on too much cider and in too much sun. The road seemed endless -- no habitation and no side roads to explore -- and we were looking for a place to rest and to escape the sun. I said: Just round this next bend there's a café! (I'd never been this far before - as Freddy knew.) Yeah, where? he grunted, disbelievingly. Just round this bend. Beside a pub -- well, was a pub, but is a church, these days. And so it proved. Exactly as I'd said -- except the church that was a pub was neither now, a sad, neglected hulk. I had not spoken out of memory, I could not even claim a feeling in my gut, I'd said it not quite knowing why -- but having said it, stuck to it and tried to fake a certain confidence, but confidence I had not felt. I was not even confident that it was me who'd spoken. Refreshed with swigs of water and stale buns (Good for soaking up the alcohol, so we were told), we took a peep next door. What I've called church had been a chapel and was now a shell with leaking roof and debris everywhere -- except a space that must have been the bar one time. Here was a tiny manger scene, a mini Bethlehem, no less, almost intact, and at the back, a banner peeling from the wall, A Peaceful Christmas to you all! .......................................................
MY WISH TO ALL -- A BLESSED CHRISTMASTIDE! ....................................................... This may be my last post of 2012, but then again nothing in this life is THAT certain...
Friday, 21 December 2012
Two Nights Ago
A thousand little Santa helpers spilling out across, along, and up and down our road, log-jamming it to much great ire from motorists reduced to hooting from the lay-by by our house -- ignored by Santa's little army shaking Gothic wooden boxes RATTLE, RATTLE, RATTLE, Sir! Your money or your life! All heralding the big, sleigh man himself -- a baubled, brightly fairy light lit, dressing gown-wrapped guy atop a sleigh that wobbled slightly as it took the tight right hander out of sight. I dashed out - well, I would, it's what you might expect - camera in hand, only to be thwarted by a Russian Sailor elfy thing, who said he knew me from way back. When we were through with chatting, his boss with the big sack of toys was no where to be seen.
Thursday, 20 December 2012
Rivets of Darkness
There was darkness and the darkness that was there was on the face of everything. And there was fire. Cold fire, blue steel fire, semblance of fire, semblance of light, fire without promise or threat. And there were figures, shadows of figures, figures figured against the light, a semblance of figures, but figuring hardly at all, in a huddle, huddled round flames lacking light. All this was there because there was God, tongue-tied and silent, a murmurless mummer of God, miming creation, re-making in mime, His one misbegotten, the one for which a God could never forgive himself, for which He Had from Day One made Himself the invisible part of His world. Only the hands, the hands of a weaver stand out in their intricate movements, balletic with grace, weavers in space, weavers of time and spinners of space. And the eyes with the hands... two halves of a coin spun as one, but in more than one space. And then there was grace, pure grace in a visible darkness hung like a blanket in space. Impenetrable darkness, impassable darkness, a God-produced darkness that covered the face of creation and darkened the grace. Eyeball to eyeball the light and the darkness, the misbegotten and the misbegotten's grace, stared back at each other like ghosts of the past. Creation had needed the rivets of darkness to hold it together. But always the hands were mesmeric! One chink of light as if curtains were parting and two dollies swam into view. Not dolls, but mummies perhaps; inhuman, but human in form, devoid of all detail, as featureless as landscape was at the world's beginning, the hands now a shadow of themselves, hands behind hands, hands manoeuvering puppets in space, arranging their limbs, the Final Cause causing one to sit on a tree stump, one to stand in a scene increasingly bland as the window sparkles with light, but is nothing but palm trees and sand.This is a redraft of a poem I posted about 3 years ago. You can read the original here
Wednesday, 19 December 2012
You'd better watch out!
At the top of the moor there she was, in the road, a frail little lady hunched in the rain, my kinda gal, half in my headlights, half in the mist, thumbing a lift -- though it wasn't quite light. I pulled up at once and walked round the car, smiled as I asked her where she was bound. She smiled back at me. Ah, that worries us all, but for now, off the moor would do very well! Declining my help, she clambered aboard. It was then that I saw her, but not as I'd thought: a Sister of Heaven, a strict order of nun -- a product well liked and respected round here. Our own local brand. She took ages to settle, arranging her skirts. I tried not to notice, but thought it quite odd. Then at last we were off, driving into the sun, low in the morning, us breasting the hills. We chatted a bit, but I felt myself gagged 'till a juggernaut's lights exposed a bit more of my passenger's face -- a strip by the ear that the razor had missed. I pulled up again, this time with a skid, and ordered him out, saw him stumble a bit as my foot went down hard. Later that night, when checking the car for the next day's run, the de-icer had rolled, protruding an inch from under the seat on the passenger side. Retrieving it, saw two pieces of wood, hard wood and polished, like handles of sorts -- which they were: a diminutive axe and a knife -- far too long.
