A Triptych

This is a prompt from Imaginary Garden with Real Toads - to produce the literary equivalent of the tripych.


Centre Panel

He was all Marcel Marceau;
the way he'd tap
the door's glass panel
with fingernail,
forefinger crooked...
the way he'd mouth
(we couldn't hear him)
Let me in, please let me in!...
while from his other hand,
waist high, no more,
a pile of books
steadied by his chin.

But neither door
nor boys behind it
would budge an inch
until the well-judged,
unexpected moment
when he'd stagger in.


Right Hand Panel

Top Academic at his school.
At Oxbridge
First Class Honours (twice),
he'd authored books
on mathematics, full
of his creative thoughts.

Left Hand Panel

It must be said
in all that his brain held
there was no room
for knowledge of young lads,
what made them tick.
He was adrift, a light raft
on a sea of treachery.

2 Triolets

The triolet is the form set by Gay Reiser Cannon in this week's FormForAll at dVerse Poets' Pub. Just follow the link for a full explanation of the form.

I don't remember entering this life,
I'd like to not remember exiting.
I can recall great joys and days of strife,
but don't remember entering this life.
How did I come? by birth canal or knife?
That I have lived outdoes remembering.
I don't remember entering this life,
I'd like to not remember exiting.

....................................................................

I love the shades of night for detail lost,
broad shapes replace the fussiness of day
like landscapes under snow or a thick frost.
I love the shades of night for detail lost,
they thrice repay in magic their small cost.
Some find the night delightfully risqué.
I love the shades of night for detail lost,
broad shapes replace the fussiness of day.

100-Word Play

The Royal Court Theatre is inviting ALL members of the public to submit 100-word plays for its Young Writers' Festival. The plays will not be staged, but displayed around the theatre. They are speaking of the concept of plays oozing out of the walls. It is not competitive, the aim will be to show all the plays.

Not for submission, but I thought I'd try my hand.

- Excuse me.

-Yes Sir.

-I've just taken this off your shelf.

-Yes sir.

-It says there's a special offer on it.

-Yes sir.

-With this model, the attachment comes free.

-Yes sir.

- I cannot find the attachment.

-No sir, we don't stock them.

-But you can't do that!

-No sir, we don't.

-It must be against some act or other.

-Some of our stores stock them.

-But not you.

-No sir.

-Why not?

-No call for them.

-I'm calling for it.

-Yes sir.

-Can I take the cheaper attachment instead?

-No sir.

-Why not?

-Not part of the offer, sir.

...............................................................................................................

The elephant in the room

It's the elephant in the room, he'd said,

and so it has proved. The way clothes both define

and hide a form, there is this vague, suggestive,

fungus of a shape, an elephant you saw once in a cloud

and see now at the north end of The Green State Room.

A shroud, a billowing skin,

anchored in places, somehow tracing

the contours within -

as if the decorators are expected by and by.

The ghost of an elephant out on its haunts.


Unwinding the cover

to show off the skeletal sculpture beneath -

basalt, I'm thinking - life-sized

and studded with jewels. The Indian version displayed.


Then without more ado. To the tune of:

we never discuss this, of course...

the subject's taboo!

He's winding the shroud round and round,

like the covers had slipped for a moment, that's all

and now it is back in its cloud.


Two years and a fortune in jewels? I ask,

then hidden away in.... Exactly! he says

Irresistible subject, the talk of the town.

Outside of here, it's all go.


But the funding... I try a new tack. Working that trick...

He cuts in with that grin: seduction, he says.

Her ladyship courted and... well, not just the once.

She likes to be done on the bounce.

So she kept me in all my desires for two years

and provided the diamonds and pearls.


Is there nothing, I ask, you'll not do for art?

See here, he replies, it's art doing something for me.

What we have, she and I, is a mammoth to share -

my best installation to date. We are, you might say,

the elephant most in the room.

Larger than life

A Magpie Tales Tale.

Larger than life
that's how I like 'em
women of mine
gotta be larger than life!

I wanna climb in through those eyes
splash around in them big, limpid pools
drown in the vitreous humour
of a woman larger than life.

The ultimate prize
of lost in those eyes
floundering somewhere
out of this world.

