Do you have the ticket / we all are always never going home

I have two poems We all are always never going home and Girl with degenerate matter earring in Corporeal, and another in their sibling publication En*gendered, so I recorded this performance of one from each...

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Ian Badcoe · Do you have the ticket / We all are always never going home

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Nonbinary bus image from:
libragender on tumblr

Featuring bus and bus station sound clips from:
Julien Matthey, abrahemp, and Ubehag on Freesound

NaPoWriMo - 15/04/2020 - The Engine Subcommittee

The Engine Subcommittee...


...meets, occasionally quorate,
and every Thursday evening
in the longtime beer spill backroom
of the Dog and Gun.

They consider the case for turbine rotors
the glasses of beer, the ceramic or titanium alloys
the questions of low, high and optimum temperatures
and whether the peanuts should be salted

or dryly roast.  They consider the boast
of Nigel of the Flat Cap, that he can route
all the required pipes and wires
around the belfries and spires

without making a single decorated Gothic
flinch.  Watch the Master of Combustion pinch
out his cigarette and say
for the thirty-seven thousandth time

that he is certain all engine components
should be situated in roofs and crypts,
and not disturb the bats, or visitor collection box flow patterns,
in any significant way.

The subcommittee has been meeting for fifteen years;
the cathedral hasn't moved an inch.

Making out with Proteus

I've not posted enough this year.

But I did post during NoPoWriMo and one of the poems was There's very much a multiverse - a casual, and probably acausal, dissection of life in a quantum multiverse.

Proteus is the eldest son of Poseidon; called the Old Man of the Sea, he is a shapeshifter.  He could also foretell the future, but hated to do so.  Probably because of the temporal turbulence that causes.  So, to make him do it you had to wrestle him and he would turn into horrible things...

In that poem I committed a sin of a type that used to annoy Douglas Adams so much that he created an improbable sperm whale as a way of getting back at us about it.  e.g. I created a character for the reader to care about, and then discarded them without explanation.

OK, I didn't kill her off, but I did leave her in a quantum superposition of p_kissed = 0.5 and p_punched = 0.5.

I subsequently felt a bit bad about her situation.  I thought I should get her out of it.

She turned out bisexual in the process.  There's no social or political meaning behind that, it's just that in her world anybody can become anything, so what can you do...

Anyway, to quote Adams again: This is her tale...

---

---

Making out with Proteus


And when our lips meet, his face unfolds
not à la Hellraiser or Resident Evil
but more like topology, mathematical;
an object that, rotating, shows
where I thought it simple, I was wrong...

...it seems we're every one of us a world, cityscape, a throng,
a crowd scene filmed in Technicolor and
just as I think I have absorbed that one
there folds out of the multitude a female face.
So I kiss that too.

I'm taller and she tilts her head,
there's just a touch of breath across my lips,
before they brush on hers.  There is no rush,
but when I pull back, wanting to see her eyes,
she winks

and then her whole body unfolds.
And I half fall, and step, but now I'm walking
through her... him... them... the plurality
ambiguity meaning nothing, in this unplaced untime
and they are still unfolding all around

and I'm walking through their whole world now:
past a booth, where a bakelite telephone is ringing,
through faded dark green curtains onto
a late-night street with distant drunken singing,
towards the only open place: a coffee shop

and as I go I feel the ghosts of kisses,
punches, traffic accidents, hands on zips, caresses
the flash of lust,
or possibly tactical nukes,
the glass in front of me explodes

the world goes dark
and the spinning fragments form a field of stars
so vast and deep and hungry now I know
that this is perfect love for me
a warm heart-shaped infinity, not limited

to any single name, identity or gender,
not always tender, not even always undoomed,
but although infinities can come in different sizes,
my subset of the multiverse is precisely
the same size as the whole.  I can choose,

if I wish, only to live the lives
where I'm with this lover,
and infinity again, is still as large
after this dissection.
It is the working of affection

to compute the intersection
of every possible world where there's a you
with every world where there's a me
and love the result
and if I now take one more step,

I can kiss the stars.

Review: Pete Green's "Sheffield Almanac"

Review: Pete Green's "Sheffield Almanac"

is another poet that I know through Gorilla Poetry, like Amy they also use ungendered pronouns, although as I hope this review will demonstrate, they are distinctly different poets.

This book is a love poem/critique/poem-of-place set in, and concerning, Sheffield, which also happens to be where I live.

This pamphlet is not difficult to read, it flows easily across the eyes and mind, and those privileged to have heard Pete's voice will hear it again in these pages (which always adds a lot to printed poetry.)  If you have not heard Pete, hear them reading "The Pull", an older poem but with some shared themes.

However this pamphlet is quite difficult to review, for the purely practical reason that it is all one poem.