Image as prompt supplied by Tess Kincaid at The Mag
Tuesday, 18 December 2012
The Rapper Bird and I
Take the rap, take the rap, the rapper bird tapped deep in my sleep, on my window pane, in a slurry of rain with a tweet or two in the heat of the rap, the grip of a riff which was swift to proclaim:- I-amb the great I-amb, I-amb! Tetrameters tremble, the great Grand Slam is here, my friend, on your window pane. If you catch a whiff of the rhythm's shift, I'll follow you into your waking world. The lyrics were blurred, but even in sleep I could see they were handsome, tell they were deep. Cocky the cock bird with taste for the tap -- like the flap of a sheet that smacks in the wind or matters of state when the government sinned. Now out in the world it has come to pass,that you can't confine the rap to a tap on my window pane, for even the glass of an omnibus sings, vibrates to the rhythm, slow or fast, to the hammering song of the bird's refrain. And everywhere in the world or there, in tittle or jot -- you can care or not -- the song of the rapper is still the same. The lines may be short or the lines may be long, but the rhythm the rapper bird taps is strong and its lyrics you'll think a definite treat -- though the rapper bird rates them no more than a tweet.
Monday, 17 December 2012
My Own Little Galaxy
I'm wondering... could I... possibly count myself as experienced now? First day of my second year... well, no. Perhaps not! One year, though... ought to count for something... no? New Class. The School's Misfits - That's the last head's terminology. New head with new ideas. The new ideas do not include misfit mentalities. The whistle goes, the pupils line up class by class. The head appears. Inspects the troops, walks down the lines. Arrives at mine. The leading boy is dressed for the wild west. Ten Gallon hat - well, relative to his pint-size. Six-shooters on his hips, check shirt and jeans. "And what is your name, pray?" (The head.) Roy Rogers, sir! "I haven't time to play these games. I'll ask you one more time - Your name?" Roy Rogers, sir! Roy is dispatched upstairs to wait outside the head's room for some resolution of this impasse. So Roy clatters off, his spurs banging together as he goes. The head moves on to the next boy. "Your name?" I'm David Lloyd George, sir! "Are you? Well, you also can have one more try... Your name, now -- if you please." I'm David Lloyd George, sir! What follows is a repetition of the first affair. As is the Peter Wilson farce that follows it. Victor Sylvester is almost the last straw. Shortly afterwards the head arrives to interview his motley crew. Takes down the register, consults it earnestly - and there they are, the way they said they were. Roy Rogers, clear enough. And David Lloyd George in a strong, plain hand. Further down, there's Peter Wilson. And at the very bottom even Victor Sylvester of dance band fame. The head's all smiles: I should have known, with Dave King for your teacher, he was bound to rustle up a few celebrities. ..................................................Dramatis Personae
Roy Rogers :born Leonard Franklin Slye (November 5, 1911 – July 6, 1998), was an American singer and cowboy actor.
David Lloyd George :Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and led a Wartime Coalition Government.
Peter Wilson :A towering figure in British sports writing.
Victor Sylvester :English dancer, author, musician and bandleader from the British dance band era.
Dave King :English comedian, actor, and vocalist of popular songs. Had his own T.V. show with top ratings.
