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...

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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.

What is her mission here on Earth?

This was recently on the front page of Poetry Circle which is a great poetry magazine/forum site with lots of active members and a lot of energy.  A good place to check out...

What it is this about?  Well there's loneliness and isolation, wistful longing for another person...  but I think mostly this is about the awkwardness of adolescence and growing up.  Boy wants girl.  Boy doesn't understand girls.  Boy speculates wildly...

...obviously it works the same for any other combination of genders, and the gender of the protagonist is in fact wholly in the gift of the reader... is in fact a sort of 'everyperson'; a symbol for any or everyone.

One day, maybe, she'll speak to us and everything will change.

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What is her mission here on Earth...


...and do I even waste what chance I have
lounging beside my locker, checking-out
the girl from Mars?  Nobody ever saw
her father's car: so maybe she gets dropped
at five a.m. by shuttle-pod somewhere far

beyond the football ground.  She has no clique,
not even in the default group for freaks
and friendless geeks--I know; I've run with them
myself.  How can you stand outside outsiders?
Unless intelligence, so alien

broods silent in one eye?   It sees but does
not do; it won't join in; her hands so thin:
she writes machine-like, awkward and a touch
frustrated, as if  paper with only two
dimensions is so quaint.  She ain't stupid

in maths, she writes the answer first, before
the working out.  And think of Martian sex!
Does she have tentacles...?  Scratch that.  Relax...
Focus on facts.  She's drifted through these halls
for three years now, with always half a smile,

an emissary from mission control;
or maybe robot telepresence rig,
that sort of thing: space-probe or bomb-disposal
mechanism driven by a soul, distant,
the far end of a string that's pulled so tight

out of an empty tin.  I'll ask again:
What is our mission here on Earth?

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.

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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

NePoWriMo - 2017 - April 30th - You there!

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

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



You there!

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

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

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

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

You there, you!  I am talking to you.

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.

NaPoWriMo - 2017 - April 14th - Haunted

An old unfinished one I dug up and converted to electricity.

Quite by coincidence this (almost) fits of the prompts I saw elsewhere for April 14th: A poem about friendship — I think that ever-so-ever-so-long-ago friends are still friends, aren't they?

Haunted


Somebody steps on the creak-board now.

The door is closed, bolt unthrown
when someone treads that selfsame creaking board
so forty years just come undone and blow with my smoke
through the empty window pane.  There was a time

when from that single tread I could have told
exactly which of the three of them
the other three haunts,
the other three-quarters
of the definitive clique
the high school slightly ahead of the curve
but not so geek squad: Becky, Dave or Edward

was stood on that selfsame creaky board
but no more — those four decades
will not be put aside. Time goes in a moment
but the moments then remain, elapsed,
forever.

I've always known that I must come again
to haunt this ghost-filled building in the trees
but who in turn is haunting me
what spectre, childhood or young adult,
stands now upon the landing.  Why don't
they push the door?

Time was, we four, came here
to drink and smoke, snog
in various combinations
— Dave/Ed is the only one they won’t admit to —
and talk about how the World will be
when we’ve drunk from the secret cup

of growing up. And here I am
fast-forward to this moment
forty-odd years and no leagues hence
when all dreams are no more
and how our lives turned out are now well know.
Somebody steps on the creak-board now.
Please do not push the door.

NaPoWriMo - 2017 - April 4th - A blue star rises, and who of us can say

From this prompt about the Enigma Variations -- although as ever not directly from that...  I came the long way around.


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

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?

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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.

Boy/Girl/Thing

This may be the newest poem I have ever posted, I was editing it as recently as August 7th...  although, as is common for me, it had its origin some years ago and had to sit around in my subconscious/backlog until I was ready, willing and able to complete it.

This is also one of the hardest pieces of text that I've written for some time and the explanation for that is chock full of *spoilers* so stop here and go to the poem first if you want to experience it without preconceptions...



Ready now?  OK, so this is my attempt to get beyond gender.  Gender has been one of the major social battle grounds of the late 20th and and early 21st centuries, and great progress has been made — at least in some parts of the World.

So in this poem I'm attempting to look ahead to a time when gender is completely sorted out, and I'm using the trick of writing in the voices of two intelligent machines that don't have gender.  This way they can look, as it were, from the outside.  I've also added (off stage) some sort of do-gooders who are trying to "give" gender to the two machines — presumably on the basis that it is their (human?) right — but missing the point that the machines may be happier as they are...

...which of course echoes various historical cases of people thinking they know what's best for other people...

...I've even attempted to suggest that wiping over with a lint-free cloth is something of a sex act for these machines (I don't see that sex without gender is at all contradictory...) and finally, just for kicks and characterisation, one machine has a crush on the other (which again doesn't absolutely require gender.)

So why was that hard to write?  Just because English isn't designed to portray conversations between sapients without gender.  We only have the one ungendered pronoun: "it" which is far too loaded to sprinkle around unexplained.  So I had to resort to a certain amount of syntactic trickery (like assuming the person now speaking is the one whom we just just watched acting) and also repeating the two names more often than is common for casual writing.