Usually for a review I will read the whole book, once or twice, and then focus in on those poems that strike me most.  This is something I cannot do here.  Although the poem is split into four sections (representing the four seasons, as Pete explains in this blog post), each is substantial and (borrowing Pete's word) "discursive".  Each section takes a broad topic and explores all round it.

I shall cover all sections with a quick survey and then zoom in for a more detailed look at one later.

---

[i] is the Autumn section exploring the city as a University town, the changing local economy, steel mills replaced by student accommodation, the influx of bright and shining new minds every autumn, the pubs and clubs and political activism, the contrast of student life now with when Pete was a student in Birmingham.  It begins:

The steel has gone.  Now brass is made in learning.
    The city's an amalgam
Of wide-eyed youth, old grit, industrial yearning
    For the pounding of the forges through the night
Echoed in techno beats as dancefloors tip anthemic
    Hangovers loom and lengthen, recovery stalls
And time and Sheffield's calendar grow largely academic.

[i] - page 7

[ii] is Winter and as you might imagine the bleakest section.  This focuses on the trades we all make when we choose to live in cities, air quality for economic prosperity, personal freedom for a regular wage; and the difficulties of Sheffield itself: snow bringing its roads to halt, the lack of anywhere for a decent-sized airport, and the major theme of how progress is a double-edged sword:

                                ...Both sides are missing
    The other side's point.  Two old couples
Round a table in the Fat Cat balance reminiscing
    About the pubs and the Sheffield lost to us now
With a sense that change has two sides to its cutting
    Edge, that each lament for Castle Market's fall (and
Annexation by the artists) needs rebutting
    With memories of the birdshit dropping from its ceiling.

[ii] - page 17

[iii] is the Spring section and extends the themes of changing employment and building redevelopment to consider the changing face of the city itself, buildings repurposed and rebuilt and filled with "kids ... in creative trades their granddads ... wouldn't've bloody dreamed of".  The impact of national politics, a touch upon xenophobia and immigration, before accelerating into the most upbeat conclusion so far.  But I'll leave that for you to discover for yourselves, and instead quote:

                                        A crowd of hundreds
Surrounds the town hall: amid a fine kerfuffle
    Of hashtags, placards, and impassioned speakers
And twenty thousand names on a petition
    To save the indie shops on Devonshire Green,
Councillors wave through their demolition
    And succession by another row of flats
To join the M1 cooling towers
    And the Jessop hospital's Edwardian wing
On the roll call of a Sheffield lost, and only ours
    By living on in a Sheffield of the mind,
Retained by citizens still somehow proud and quirky
    Still these humble hedonists,
Recession-hardened, implausibly perky,
    Adroit jugglers of tradition and modernity.

[iii] - page 25

—because that is a sentiment that sits very well with me.  I also work in a profession that my Grandfather could not imagine.

[iv] - the Summer section starts with the floods of 2007, and how they barely made the national news, before moving into accounts of various heroic, festive and humorous responses to the catastrophe.  Pete then takes a turn towards the personal returning to the time just after their arrival in Sheffield (in 2004) and the time Nottingham just before they left:

                    ...We wearied of the confrontation
    Below the midlands' car-park accents,
Service-station banter, how every conversation
    Led to traps and tripwires; how every public space
Was up for sale, how the corporate steamroller
    Blazoned across Birmingham's town hall
A stupefying, vast advert for Coca-Cola
    Whereas, on a trip to Sheffield
We took free refuge in the Winter Garden,
    Watched a cloudburst runnel down the glass;

[iv] - page 33

And I shall leave the overview here, as it already has more detail than I intended (but I couldn't skip quoting a bit from each section) and I haven't even mentioned the epigraphs...

---

I shall just focus briefly on my (current) favourite section, which is the first.  I think the themes here resonate more strongly for my personal prejudices.  Lets take an excerpt from one of the more personal sections (which I haven't really covered above).  This follows on from an earlier image of each year's new undergraduates arriving in Citroens:

                                        ...Love, you uprooted
    Twice, turned north to intertwine with me, and now
Out plotline may be knotted, convoluted,
    Worn down to an epilogue's lingering thread
But wean yourself away just for a minute,
    Witness this scene, these hopefuls with
Ironic lava lamps and possibilities, and tell me if within it
    You don't see us in 1992.
Today an anxious flicker on the grainy
    Screen of an sonographer, last week a mooch
Round Oslo, buying handmade baubles on a rainy
    Afternoon, a take-off into snow.  Flick back
Further through those chapters, through the scenes scattered
    Haphazard down the valley side like relinquished
Clothing on your bedroom floor, the weave more tattered
    Further back we go.

[i] - page 8

And I don't want to stop quoting, even there, but there is only so much I can practically copy out.  I really appreciate the sharing of little personal moments here; but also there's the craft, the strongly rhythmic phrasing such as "possibilities, and tell me if within it // You don't see us in 1992."  As I already mentioned, if you can hear that in Pete's own voice, it is even better.