Sunday, 16 December 2012
Carols and Flashing Blue Lights
Brian Miller at dVerse Poets Pub Poetics suggests we go for detail
Turn off the road, careful now, and through the narrow opening, brick piers on either side. Sharp left, avoid the (totally pointless) bollards left and right. The curving drive has opened up before me - quite invisible till now. I curse -- I always curse -- its traffic calming bumps. Pretentiousness to call them that. What traffic are they calming, eh? Unnecessary. Totally distracting -- and I hate to be distracted here. There's always some- thing taking place, something to see, to muse upon, an idea to take back with me... this morning now, a small giraffe lopes leisurely across the lawn. It's followed by a hippo with a barrow full of holly. Kerrrrrumph! Kerrrrrrrrrumph! Two for the price of one - the bumps again. Distracted, see? Aha! A parking space. I reverse in, then walk back to the entrance. The door creaks open then slams shut. Navigate the cardboard Bethlehem and papier-mâché meercat costumes -- complete with mistletoe -- that fill the vestibule, past the empty desk... and why no Joan this morning? Turn the corner by the stairs - and there he is. Door wide open as it ever was. Tom working on this morning's Carol Service. A small red headed girl arrives. Could he please check her poem for the service? Miss isn't sure... he reads it through and hands it back. It's absolutely fine. it's very Miltonesque! She skips away. She stops. Looks back. It's very what, sir? It's very Miltonesque! Ah, thanks! Tom's P.A. is sorry to intrude, but did he mean the double oven for Domestic Science? No, didn't. He wants the one they talked about. She'll sort it out. The order number's wrong. He gathers up his papers, checks his visual aids... when through the window behind him flashes a blue light. Very bright. Very intense. Second by second it sweeps round, bathes the room in its uncanny hue before returning it to normal. It reminds me of a lighthouse beam - if I ignore the colour. Tom ignores it. Carries on regardless. Curses softly -- Not the boys in blue again? No, I say: a lorry. Lorry? but before either of us speaks again: Begging your pardon, sir, Headmaster... The man at the door is doffing his cap. Tom still does not look up. Motorway Services Repair and Mend Operative. In the area... Half a load of asphalt over... Couldn't fail to see the parlous state of your driveway. Can't think what a state come a hard winter! He quotes a perfectly ridiculous figure. Tom refuses. They haggle for a bit. Okay! (Tom as he flies off to the Carol Service.) I spend a brlliant day with Tom, his staff and kids. When we regain his study so does the Motorway Repair Man -- with a bill, that judging by Tom's violent expression, might fund the next moon shot. You quoted £97! Man doffs his cap. Correct, Headmaster. £97 per cubic yard -- plus labour, naturally! They argue, but eventually, Tom coughs up - and when the man has gone, says confidentially: of course, I thought him genuine -- with his blue light and all! But it's a poor- ish sort of cock-up that brings no benefit. The traffic calming bumps have disappeared. Thank you, thank you God, for sending us thick asphalt! Merry Christmas and a wonderful New Year!
Saturday, 15 December 2012
Happy Christmas, Ethel!
Ethel was my friend and I was proud to know him. His mother called him Jud, the name she'd given at his Christening, but no one else could call him that. The last to try still carried a black eye. No, Ethel was his chosen name -- or rather, Ethelred, although the red had quickly fallen out of use. Why Ethel/Ethelred? Why that? His second name was Mudd! He was a proud man and his chest would swell whenever -- and they sometimes did -- his friends would rattle off his full address: Ethel Mudd Furnace Man, The Gasworks Love Lane Tadnam -- where, as it happened, I'd been sent to see what I could paint. That's how we met. He watched me for a bit, then asked if I would draw him at his fire. Of course, I said I would -- and he went wild, as if his team had won the cup. He asked: And with that charcoal you were using, eh? "Certainly," I said. I'm off to wash me face! "You're not, you know! Just don't you dare!" and then explained, as best I could the soot was part of him and what he did. Gave character. He didn't understand, but did agree -- and liked the Portrait when I'd finished it. And in your paintin' Guvnor, show me at my fire? "Well no.... I drew you yesterday..." showed him again the drawing that would go into the work. "You're doing up your bootlace... you recall?" Oh, he recalled alright, but floundered when he tried to understand... Why would I rather have him doing that than stoking up his fire? I pointed on the drawing to the way his muscles tensed and shaped the back and legs, the lines of stress that ran down through his form, how figures in the background echoed this -- as did the open furnace door, its shadow and the flames.... And I can do all that, he gasped by tying up my boot! -- I must be quite a special man, at that! "Ethel," I said, "You are, you surely are!" We sent each other Christmas cards for years.