I could spin like the earth round her sun
and all the four seasons would come
each in its turn, to freeze or to burn
with a woman much larger than life.

Can't take her all in
not in one go
but that's how I like it
larger, much larger than life.

Would you look at those brows
trimmed straight as two dies
never arched in surprise
stern as they come and cool as her lies.

Larger than life

that's how I like 'em
women of mine
gotta be larger than life!

amazing what you see in car parks!

Parked to kill time,
the world's going by.
Children with mums
are walking to school.

First, Little Miss Muffet -
I guess from the fact
that she's coming complete
with spider and net.

Batman is missing
his Batcave, I think -
in a flood of
unstoppable tears.

Two skeletons now,
one big and one small,
and a fierce lioness
and a dog with a ball.

There's a fireman - no fire
Correction: comes mum
with a portable one
of cardboard and gum.

A fairy comes next -
Diminutive thing,
pink wings and blue wand
and a bag made of string.

And now an Ice Maiden,
a witch with a hood
a chocolate soldier
and one made of wood.

Then just when the show
seems over and done,
Bat Man returns
his hand holding mum's.

Next comes a dwarf
(I missed him before)
and then there's the fairy
and the small labrador.

The youngest, it seems,
(not yet recruits)
will not be left out
of sibling pursuits.

Abstract 02 (from Walter Smith's Musee D Orsay series)

A dVerse Poet's Pub prompt by Sheila.

Think what an ocean of live flowers
might do for you;
how rollers breaking not on shingle but
far out at sea
might be the venues for new villages
beyond our dreams
built not beside or under but between
those fragile waves;
how breaking surf and spray might drench the air
with fragrances
at once restorative and volatile;
how life might be
so much more transient than now;
how change becomes
a constant, gentle and organic,
obeys clear rules,
how brachts and petals lap and overlap,
close and disclose
how just the folding of a flower
could end your life,
inflorescence be the birth force to
sustain the world,
how birth, rebirth and death are painless here.
This is a world
immune to all pollution from outside
the flowers keep
the focus of the mind on what is real;
how other worlds
might visit to discover what we have
of wonder here,
might bounce upon our currents, ride our waves
and fertilise
anew this lonely world we try to run.

Shadows of You

Imagine looking down into a river,
there watching the reflections change,
the shadows creeping round towards the evening,
the sun's rays skipping purl to purl.
You begin to feel the chill, but still you stay to watch.
The people on the other bank
are puckered and inverted in the flow,
the ponies in the field will jump no more today.
But now it's really cold and you should go.
Yet still you cannot tear yourself away,
must stay a bit to watch the surface cloud.
At first you think it's semen that's been spilt,
a milky gloss or glaze, uneven at the start,
but slowly thinning as it creeps and evens out.

The images are losing clarity,
you stare but cannot grasp what they're about,
they blur beneath the ice, the movement's frozen out
as surely as the images are frozen in.
You look down at yourself, immobilised,
serene. It's you, as if you had been drawn
on blotting pads. The shapes of you are neither
there nor not. The edges that define you are erased.
The river's memory is dimming as your own.
It's throwing out some hints on what's to come.

how deep a plum was then!

My thanks to Claudia at dVerse Poetics Pub - Translucent Poetics : Writing the spoken word, for this prompt.

It was my tree.
Here, in my mind it was my tree,
for planted on the day that I was born.
I first and best remember it
when it and I were five.
My first excursion into it
(with someone holding me),
the earliest of sensual memories: 
allowed to pick the plums,
those velvet bombs of taste,
incendiaries of colour,
soft waxy reds and yellows,
purples, blues and indigoes.
Those plums, those sweet Victorias!

I found that you could spit
and rub them with your thumb,
make lines and other subtle colours rear
their lovely heads. You made a sort of map.
Inside, you'd find the prize: a golden flesh,
juice-filled, that squirted when you bit.

Later on, and maybe six, the hands
still round my waist, my head now full
of stories from the war, Atlantic
convoys and the like, I found
that if you bit the seam from end to end,
the squirting juice could easily
become a depth charge in your mouth.
Then if you gently squeezed the base,
the sharp stone surfaced like a crippled submarine.