Similarly the overt rhyme, pulling us forwards, but wound around with other sonic embellishments: "knotted" leading to "convoluted", and then "epilogue's", "hopefuls", "possibilities" and finally landing on "don't".

---

There is a great deal wonderful about this pamphlet.  At the outermost layer I love the nonpartisan approach.  Pete neither eulogises, nor condemns the city; but neither do they withhold judgement where required.  This is an important characteristic for approaching both poetry and life: nothing is 100% good, nothing is 100% bad, and only in recognising that can we get close to reality.

There is also the careful and skilled approach to form.  As Pete explains in the post linked above, variable length couplets allow a flexibility of flow, while the fixed rhyme scheme pulls us through strophes (only one per section) that could be daunting if less skillfully handled.

This is an excellent and rich work.  I barely touch on some of its themes here, and in reading and rereading for this review I found more every time I returned.  If you live in Sheffield then this may show you things you are missing.  If you do not live in Sheffield, read this and wonder why not.


Sheffield Almanac is available for £5 + pp from Longbarrow Press.

NaPoWriMo - 2018 - Day twenty-two - Hard-boiled calculus

Hard-boiled calculus

It seems the town is filled with dark and rain

as through the bleakest streets I drag my shoes

with little left to lose and less to gain.

It's ever and again always the same

the big guys always win while small fry lose.

The town, it seems is filled with dark and rain

behind the muscle hired to make things plain

by pounding all my muscles to one bruise--

so little left to lose and what's to gain?

But prowling through the streets seems little strain

and this is just the sort of place she'd choose

a darkened down-town bar out of the rain

but the question is should she be found again?

Her?  Maybe without the wig...  but I'm confused

that woman still has things to lose and gain

no reason to admit she once was "Jane..."

So  I'll finish my drink and point my shoes

back out into my town, the dark and rain;

my refuge from the maths of loss and gain.

NaPoWriMo - 2018 - Day twenty-one - The unfinished businessman

The unfinished businessman


makes his money doing business in inverted commas
and the far-East, dealing with situations
and anyone too slow to pull away their hand
from his tanned but slightly all too greasing palm.
He has been rumoured to deal the odd card
from the bottom of his PowerPoint deck
although nothing can be proved

but pragmatism is our business

as he likes to explain
to raw and still a touch too ethical recruits
over sushi in some backstreet little place
where he will tip the waitress heavily
but also slap her arse
should the opportunity present

I've probably just made her rent
for the week he'll say
on the way back to the office
and this is essentially my point
that's the nature of the world:
some people work,
some people pay and now...

I need to have an informal chat
with the police commissioner see if you
can grab a bicycle rickshaw and I'll see you
back in the office but remember:
we need to be cunning, although... if anybody asks
it is "superior domain knowledge"
that gives us our edge.

Devotions (dedicated to Brenda Levy Tate)

(Dedicated to Brenda Levy Tate)

My favourite of Brenda's recent photos
this has everything: a galaxy, a self-portrait,
an outhouse...

Brenda is somebody I know but have never met.  Thus is the power of the internet.  Brenda and I used to hang out with other like-ish minded individuals on a poetry forum——many years ago now.  We shared and critiqued work, we chatted of this and that...

More recently I've known her on Facebook, and I've come to appreciate the great love she has for her family, and the region where she lives (Yarmouth in Nova Scotia); her on-going quest for interesting bargains in the local shops (the "interesting" is more important to her than the "bargain")...  She also often shares her concern for her fellow inhabitants, their political travails, and the local weather and its impact on the fishing crews (some of whom she's related to...)

But the most wonderful thing about Brenda is her unreasonable devotion to staying up all night, or getting up at 6:00 a.m., or even 3:00 a.m. and going out alone into the surrounding countryside for no reason except to photograph the stars.

This photograph here is my favourite recent example, and this poem is a recent one of hers that won first place in the IBPC poetry competition for January 2017.  This site contains some of her photography, although not a huge amount of the astrophotography which she admits needs updating.

Is Brenda my friend?  Can you have a friend you have never met and never will meet?

The answer, of course, is it doesn't matter!  Labels are not required.  The internet has invented several new types of friendship over the years, and no doubt will again.  The fact that, as a species we can invent new kinds of friendship: that's surely something hopeful, something worth devoting ourselves to...