Friday, 14 December 2012
Ode to a (Basic) Mobile Phone
Dear fossil from a bygone age, not bought when you were all the rage, but recently in the pretense that we embrace the cutting edge... Alas, like me, you're not the part, but have some aspects close at heart. "Mobile Phone," they christened you... Misnomer of the century, since no one phones with such as you but spans the world in other ways. Your nearest kin are artists now, snap-shooters and photographers... But that's not you, my dated pal, you are what you were meant to be: a 'phone and a few angles more. (The screen is just for user's ease.) A simple soul, but keen to please. No Mona Lisas spew from you. But on the other hand, you stay aloof from all the intrigues, every spoof the network yobs can throw at us. My neighbour's breasts are safe with you: I cannot sext her with my lot,requesting her full frontal, naked body shot! .................................................
Written for Victoria C Slotto's Meeting the Bar prompt to write a Second Person narrative. You will find it here
.................................................
Sexting: a current craze for sending full frontals or close-ups of genitals to someone of the opposite gender and requesting theirs. (With variations, of course!)
Thursday, 13 December 2012
THE C WORD
Consider if you will the way an image or a word can hold a strong emotive charge (and what the physicists call spin). As such, it's not susceptible to reason, ducks beneath the flailing arms of logic. A word is just an abstract sign? That's all? Believe that at your peril, it's a Trojan Horse. For good or ill, your landscape's under threat. Take cancer for example, how it is two hundred different illnesses, two hundred different entities. One word to vouch for all. Think how they use this umbrella word we've given them to creep up incognito in disguise -- a kind of burlesque to confuse us in the night. Some ancient narratives folk tales and myth are interwoven here. These are the bases of its reputation, the raw material of its powerful charge. And so we ask: how best to counteract its ill effects, the wills- o'- the-wisp that reason cannot touch? I've heard of patients giving sexy names to what at first they found unspeakable, Sugar Daddy Baby being one. She found him more acceptable that way. Familiar handle, trivial terms killing it with friendliness. I knew a man who had Tallulah Bankhead in his groin. How could a man feel bad about a thing like that? Just recently, I've been impressed -- I should say blown away -- by images of cancers on the walls where patients wait. Stunning, complex forms, more succulent than fruits, like fractals drawn in five dimensions. Serious, seductive, natural works of art -- the colouring a function of laboratory staining, admittedly, not fundamental to the form (but then what colour ever is?). And so the thought occurs: is this not clue or cue for some aesthetic therapy? These powerful images have the same kinds of force fields as the enemy... They would be shallow craft, I know, not to be launched in heavy seas, but when the waves are calm, could they not use their charge to neutralise the foe's? There must be some new way beneath those flailing arms...
Wednesday, 12 December 2012
The Owl and Me
It was a day like any other day (if I haven't got that wrong), the day of my first inkling of who and what I am. Across the twittern * bordering our grounds, my tawny owl's tall tree. I'd see it sometimes, mostly I'd just hear, but worried now, the past few days: why had my owl become no more than half an owl? too-wit, he'd go, too-wit, but no too-woo! Until an uncle eased my mind and told me how it was: too-wit, was the male tawny calling to his mate, too-woo, she's answering I will! So now I'm thinking: lonely and downcast, perched high up perhaps, his favourite bough, and vainly calling her. But this the day I mentioned at the start... The day I came upon him/her (I could not tell): a feathered heap, some old flea-bitten thing,discarded for the dustman to collect. There, looking down at him or her I knew the truth of something dad would say: He/she was gone the way all flesh must go! I saw so clearly then: one day that owl is me!
.......................................................................
* A narrow country lane.
Tuesday, 11 December 2012
What we're told and what we learn
Moonlit. Deep shadows cross the valley stealing sight. The five men plunging on ahead. Trying to keep up, I kick against a sleeper. Stumble. Twice I nearly fall before the blaze of light. And in the light (think: insect in a spider's web) a rabbit staring straight ahead. The ganger's coat flaps open wide. Voluminous, down to his feet, the coat seems made of pockets. Enormous ones inside. He picks the rabbit up and pops it in. As easily as that. Then we move on. Not far. The light again. A rabbit caught. Five times in all before we're done. The men are quite delirious. Explain: the station master owns the land as as far as you can see. The thought has made their evening perfect as could be! Midnight gone when we get back regain the carriages. (Two are sleepers, one a diner.) No time at all, I'm bedded down. Top bunk. (Mostly the men have bottom ones.) Then in the darkness: Spose youse guessed it, lad... we all of us are gay... wondering... Could youse be interested, eh? Politely I decline. Politely they accept. No more is said, no moves are made. For me, this has the force of revelation. Not what the culture of the day has led me to expect. The warning was they'd force themselves upon me or wheedle their way in. All evening I've been winding back the mileage counter from my bicycle's front wheel -- fluorescent in the dark. And why have I been doing this? I've no idea. The why is lost in memory. The doing, though, is vivid beyond anything that day. Is that not surreal? Would you not say? I reach the target number... Done it! I cry, triumphantly... which in the darkness, worries my five friends. The men were working on the line and living where they worked when I'd turned up, my bicycle unrideable, the last train gone. They'd offered hospitality, as warm as any you might find. They changed my whole perception of how gay people are, what they can be. I look back fondly, even now. Yet only now the thought occurs... But what if I'd said 'Yes'? -- and me still under age?