---

This is a rewrite of part of a poem - rather too long and too opaque. One of the first I posted.

fragments

Joseph, Marie, Bryony,
each of the unholy three,
had slept, on separate occasions, with
each of the remaining two -

though not one of the three could know
that this, in point of fact, was so.
Each of their three rooms had grown
to favour one and one alone.

And so it was that Joseph's room
to Bryony would sigh Marie,
but then when Marie came to call
the room said nothing much at all.

.......................................................


When we were in the womb
if we had asked
(had there been someone there to ask)
what is the meaning of this life?

Would we have heard:
to look beyond its shallowness,
food comfort, warmth, security...
A soul is made for love.

Though sounds of love surround you, here
is only loneliness
and distant are the sounds.
Beyond the breaking of the waters lies

a journey, trauma, to a world
that could not be 
more different than
the one you've grown to know.

...................................................

You do not realise when you're small
how everything you do and say,
how everything the VIPs around you do,
how every happening of consequence
goes to build an ark for you - for which
you will be grateful some late day
when being adult falls like rain
to flood the earth, the whole terrain
of what you thought you'd got to know.

The Gentle Art of Removing a Light Bulb in a Complex World

Avoiding, for a change, the bagatelle,
he made his way,
                unsteadily,
towards the stool, his stool. The air
was thick with memories of hanging smoke.
Raw moments from his past
slid by
       (as did the stool beneath him)
easily.
He called for one more jar of memories from the bar.
The potent brew
               slipped down without him noticing - almost.
It mingled with the few that had preceded it.
It laughed with them. Then argued. Finally, 
it fought with them.
A thousand details, unannounced, confronted him.
He buttonholed them one by one.


Material for his fantasies, they came,
expanding like so many bright balloons.
All overblown. Some burst as they arrived.
The rest turned black or simply danced away.


The fuzz and buzz worked on him once again,
an alchemy of alcohol and brain
transmuting, grain by grain,
the few remaining grams of gold
           to dross.


           Above his head
a light bulb in a coolie hat
pricked at the corner of his eye.
He closed the eye. He opened it. He saw a switch.
He pressed it with his thumb.
Up. Down. Off. On. Closed. Open. Nothing. Not his day.


Unsteadily, he climbed
and crouched a moment on the stool.
Then straightened - shakily - to his full height.
He reached above his head towards the orb.
Both hands. Too hot. One chink of merriment
before it danced away,
became a super nova detonating in
the deep space of a mirror hung behind the bar.
Shards scattered like a hail of comets from the sky.


Where moments earlier a bank of fierce-hued bottled nebulae
had vied
        each with each and each with its reflected clone,
now in the gilt framed image of the bar
was spectacle surpassing all.
                             Guilt framed,
his thoughts were fed by the reflections.
Ricochets of light burnt through his head.
Soft pinpoints blown to solar flares.


But in his mind the bulb swung on,
a comet in a sky of Northern Lights,
a bright-eyed pendulum.
His inner eye locked-on,
stayed with the fire ball
as it traced its complex shapes,
drew fractals in the air,
a fractal-maker drawing plots -
alive and well and living in his world!


The bulb became a small girl's lost balloon.
Beddington. The park. The wind
had carried it away, and he,
Sir Galahad, had promised to recover it.
Its twists and turns,
its flights and returns,
embarrassed him.
And then it finished in a lake beyond his reach!


Failure. A tankard full of failures. Big
and small. A life that had, quite simply, skipped away.


And so, chest out, head back, full height, he sang.
All that he remembered from The Student Prince ,
The Drinking Song.
                  He was at school again. A vintage year.
The Cock House Cup, the Gold Ribband, his blue
all in that one good year.


He had not heard the oaths among the tinkling of the glass
or seen the barman raise his baseball bat, then put it down.
His gaze was on the bagatelle.
Ball after ball careering round the board. Pin after pin
emitting ever thinner sounds of pain;
ball after ball eluding or becoming corralled by the pins.