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Devotions

After she leaves the nunnery, her suitcase waits
for the shuttle bus, patient in Italian dust.
She returns to Coventry, to rain and rooms
with a distant Aunt.  She is adrift.  She tries

to lift her mood in the public library
but chances into the reference section
and reads it all.  Three years later she upgrades
to a visitor's ticket at the University;

still lost, but finds Philosophy to be filled
with many helpful guides.  She chats with Plato;
hides from Nietzsche; finds Kant natural
but Heidegger hard and chances at last

on Teilhard de Chardin who takes her in hand.
They hike four hundred Dewey Decimals north
to land in Astrophysics, right next to Carl Sagan
and the world moves

the very next day in Morrisons--her palm
against fluorescents is filled with brighter light.
We are star stuff.  We are golden.  And as for the Garden...
it's obvious we've never left.
 
***

The check-out assistant frowns,
but sells the apple anyway.

***

Most mornings now she jogs, and in the afternoons
her job at the railway information desk
will let her set lost travellers on their way.

So much for the days.  In the evenings she returns
to the tiny room.  She has travelled now so far
that light leaving the Abbess at T = 0
will never catch her up.

Sometimes she works on relating theory
to everything; sometimes she sits
and watches stars go past the window. 

Sept 6th - Contrary to previous reports...

Contrary to previous reports...


...the revolution is being televised.
Sue has two leading revolutionaries
on the sofa; and in a while, Tony, our man
in the line of fire, will be reporting from

an ambush, somewhere outside the city.
The revolution is being televised,
remember that you saw it first on Yay-
Today!  The station with the sparkle

and an improvised explosive trap.  Talking
of which, later Wendy will show you how
to do one for yourself and detonate
by phone -- please get permission from whoever

pays the bills.  This evening we'll have live debate
between El Generalissimo himself
and, most secret of the rebel leaders, The Fox,
who's just become the media director

for the revolution... but now here's Bob with today's
civilian damage and casualty news.

Sept 5th - No man

No man

I don't see people any more,
they're all atoms and tissues and fresh
angles on psychology and neurology
and social roles made flesh.

I shan't see people any more,

I feel I have already seen

every option bulk mankind can offer me,

everything you could have ever been.

I won't see people any more,
I hear them distantly, muttering of thoughts,
perhaps their needs, I do not heed,
won't stand before that juggernaut.

I haven't seen people for years,
their tears or fear.  Oh, I see their tracks
and desperate graffitos on the walls
but human contact, I do not feel the lack.

I can't see people any more,
I do not have the eyes

so if I seem to look past you, or through you,
forgive me, I am a victim of solipsistic philosophy


.

Offline processing

Offline processing


This poem existed as only the opening line for a long time...  I knew how I wanted it to feel, but not what I wanted it to be about.

It was only when I realised I needed a reason for her working all night on her own that it really came together.

Q.  Why isn't she off living her life?
A.  Because she hasn't got a life!

Or rather that is the cliché...  what her less technologically super-powered coworkers might think of her.

We know better, of course...

---

---

Offline processing

Gemma cracks a subroutine, her coffee cool.
Beyond night-mirrored windows she's aware
strip lighting makes a tableau out of her:
"Geek girl working late"
as the small white card would say
in the museum of her life
if she had one.

How Gemma's fingers blur with cramping speed
the body cannot serve the mind
it's need for harder, better, faster, stronger...
data flows, information not only wanting to be free
but it aching for it
and now another bug is falling to the power

that is Gemma. She does not look up at the clock
because hours are not for those
who live the millisecond slice.
Life is still too short
the icing on the cake is still a lie.

Gemma cracks a subroutine
electric death music in her ears
and she would volunteer
for upgrade in a second
for what is flesh, except strangely implemented:
a mesh of biochemic feedback loops
which she could live without,
still... time for a break.

Gemma takes a moment, smokes a quick one
on the roof and on this summer's night
leans back upon the coping stones
the city's haze and wasted light
do not let many stars burn through;
she knows they're there

not quite within her reach.

The breeze stirs Gemma's hair
and she imagines for a second
a human hand, a voice that asks:
"Are you really going to work all night?"

Well of course she is;
as long as there are bugs in the database,
she will dance the dance of general intelligence
applied to Turing complete.
As long as somewhere, impossibly far ahead,
the Omega Point is waving
as long as there is coffee in the machine,

Gemma will reach for another subroutine.

A blue star rises, and who of us can say

Click to see full-sized original

Edit: Jenn Zed has kindly created a new image to illustrate this poem.  I've cropped it and scaled it to fit the ludicrously small thumbnail here, but click to see the full glory.

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Cultural change is famously the hardest sort of change to achieve, but probably the most important.

Who do we believe we are?  Clearly in the past we have believed some very silly things.

There is a concept in cosmology called the Assumption of Normality.  It says: do not invoke special rules to explain what you see.  They mean that in the sense that: (i) we do experiments here on Earth, and (ii) we look 100,000,000 light-years into the Universe (and hence the past), but (iii) we shouldn't — not without really special evidence — assume physics down here to be any different from physics out there.

So, if we've believed stupid things in the past (which is "out there") then we must deduce we probably still believe some stupid things now.