Monday, 10 December 2012
on not being positive...
I'd often thought one day I might, but now the world's in such a plight I don't know if I will at all -- I might just go and have a ball. A ball is what I'm needing now, a crystal ball to tell me how and when and where and what to share -- and most of all, if I would dare. I asked the guy behind the bar who thought that things had gone too far. He'd tried himself to do it once -- on Bournemouth Sands -- and felt a dunce to see it all go up in flames... thought me too old to play such games. His last idea was Get out quick: These Hooray Johnnies make me sick! A funeral man with horse-drawn hearse said he had done it with his nurse, a friend had tried it on the horse -- mainly using chilli sauce. He'd heard of such things tried at wakes -- They're not all beer or tea and cakes! He'd found it, though, a strange affair. (Illegal now, so have a care...) Illegal gave a certain frisson... but not enough to go to prison. I could have gone for it in France (where it's become a form of dance). I saw it on the Metro done, and in the mountains, just for fun. More seriously, the Eiffel Tower was venue for a bid for power. So now I don't know what to do -- and indecision makes me blue. My ex-inspector used to say: Be pro-active every day. Make your mind up early on, then stick to it -- you'll not go wrong! But to the contrary, I'd find I'd get a boost from change of mind. The positives were plain to see, but this conundrum puzzles me. I'm certain now, I've missed my chance... I'll wallow in insouciance, although that isn't really me -- I'm serious, dynamic. See? I pray you all, my friends, will find the power that goes with change of mind.
Sunday, 9 December 2012
Pirated!
At some point, I suppose, I did leave school... Must have! The last that I recall of it was that limp operetta: all us bloodless pirates prancing round the stage, the parents clapping like the ninnies that they are, and earlier, the hours of tedious rehearsing -- during which I found the time to write my new, alternative, more violent script, The Pirates of Pen's Pants. Ah, I remember now, THAT'S when I left school, a tad before my time! Years after that I found my hayloft studio and bought the thermal lance and 4X4 to turn out beetles in sheet metal by the score. It all goes back to frightened pirates walking home along a pitch dark twittern known as Cold Blows under trees, in uniform -- or costume, if you will -- and that last evening of them all, when Mother Nature furnished me with props beyond my dreams. All week I'd walked home leaping, whirling, putting Dervishes in shade. I'd given them the scripts I'd written them, my friends, but could I get them to join in? God,were they afraid? Of what? The shadows or the hospital for those who couldn't live? Who knows? That evening, though, the beetles fell in curtains from the trees to form a carpet that we walked upon, its pile was inches thick and crunched beneath our feet... Okay, fair dos, a nauseating sound. I felt it too,but I am made of sterner stuff and set about those beetles with a will. My cutlass thrumped above my head like helicopter rotor blades. That night I slew a dozen demons in my head, chopping beetles by the thousand clean in two. You should have heard them squeal, my yellow-livered crew. I told them straight: how beetles feel no pain; remove a beetle's arse or abdomen, it eats on as before. It stood me in good stead,that night,helped my career take off like I had made the world's best mouse trap. People came and beat that once proverbial path to my front door. And yet I needed more... The cutlass was replaced by thermal lance and 4X4. I threw my beetles from the hayloft door or ran them over with the 4X4 or with the thermal lance would cut them clean in two -- or three or four. I asked two of my Cold Blows friends to join my project, share in my good fortune, help me make a mint. The one ghost writing this I asked and one who's putting sharks in something called formaldehyde -- like that will catch on sometime soon! Yellow-livered still, they both declined. Ah well, the more for me!