His life 'till then reflected in the travels of the balls.
The plots that had confounded him
were traced anew in each ball's circuit of the board
The key to each mistake
lay in its origin
                 and not its destination.
That he clearly saw at last.
                            He swayed,
made one last, desperate attempt to stay
upright, b ut saw the final ball roll out of play.
That's GO TO JAIL, my friend, he yelled
DO NOT PASS GO! DO NOT COLLECT £200! 
Hell's bells. Wrong game!
I am THE WAY, THE TRUTH, THE TRUE BALL AND THE GAME!
NO ONE COMES TO ME BUT BY ....
THE FATHER WHICH ART...
Which art? Which art is in heaven?
Whose art will be there?
Hallowed be the name of...
BENOIT MANDELBROT, the fractal man
and Koch and Julia who met 
the new reality inside a numbers set.
Complex numbers, be it known!
See how the finger writes
and having writ
goes back and forth and back again
fragmenting bit by bit
the plot - if there's to be a plot -
The plot is thickening.


There was no plot. There is no plot.
He saw a sea of grinning faces,
saw them as a single entity.
                            Humanity
had massed itself against him once again

References: Mandelbrot : Julia Sets : The Koch Snowflake

GARWAAN

There was a smallish hostel, I recall,
high on the Old Moor, with no road. A flinty track.
The mountain bikes we have today might just have made 
it there. Not so the cycles we had then. We played it safe
and walked them to the top. Then through enclosures
where the pigs roamed free, and we'd arrived.
First thing we saw: a notice in red paint:
NEW CYCLE TYRES FOR SALE No need to wonder why.

Self catering. The shop was out of food. Just bread
was still in stock. A makeshift supper, then next day
we're off to hunt for gulls' eggs for our toast.
(One more black mark against my youth.) And as we ate,
the warden told us of a village lost to sight and sound -
but he knew where! Below the Gulls Cliff Rocks. The gulls
were villagers, now elevated to the spirit medium of air.
We went to see. Saw nothing - not surprisingly, 

we thought. That night, provisioned now, we're back
and asking him again. The village never had existed,
he tells us, except in their imaginations. Then came
the great rock fall, rocks raining down on them -
from heaven, so some said. It was too much for them.
Imaginations could not quite sustain it under such
an onslaught. Thus, in its turn the village fell
into a darkness greater than all other darknesses.
Lost to sight and sound. Lost to man for ever.

Which did not quite explain the village sign...
He claimed he'd found it, down among the rocks.
It had been hung in pride of place, above
the basins in the wash room: GARWAAN

Reinventing Warhol's Wheel

Image and prompt by courtesy of Magpie Tales

Caught on a Tesco shoppers mobile 'phone,
Warhol look-alike, Mark Major Zing
welcoming his vision of the next big thing:
fifty Campbell's Soup can images
in an I-pod art display.

Incredibly,
he's unaware it's all been done before -
or near as makes no difference -
by someone looking just like him.
(Where has he been these years of yore?)

Images on retinas? No, not for me!
he'll tell the media clans.
I focus on the concept
that wants to cover all our walls
with rows of Campbell cans.

Incredibly, he doesn't know
it's all been said before -
or near as makes no difference -
by Duchamp, on the Warhol thing
that sank art's status quo.

And so he'll kneel in reverence
before his Oh, so seminal, idea.
Incredibly, he's unaware
the West Coast Pop Art picture show
was many years ago.

The River : three poems

These for dVerse PoeticsSculpting a Poem. I have chosen the option to write a poem then chip away at it as a sculptor might at a block of marble. - My phraseology. Do go and see for yourself.

The river

is a living thing,

a sculptor reconfiguring

all that would contain it: limestone landscape,

flood plain, poetic metaphor.

We see it bide its time, this thing

that Eliot called a strong brown God.

We see it watching, waiting,

swell and shrink,

breathe in and breathing out

until one quite precise and vital moment

when it catches us off guard

and breaks its banks to overflow

and inundate the land.

Its first magnificent creation is destroyed

along with all that man has made.

....................................................

The river,

living thing, creative force

hand of an unseen sculptor,

reworking limestone,

finding shape and metaphor.

It bides its time

does Eliot's strong brown God,

it watches, waits,

inhales, exhales.

It swells and shrinks,

then catches us off guard

to overflow its banks,

rejects its first creation

to start again.

................................................

The river

creative force of nature

spirit, carves limestone

into metaphor

bides its time,

is Eliot's strong brown God,

that swells and shrinks,

breathes in and out

then overflows,

catching us off guard.