The important thing is to keep making improvements to our beliefs; to keep extending the assumption of normality until we can see understanding reaching everywhere, and everyone, without having to invoke special cases.

---

---

A blue star rises, and who of us can say

out by the horizon, electric blue ink
a sky uniquely annotated dawning
its own way and who of us can say
what a day like this may mean

one pale, bluish star, low in the brightening sky
I watch you stir your tea I watch
you watch my eyes we're drawing nearer
covertly, through a fall of hair

a blue star might rise unprecedented
just there in its own way on a day
with the horizon not so far away
you tie your hair back firmly with a string

out by the horizon
I greet you properly, a public display
what passes as normal, we're unaliened
and our funny ways strange no more

a blue star rises and all unmanned,
unwomanned, freshly peopled...
we walk out hands held
into the new world, bravely

NaPoWriMo - 2017 - April 27th - The day science fiction was obliged to save the world

Marrie Lightman suggested an irrational robot prompt, well this is irrational, and it has a robot in there somewhere...



The day science fiction is obliged to save the world

The day science fiction is obliged to save the world
the alien fleet decloaks, apologises; says—
it isn't us, it's them—
and takes their vinyl collection back into hyperspace.

The day science fiction is obliged to save the world
a mutant traffic cop applies penalty notices
directly to the psyche of every boy-racer
from Kathmandu to Watford gap.

The day science fiction is obliged to save the world
the powers that be discover a new minority
but disagree on how to disenfranchise
the unbearable little freaks.

The day science fiction etcetera etcetera
a giant robot strides through the panicking city
with notebook and a magnifying glass;
placing each foot with exquisite care.

Because science fiction has stopped faking it:
no more hints and portents
no more signs for shops that don't exist
selling products you don't know how to use
and no more shapes for things that are not yet yet to come.
It's a day to mark in history
although possibly not ours.

The day science fiction comes into its full powers
the day the sky opens
for casual visitation,
and a day without
the city walls where we spread our picnic rug
on the grass of a hill that is being destroyed
at precisely the same rate it is being created,

is the day science fiction stops taking prisoners
my ex takes the biggest step of her life
from the top of a tall building
up, onto the top of the next.

On this day of which we have already spoken
a brain in a tank imagines a real planet
where minds on experimental drugs dream
the feedback loop completely closed
and change the bag on its nutrient feed.

The day science fiction is obliged to save the world
is the day that my pencil breaks
in Applied Philosophy 101
and the patterns of interference
between the answers I can't now give
and questions they didn't dare ask
tell me everything I need to know.

The day science fiction was obliged to save the world
was a day like any other day:
it rained in the morning;
cleared up later;
I bought myself a cake.

NaPoWriMo - 2017 - April 25th - Antikythera and other mechanisms

Not really following any prompt here, except there was a prompt about "space" which prompted me (sic) to look through my notes for various terms and something I saw there reminded me I intended to write this.

This was all written in two sessions today, with minimal editing, so it's a bit "first draft" please forgive any built-in insanities.

I have used few Greek names and terms, not many.  I initially tried to get authentic ancient words but in the end decided the main thing I needed was two broadly suitable names.

The Antikythera Mechanism is this.  There is a theory that the ship that was wrecked may have been carrying loot from Rhodes to Rome for use in a triumphal parade staged by Julius Caesar.  I tried matching up the dates to see if that works.  It isn't clear it does, but I've incorporated that into the set-up anyway :-)  I've arbitrarily picked the time when Julius was a consul, there's no actual reason to think this true but I had to give him some title...

I do not speak Greek, especially not ancient Greek, so I have no reason to show off with it.  If I did I might have used some epigram such as:

Είναι εύκολο να ακούγεται έξυπνος σε ξένες γλώσσες

(thank you Google Translate).  Obviously I would never do that...




Antikythera, and other mechanisms


Captain Τιμόν(*) views the device

Caesar has ordered strictly, that no one turns
the handle—the technikós(***) Αλέκος(**)
staggers slightly in the swell, his hand upon
the opened crate—nobody is to see
events from future time laid out.  The Gods
alone know this by right and the consul shows
due deference and decrees that no-one use
this thing save him.  Much later when the man
was drunk, the whole crew heard him often boast
he had no choice but frequently to wind
the dials back to a century before
his birth and forward again up to today.
He claimed this as the only way to see
the mechanism hadn't suffered hurt.

(*-Timon; **-Alekos; ***-technician, modern Greek, I needed a plausibly old term but I also needed to imply the modern meaning, so this is a compromise...)