Written in response to Hobgoblin's prompt, Acting and the First Person Narrative, which you will find at: dverse Poets' Pub, this is a rewrite of one written several years ago (though posted more recently), but from my viewpoint. Here I have chosen the viewpoint of the main character. Also, this version, unlike the original. is not told in true chronology. You can read the original here.
Saturday, 8 December 2012
The Seasons
It seems to me we favour most the season of our age -- though truth to tell, the summer's heat, for all the time that I recall, would leave me cool inside. My first love was vivacious spring, its joie de vivre, its brightness, hope and colour sense. It was a long affair. Perhaps too long. But then again: no one got hurt. So summer time was overlooked and went without the small amount of credit it deserved. Harsh of light, bunged full of stuff, it lost its shape. Warm, staid and comforting, its boring days were friendly and reserved. I kept it just for doing things -- other things, not things with it. Autumn took me by surprise (the way that summer did to Eliot across the Starnbergersee), but like a lover in my case -- like one I'd always courted, but never thought to win, who'd never shown the slightest heed, but then had caught me willy-nilly with dark and flashing eyes. But now, ah now, 'tis winter time: the season and my soul agree -- and if the body jibs a bit, it always was a misery, not liking this or that... I bow to winter and its charms, its stark and minimal delights, its skeletons and filigrees like blueprints in His pattern book the Craftsman opens just for those who'll revel in His Winter show, and so reveals this time of year, the elegance of structures, the underlying rhythms: His reasons and his rhymes.
Friday, 7 December 2012
We All Are Players : a Quatern
I see the ghosts of parts I played before I played the larger stage. This was my house -- stage left, the door through which my father went to war. All that you see, my Granddad built, wherein are ghosts of parts I played. A cast of five, we trod these boards before I knew the truth of guilt. My baby brother enters (right) as I exeunt (stage left) to school, I see the ghosts of parts I played once this split stage became the rule. And was my role of Joker flawed, the arty fool upon whose acts the love of all the rest was poured? (I hear you, ghosts of parts I played.)
..................................................................
The quatern was given as a prompt by Gay Reiser Cannon for dVerse Poets' Form for All
Thursday, 6 December 2012
Teachers too, can daydream at the back..
School assembly. My mind on what comes next. I have not even noticed the heads are turned my way. I'm busy fantasising the infamous 3C - next period with me! Day #2. Student teacher for six weeks. Here to study practice: learning how it should be done. Suddenly, I'm back among the living. A sea of eyes. The only eyes I see are his, the boy's. Beseeching me. I've missed the play so far, am trying to rewind. To travel back through time. To reconstruct: the boy was in detention yesterday. The boy did not show up. The boy went home. The boy now says he spoke to me. I gave him the O.K. I do not recognise the boy, but then I do not know the children generally. Just one or two. I was on duty at the gate... I spoke to them... a few... more than a few... couldn't pick them out... not many of them. Saw them off the premises. Wished them Goodbye. That sort of thing. He might have been... Perhaps he said: I'm off now, sir! and I replied: Oh, lucky you!... I'm sure I did not give him - anyone - permission to leave school. They're waiting. Hushed. Expectant. All of them. The head not so inclined. Let's have it then! You either did or you did not! Did you say this boy could do a bunk? I little more than mouth the words: No, I did not have that conversation, Sir, with anyone. It's possible that I - I'm unprepared for what will happen next. (The boy not so.) That's all I need to know! -- The head triumphantly.-- The boy's hands rise and fall alternately. The cane descends to meet each in its turn. The boy is howling now. Now walking off, hands on his head, as custom must require. The head announces the last hymn: The God of Love my Shepherd is... So there's best practice for you -- clearly demonstrated.
Wednesday, 5 December 2012
Time happens
I didn't know that Time had time to watch us as it ticks away -- or is it us it ticks away, a smoke and mirrors party trick, the way the quayside seems to leave our stationary ship? And if time closes Time's one eye, will everything slow down, will snores replace the former ticks, and tocks turn into grunts? Will what Time watches be but dream? Will Time have dreams of us? Our dreams are dreams of possible when Time is out of town. Things happen coincidingly: the Eiffel Tower is London Zoo, the train becomes a bicycle before Time's eye can wink. And is it tick and tock, my friend, or is it snore and grunt that brings the music to a life, the rhythm to a dream? For even ugly sounds can sing transmuted by the ears....................................