We thought it finished

when it trashed its work

to start again

String Theory for Puppets

Written for The Poets' United #85 Thursday Think Tank "strings".

"I'll be there...
like a puppet on a string,"
sang Sandie Shaw back in the sixties...

and so we all were are - and will be
if the scientists are right,
if the theory is correct,
if the planet and the universe,
if all that therein is, from
the ocean to a virus,
from the sun to you and me
is composed of tiny strings,
if the strings vibrate like hell,
if the strings are one dimensional
and if that one dimension
is piddlingly small
and if they're all attached -
though some of them are not -
to membranes known as branes,
if that aint quite enough to blow your brains...

It's sub-atomic particles
we're talking about here,
the things that in the sixties
were little tiny balls -
which is too low tech' for now.

But it's rather hard to argue,
so kick off yer shoes and dance
and sing with Sandie Shaw
C G G7 C
I....wonder if one day that, you'll say that, you care.
G G7 C
If you say you love me madly, I'll gladly, be there.
G G7 G G7
Like a puppet on a str....ing.

The strings are tuned to wavelengths
like the strings on a violin,
like Sandy in the sixties
when she'd open a new key
and her voice would billow out:

Just who's pulling the strings
I'm all tied up to you
But where's it leading me to?

Like a puppet on a str....ing.

I was younger then than I am now
and maybe you were too.
They didn't tell us gravity
was stranger than we knew,
was an interloper loping in
from somewhere out beyond the blue,
a dimension that we hardly thought
could possibly be true,
was not a part of us at all,
at all, at all, no, not at all!

Now we all of us are puppets
with strings that can be pulled,
but we're also made of other strings -
and so are those that pull.

The Night Garden

(Written for the dVerse Poets' Visual writing masterclass.)

Trees in the night garden
scraped as on a scraper board
stark black and dazzling white.

Shards of light
snagged on branch and bark
sketch the maple in
a new design.

Winter's straggling beams
weave ghostly other trees
against a cobweb foliage.

A spiral
or a wing form
give themselves
mysteriously
as petals to the dark.
They will become full flower by day.

All thoughts of a Divine Designer
unravel in the tangled mess
of the forsythia.

Nearby
a rustle in the hellebores.
They shake or nod their heads
in total disagreement
look down ashamed
of their discord
recorded in
the flicks and flashes of the night.

Beyond the garden,
the willow backdrop
introduces colour.
Its curtain of faux gold.
sways, turns to cataract -
an aerosol of light -
as cold air stills.

...........................................
Do pop along to the dVerse website and read the prompt for yourself. It is too much for me to post and too good to shorten.

the first man and the last

I drop in on an Autumn night
and catch the cold wind in my fingers as it blows
before it blows the last dreams from the trees.
The dreams are dying, anyway, so any way you save them
is alright by me. Deep drifts of them,
the like of which I've never seen before,
lie piled against the ever-open kitchen door.

Some dreams are mine, have fallen from our trees,
but most are blown, have come here from our neighbours' grounds.
it's difficult to recognise them, which are which. I dream
my neighbours' dreams. No doubt my neighbours will dream mine.

I pick up one that lies beneath two cherry trees from which
the fruit is falling and in which there is a God-like shape that now
throws dreams into the air. I see him catch and throw them back
where there are birds that swoop and dive towards,
but never make it to the dreams, which in a moment
also become birds, black birds that fly towards the moon from which
no light has come, no light will ever come except in dream.

This is the orchard Adam knew where dreams are made accessible to those
who do not dream, who watch and wait and keep their minds awake.
And so the dreams still fall, and anyone can read the dreams. They are
like shadows on the mounting piles of snow. No need to enter in,
just wait for them to come and - in a moment - go.

The last dream comes and always is the same. The distant church
is dressed in snow which falls. Large sheets of it slide off,
slide down the walls, hang for a moment on the buttresses,
then slide some more, reminding me of how a woman might
undress. She leaves the garments where they fall. But yet,
what's changed is this: there is no wall. The church, divested
of its snow, becomes a prison. Locked within, the clergy are at prayers.