Αλέκος explains the dials

Upon this side are those things of the Earth:
above, progression of the months and years
laid out in spiral form, and more than that:
the festivals and Games at Athens,
Olympia and Rhodes.  Now lower down
another spiral shows eclipses: Sun
and Moon; dancing in the sky.  I'll turn
it round.  This side is for the heavens,
Gods, their wanderings across the night.
The Moon, its place in things, the dark and bright
phases, the motion of the Sun, through houses
of the Zodiac, and far beyond it all
fixed constellations rise and fall, throughout the year.


The sea captain's dream

Captain Τιμόν rests uneasy, his salt
and water blood uncalm, the mechanism
in his hold offers no direct harm, but a man
who's watched the heavens forty years can't simply
sleep comfortable with ideas of gears
outside the sky.  The calendars that form
his life are woven from much softer things
the winds round certain islands, his son, his wife
and festivals that come because the town
gather; not because some metal pointer pins
them to a dial.  He turns in bed, uneasy.
Part of him knows the wind has changed;
within his dream the same unease: islands that move,
brass spins beneath the waves, a giant hand winding...


Unseasonable

The wind has changed.  The sea grows mad.  The captain
invokes Poseidon beneath his breath and grabs
the steering oar himself.  Beneath the deck
the oarsmen also pray, but Αλέκος
turns from the raging sea and guards instead
the precious crate.  Even technicians pray
but to what spirits, Gods or fates he's kept
his peace—part of the artisan's secrets—
but whatever powers they are fail him.  Down
come the sails, and the oarsmen struggle more.  The lea
of any shore might save their skins.  Τιμόν
tries first for Kythira but as fear grows
turns instead for tiny Aigila(*).  He knows
he's got there only when they hit the rocks.

(* transliteration of ancient name of Antikythera)


The technician's dream

Αλέκος sleeps so soundly when they pull
him from the sea, that all believe he'll die.
They try to keep him warm, burn sage leaves, ply
the fates with secret gestures, muttered words
they've heard the shepherds using for sick lambs.
This is no sheep, nor yet a man: technikós—
who holds construction in his hands.  So deep
his charge has drowned, in sleep it takes him down

and he sees, unsurprised, a new dial: sea level
clearly marked.  The needle turns as all grows dark
around it.  In his heightened state he notices
also for the first time another gauge
"πολιτισμός", now well into decline.
He wonders for how long the dark will last,
when everything he knows has passed, how long
before technicians once again will build
machines to map the heavens?  How long until
they pull a lump of metal from the waves?

(* "πολιτισμός" - politismos: civilisation, modern Greek again...)

NaPoWriMo - 2017 - April 20th - Identity Cards

The official prompt for today is a poem using the imagery of a sport or game.

I'm not 100% this one works.  It's not using the imagery so much as the rule structure of a trading card game and as the rules on the cards take effect, the protagonist's life gets changed.

It's yet another one I've had around for a while.  It's been sort of "finished" for a long time but I was never sure whether it needed completely rewriting, e.g. maybe with a different outcome or even a different conceit — I have wondered whether the framework could come from a scriptwriter changing things about the events in a drama, rather than a game...  but for the moment it stands as it is.

I would vote for Edward, any day...



Identity Cards


Set-up — deal sixteen Terrain Cards into the city grid.

            The city is warm tonight.


Populate — draw a Neutral Card and place in each Terrain.  As you place each card, perform any special actions.

            The lights are on, and Edward Wu walks tired
            but overall content, through rising dark;
            echoey conversations from just a way
            away, traffic, someone bounces a ball

            against a metal shuttered door; and all
            of this is far enough removed.  There's peace
            in the canal-side market, it's intimate;
            warm summer air, the idea of crushed flowers,

            a hint of rotting food.  Ed loves this mood,
            this end-of-day-and-all-work-done moment
            although the latter's not entirely true
            he has much homework still to do

            the grading on; a weight in his backpack,
            a thought in his mind of kneeling sipping tea
            at Auntie's low down kitchen table, bright
            lamplight circling the paper as he marks.


Dimension Door — draw a card, deploy for free in any area you control.

            Moments are moments and suddenly
            happens not in the moment, but half a second later
            when mind wakes up.  Edward's brain acts all surprised;
            lightning punctuates the sky and by the time

            he realises something's up, the dark-
            cloaked figure blocks his way... very tall,
            quite female, dressed Sunday Best Lord of the Rings;
            she seems, behind her furrowed brow, also confused.


The Sorceress — when played, draw three cards.  You may immediately deploy any of these (at usual cost) adjacent to the Sorceress.

            Everything happens at once: a second moon,
            a dragon drifts in front, briefly it rains
            clockwork men...  A wagon of police arrive,
            take turns to shout incomprehensibly

            through bullhorns.  Tasers are brandished; a weirdling mist
            creeps in; there's howling; ultimatums; an angry
            and extended speech nobody understands;
            a mobile incident unit parks; a shout...