I am indebted to Willow at The Mag for this image as prompt.
Monday, 3 December 2012
The Super Highway
Will future ages say of us we were a new line of descent: Arachnid Man who blanketed the world in wonder webs? If so, no wonder, they might think, the world became so heated underneath! Or will they call us Link Age Man, and realise that all those threads were Fred and Ethel, Jim and Beryl trying to connect? Ours is the Age of Connectivity -- and not of information, as we're taught. Connecting has for ages been what's super cool -- it does not matter much with what, to whom: the globe is but a super room where we can chat our stuff... But you think not? Well, things are changing slowly, so I hear... the super-highway has been mugged, become a tad less info' and touch more Hi ya Pal! -- With very little info' kicked around... raw information isn't what the kids are all about. The web, some say, does for society what our connective tissue does for us: it binds, supports and keeps apart the body parts that otherwise would jar. If we should lose the internet -- by some default of use, let's say -- society would suffer all those stiff and painful joints. Yet I was reading only yesterday how youthful sections of the global population now think the web is naff. It's a Dad Thing, they will say. Or worse: A Wrinkly Thing -- of course, they still connect, web-wise, in other ways! But if the Not Cool label sticks, if others take it up, the viewpoint spreads, the web might just become man's last big thing -- Perhaps we'll end up as the End Time Man! .............................................. It is twenty years since the first text was sent.
Sunday, 2 December 2012
A Little Bit of Bread and No Cheese
Good evening, Evening Sunshine! Have you wondered how my day was going, alone and in a place we know so well? I thought I'd mail you, tell you what a strange experience I had. Ghost of a place, I'd say. I could not come to terms with it -- how nothing clicked the way it used to click. I saw the waterfall where we first met and walked where we have often walked before. I thought I knew each blade of grass, the sound that feet make on the boards that oversail the wetland strip. You taught me names of reeds and rushes there, and how to tell the summer song the robin sings from that he sings when winter comes. I thought I knew the pinetum's most distinctive smell, the sound of wind high in the trees -- do you remember how we once agreed it sounded like a brook? You taught me how to recognise the song -- what bird was it? the name eludes -- that sounded like a little-bit-of-bread-and-no-cheese. I had not thought until that day how birdsong might have lyrics... All this I had expected to be there as ever was. Alas, I did not recognise the place. How sad and boring rushes are! How colourless are reeds! The planks across the wetlands merely groaned from missing you. I heard the robin in the usual place, but could not tell without your high accompaniment to paint the notes which of his songs he sang. And in the pinetum's highest trees the wind this morning sounded like... the wind once more! I think the little-bit-of-bread-and-no-cheese bird had gorged on Gorgonzola late last night. (It's coming back -- the yellow hammer, yes?) The pinetum had no smell at all -- how could that possibly be so? Next time I go I will not go alone. XXX....................................................................
Poems of hate and Hope at dVerse Poets (Poetics)have set Missing You as theme for today.
Saturday, 1 December 2012
Mistaken Identity
Someone has nailed a note to the front door like one left for the milkman -- but it reads: THIS HOUSE IS DANGEROUS KEEP OUT The house's number, that I'd thought was six, is twenty six. The two is on the ground. All is boarded up, but none too well -- a plank has fallen, and a window, like an eye half open, stares at me with some malevolence -- and all the depths of ocean. Does something far too grim for airing harbour there? Strangest of all: the morning paper in the front door tells, for those who care about these things, of shattering events around the world. But no one does, the paper goes on getting wetter in the rain. There's no one here to care or take it in. Three signs of life I see, and only three: a tree is coming into leaf, a cat runs furtively from just behind a concrete wall to garden rubbish bins. Precariously, a mouse's life hangs from its teeth. The garage doors hang crookedly on rusted hinges to reveal a jet black Cadillac -- with patches of dark indigo, like someone beaten black and blue. It might as well have been a hearse as adjunct to this house of death. But wait! A further sign of life: a nest of robins in a smashed headlamp... I'm imagining the Cadillac as hearse -- or maybe just another funeral car -- processing down this cobbled hill -- and who will follow it and all the mourners shaken up inside? The cat perhaps, the paper boy, the refuse men and those who put the sign in place -- and he who didn't know him: me.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)