A monkey comes and puts a lighted match to this last dream.
The church goes up in flames, but in the way you know things in a dream,
I know that God is there, but cannot tell his form. A thousand shapes
are fluttering. They merge and part again. Some slide or leap and others
merely relocate, and one of them is God, but no man knows the which -
except, perhaps the monkey-man with match - the only light I've seen
this night, this day, this dream, which ever one is right. Dolls, I see,
both male and female, broken, on the floor, heads smashed or off.
Yet as the flames die down new dreams are born. I see them pile
against the ever-open, dream-caught, dream-catching kitchen door.

Sound Bite Artist

I'm top shot at my game. I pen
the sound bites for a man
you've heard of right enough -
one too verbose for words.

From long and convoluted sentences
I strike the fiery chips
that sparkle for eternities
on everybody's lips.

I can reduce a dissertation
to a syllable or two,
wrap up a constipated message
in a word that hits home true.

My master's speeches you'll forget
before you've finished clapping
but mine go on -
some say too long -
and never lose their grip.

Give me a closely argued script
and some syllables to fill,
I'll give you back a winning phrase
to move in for the kill.

When my haiku hit the campaign trails
I'm the Kikaku* of Tooting,
I'm the Manifesto Masefield of my day,
The Ezra Pound of policy,
a Spenserian of speeches
and a Browning who will storm a budget day.

I write villanelles on voting
and tetrameters to trumpet
every turning of the tortuous
political, backstabbing working day.
..........................................
*A protege of Basho.
..........................................

Like my poem of a couple of days ago, I've based this on a person known to me, though on this occasion, only briefly. I met him at a conference and during a lunch time chat he confided that he had worked for a time as a writer of sound bites. He seemed to consider that his "bites" were politically more important than "the big man's" speeches. Maybe he was right. I have for long toyed with the idea of writing about him, but there was a problem: Carol Ann Duffy has a poem I much admire about the man who writes the headlines for a newspaper. The similarity is unmissable, I thought I would not be able to avoid stealing from her. Nor - I think - have I. For those who might be interested, "Poet for our Times" can be read here. I don't mind you reading it now, but I sure wasn't going to follow it!

U.F.O. Chaser Extraordinaire

On this portentous day with palindromic date
of 21.02.20-12, Shrove - "Sorry" - Tuesday, on
this day on which the world, the cosmos, might
be tempted to heave up its unguent back
and scatter humans to the outer fringes of existence,
on this most likely of all days,
Mark, Detective Secretary of The Things in Space Society -
Blipper to his friends - is cycling home. The bliss!
The open road, the peaceful night as dark as pitch...
His joy is interrupted by his front lamp going out.
Almost simultaneously, on yonder hill
a radiance, a phosphorescence bathes
the world - the whole of it, so far as he can see - in light.

Push and puff to reach the top
to find the source
so clearly sent
from outer space. He gasps
from lack of oxygen, from disbelief.
A light-emitting diode - the largest
ever seen - and in the shape
of one of those old phone booths. Psychedelic.
Radiant. Metallic. Space ship.
Quite beyond a doubt. It throbs with light...

and the telephone is ringing.
Eerily. Insistently.
Unlike all phones he'd heard before.
Jangle of a dozen noises.
Jangle of nerves, he picks it up.
Jangle of whirrings now, tappings, tickings
and escaping steam. High-pitched screams
of slipping belts and centuries old technologies.
Tick of clockwork in the throes of going bust.

"Hello! Whose there?"
he bellows at the mouthpiece.
Sounds extraordinary
sounds extra-terrestrial
are coming from it. Indescribable.
Like alien tongues reflected from a sheet of
corrugated iron
and filtered through a bag of nails.

And then a voice he recognises.
Joseph from the office. Laughing.
"Gotcha this time, eh?"

A Magpie Tales story.

The Atheist

A church is like a pit
for catching elephants, he said.
One is built, the other dug,
and there the difference ends.
If anything, the elephant,
nature's bulldozer supreme,
is cannier and harder to ensnare.

And Christ was no more God
than Darwin was a scientist, he said.
He fitted these together somehow,
like they were made for one another.
He had an inexhaustible supply.
Many a resulting image looked
remarkably surreal.

One day I found him in the church,
kneeling, sheepish when he saw me.
Don't saddle me with faith, he said.
I can't believe a thing
for which there is no evidence,
and what there is of that is just provisional -
and I am dying, man!