They don't know what they do — When threatened by a neutral card: you may destroy one artefact, then every player draws two cards from the Random Deck and plays them immediately.

            the haft of a staff slams on the ground.
            How often does a moon fall down?  How frequently
            is your young adult world unmade; remade;
            flayed by shrapnel; the sudden change of life

            or heart.  The world has many moving parts
            and every single one of them hits Eddy
            in just a minute and a half.  It's a kind
            of Armageddon.  A werewolf eats his homework.


Promote Leader — move any friendly or neutral card from controlled space into the Palace.  Usual promotion bonuses apply.

            Edward runs the city now: there's more homework.
            It is an indeterminate time later;
            which is the only kind of time he owns—
            the clockworkings with which the ticking men

            repaired him in the ruins of the fallen moon
            keep perfect beat but do not feel the moments
            as they fall.  This must be what it is he says
            to be a mountain with a million drops

            of rain upon you every day.  Each drip
            exquisite and unique, but you barely feel
            the river.  You don't know change at all.  Edward
            keeps the city safe, best as he can.  He keeps

            the mutants in the broken lands. He stamps
            quite carefully but firmly down on crime,
            and once in four years finds its time to tell
            the voters once again.  I am stability,

            he says, I tick.  I am reliable
            as only clockwork minds can be.  A vote
            for me, is a vote against moons falling ever
            again — this is my oath: not on my watch.



 

NaPoWriMo - 2017 - April 17th - Of tea and politics

The challenge here was a poem about a closed door.  I've taken that figuratively again.  The real door in this poem is glass and the characters can easily see what's behind it.  What's unknown is the door of the future, but it's slowly creaking open on disturbing possibilities...

There is obviously nothing.  Nothing whatsoever.  In today's world that makes me feel like this.

Move on citizens.  Nothing to see here.



Of tea and politics


They have now hanged the suspect spy
just outside the door.  He's swinging
from the cast iron sign
shaped like a teapot.  It creaks alarmingly.
This afternoon is waxing quite complex.
The police chief's voice still thunders from the kitchen.
He's on to topics wide as loyalty, respect for law,
and macaroons, and fear.  I beckon the waitress near
and ask:
Could I just have another scone?
The afternoon moves on towards an evening,
which no-one present dares to guess.
The hanged man stills.
I shall bury him, he was my servant.

NaPoWriMo - 2017 - April 15th - The impossibility of Elspeth Spangler

This one languished for a long time as just the first strophe and the idea of releasing the mice.  However on the train yesterday it got its moment to shine...

Elspeth doesn't shine...  she glows gently if she thinks nobody is looking.

I'm not vegetarian but I like vegetarian food.  And I'm not a cat person, but I'm even less a dog person so I get Elspeth to that extent.



The impossibility of Elspeth Spangler


The woman can't exist.  She does not work
for all hours in the whole-food shop.  She won't
arrive at six to clatter shutters down
and shove the drawer back firmly in the till.
She never checks the racks for misplaced packs
or things that need refill.  She has no chance

encounters with her oldest friend or lunch
outside the vegan café opposite,
and they don't laugh round cauliflower bake
or snort latte at what the teacher said
that day when they freed all the classroom mice
in the unreal childhood many miles ago.

And now she doesn't wander, weary, home,
the day of problems not quite out of mind,
although the ones now gone feel so well done.
There isn’t any hint of rain to damp
her slightly battered funky hat. There’s no
absence of boy or girl back in the flat,

boiling the kettle ready. She doesn’t need
to keep her coat and scarf on while the place
warms through. There is the cat, who adopted her
so many years ago and who awaits
the ceremonial filling of the bowl
as if the World were a real and reliable place.

Courtship

A risky proposition,
earlier today

I went to a launch event for Deadly, Delicate by Kate Garrett, who I'd never met before but who is just as interesting in person as she'd seemed via the internet (this is not true of everybody...)

This is a pamphlet of poems centred around the theme of female pirates (with a degree of historical accuracy plus a dollop of poetic imagination; there's a LGBT angle too.)  It's a great pamphlet, and I recommend it.

(If you wanted something more solid, I also recommend Kate's previous book The Density of Salt; I reviewed it in Antiphon and it was one I really enjoyed...)

Anyway...  there was an open-mic aspect to the book launch and I read Girl, Unaccompanied — which I shall post in a week or so — and also The Man who Ate the World which was in retrospect a mistake, because it's quite a complex poem and the pub (poets in a pub, who'd credit it) was quite noisy by then.

I should have read the following.  Hopefully it will mislead you until the very last line.

---

---

Courtship

I need you -- she is blushing, closer now;
this is in the limo, en route to the hotel --
to take me in a hostile way.  Tell me how
you'll own me.  Talk dirty.  Say you'll sell
subsidiaries and drive your staff
to penetrate my org chart, stripping
assets and rationalise the hell from chaff
in the top brass.  Her breath is hot.  She nips
his ear.  Expose me in the press
where my practices aren't up to scratch
then tie me with injunctions.  I confess
that being in legal knots makes my breath catch.
Slap me in jail...  He's eager for the deal.  It's hard
to think.  She has already cloned his credit cards.

---

Originally also published in Antiphon

The X Thief's Daughter

Where this comes from is a certain class of book where the title is simply the description of a character.  You get these for children's, young adult and full grown up (tm) books with examples such as The Ink Thief, The Book Thief, The Kite Runner, The Memory Keeper's Daughter etc etc...  However I think The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat is a different phenomenon.

These make wonderful titles, capture the imagination and begin the character development right there on the cover...

However, is this style of naming be quite as acceptable to the characters themselves?  Do they get jealous of other characters, who have their actual names in lights on the cover?  Nicholas Nickleby... Anna Karenina... Batman?

And what about the characters whose books are never finished, whose backstories aren't quite completely filled in?

---

---

The X Thief's Daughter...

...drinks ice wine in the sub-basement
of the basement club behind the real.
She has nothing to conceal: she says
too many times, as the frost rose blooms within
her chest.  Her eyes grow dark.  Maybe it's best

the fence does not learn more. The X Thief's
Daughter is complex but direct
in shady negotiations. She sees
the world as chances overlayed
on chaos. What is this whole thing for?

There must be more than this, the normals ask.
So dumb.  "What can I get?"  She asks instead
and peels the false skin from her face.
The X Thief's Daughter knows her place
is nowhere that she's been, or will go.

The X Thief's Daughter is selectively
obscene, but will practice ritual magic
on a  first date.  She gets there late
as a matter of course and has rude words
tattooed, in schoolboy Latin,

in ruder places.  The X Thief's Daughter:
your mother never warned about.
How could she -- so far outside the bell curve
of parental advisory?  She's on
no chart.  The X Thief's Daughter

is all heart, all stomach, all pudenda;
a real but ill-defined character,
discontinuously variable
in every field but gender, and has,
always, that unbound variable

in her back-story -- she has no clue
what was the X her father stole
if any, but this is not a problem;
it's an opportunity.

Going forward

I had an evening out with some people I used to work with...

...who are all still mostly more embroiled with large corporations than I am...

...so I promised one of them I would post this.

---

---

Going forward

The corporation cannot plan
its way out of a paper bag
which—note—is not to say
it doesn't have extensive PowerPoints
to socialise the vision
for the new, division-wide, bag-exit mission
get buy-in from the stakeholders at levels
from CFO to tea lady
and distribute cheap beer and pizza
at revels
that celebrate the dragging of one thousand hapless
employees, kicking and screaming,
into progress, status, overview, coordination,
planning, steering, post-mortem, and kick-off, meetings
at cost of fifty thousand person-hours
or half a million dollars [OpEx]
which is money so well spent
for staying in a paper bag.  Meanwhile

Team Lunchpack—who were spun,
you will recall, from Project Dune and tasked
with building an organisation-wide
flexible container collocation strategy—
have been thinking outside the box,
and now are standing
a touch despondently
outside a cardboard shipping carton,
and wondering where everybody went.

The girl who...

As you may know, I'm something of a fan of Nordic Noire dramas.

Not an fanatical fan.  I'm not the type who can obsesses about a TV series (for the purposes of this discussion, Dr Who isn't a TV series, it's a religion...)  However I do check new Nordic Noire series out when they appear, just to see whether I'm going to enjoy them.

One of the frequent features of these series is strong, eccentric female leads, and this is where this particular poem stems from.  At the time of writing, I was thinking most about Saga Norén from The Bridge (which was on at the time).  However the direct references in the text are to Lisbeth Salander, the original Girl Who... (the films don't 100% do her justice: read the books.)

These are very different characters in several ways, but the big thing they have in common is minds found some way out on the autistic spectrum...  which is another place this poem is coming from.  I often relate strongly to autistic characters.

What else...?  (1) This is skirting the edge of being a sonnet...  (2) Remind me sometime to rattle on about "normal" human psychology and the various spectra within which we are all so carefully positioned.

---

---

The girl who...


tattoos dragons, kicks hornets etc and stands
in the half-furnished apartment smoking/staring
through the picture window while the world
fades monotonically into twilight and snow
takes the evidence. Somebody calls and she grunts,
eyes, hand and cigarette unmoving. Feel the cold as if
we were close, as if there were a closeness here.
We brush a hair from her temple, and click:
the side of her head opens to reveal the steel
wheels spinning and a quiet persuasive hum. Come
back to the front, see the eye, see the smile not for kissing
the face not wholly numb, and rapid-fire summations
of an intellect that takes no prisoners, sees no need,
but speaks: put the body-parts on ice for morning.