And as it happens the whole exercise is a complete failure, because having gone to all that trouble: used gender-neutral names, avoided gendered pronouns and generally twisted the text...  I still think of one character as more male and the other as more female—damn!

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Boy/Girl/Thing


This whole damn gender thing  fucks me, says Viv,
so many different ways.  A tiny nod,
a shrug, sets sensor clusters all asway—
and Chris has always been in love
and Chris will never say

one word to the machine called Vivian.
Working together now, they pull
a rusty barrel, probe the casing.
Viv tastes, grimacing; throws the tongue away.
Phenols again, we're broadly screwed
to sell this crap.  A sigh—we'll have to crack
it down to short-chain feed.
A wiggle in the nether parts and Chris
has never seen a sight so fine
as hydrocarbon plant deploys.  Meanwhile, Viv

still ranting on the need for sex:
You see the bit that gets to me...
remember how they showed that vid:
two squirming pink things on a bed.
It bites an alloy thumb.  For me
the only sexy bit was how they'd come:
their car I thought was someone I'd enjoy.

And all the while poor Chris,
while not unhappy being an "it",
feels some appeal in girls and boys,
and beds; and is content to rub a cloth
across his best friend's heat exchanger grills,
but wonders if there's something more.  So asks,
and instantly feels shy: Tonight
maybe let's try again...
but this time both be boys?

Lanscape with Distant Prospect

This poem comes from two places.  Firstly the idea that a person, internally, is a sort of world of their very own where their own normality prevails...  and that to really know somebody, you have to know their land.


And secondly from Ursula K Le Guin's marvellous Earthsea novels, which I read long ago when I was young and have re-read several times in the intervening years, whilst quite against my wishes I grew older.


One of the Earthsea novels, the third if my memory serves, is called The Farthest Shore.  We need not concern ourselves with the plot of this book here, merely the title is enough of a phrase to conjure with.  The whole drive of this poem is to reach that phrase having journeyed sufficiently to generate a sense of arrival, expectation, and potential.

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Landscape with distant prospect


Do you want that girl, whose eyes
expand so wide?  She drinks the world
through doors in her face, pours it into a covert place
of her own devising, and perilous
for those not-she—but it could be if you spoke to her,
casual, in some corridor or halfway up a stair,
you might be acknowledged with a word,
a nod, the one raised eyebrow
of a demi-goddess, whose halo, cocked
at a jaunty angle, illuminates a shade too much.

Peek into her eyes now.  Do you want to enter,
walk her world?  New-cut staff in hand
and battered boots, trailing, very steady, from the hills;
cupping one hand in rills of freezing water
and coming to love the bleakness of a land
never shaped by human sensibility
and where the thorn trees
get twisted all on their own.
Yet there is a track, faint, but with occasional cairns
of fist-sized stones.  You can drop into the forest,

build a small fire, eat fresh-killed rabbits
that you roast on spits, expectorate
gristly bits back into the flame. At night
you might dream that the girl herself came
and stood, wordless, in the shadow of some tree
and in the morning there would be nothing
but the early rook poking warm ashes for a beakful
of burnt meat.  As so you go day-by-mile, by foot to the sea

where, against probability, a ship rides at anchor
in a sheltered bay.  He is here, the captain will say,
to discover if the ocean has another side,
and you will sign-up for this crew, to chance all rigours
and violence of storm, becalming, starvation,
the vigours of pirates, and sea monsters
that rise, silent, from the depths to stare
placid and Delphic, and for no reason you could know.

But you will go for half a chance
of footprints on the farthest shore.

The dream lover of Edward Zuminga (writing as Theodora Sitné Jones)

Tropical romance, late yesterday evening

Here is another pseudonymous poem from our false personas (OK personae) competition at Christmas.

Here I was adopting a more carefully realised character than Mr Three Eighths in that Theodora is known to be the eldest daughter of an ex-patriot English painter, raised on a smallish (unnamed) Pacific island, educated (badly) in Southern California, and finally settled back in the UK where she can experience properly grim weather...

This poem, however, dates from her earlier, more tropical, period.

Adopting a false persona can be strangely liberating.  The first instinct is, of course, to change gender.  No idea why.  Possibly we all believe (wrongly) that this conceals our identities.  Maybe we think (again wrongly) that it changes our writing more than any other factor.  Whatever the reason it is a fact the imaginary personalities in our competition showed the reverse ratio of sexes compared to the real personalities.

After that you try to change style, form and subject matter.  Not much I could have done about the middle one, as I use all sorts of forms.  Also I suspect I failed a bit at the first as reading this again it does sound rather like me (although I think almost nobody spotted me, so maybe I'm wrong...)

As for subject matter, well it's a guy with a strangely-described, imaginary lover.  I'd never write about that :-)

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The dream lover of Edward Zuminga


is carved from butter and lives, besieged
by dishes, knives, napkin rings
and all that mundane paraphernalia
from a roadside eating-house that also isn't here.

She limps slightly and speaks
of it only when plied with quantities
of drink, over-priced from the only bar
open after the flies are all asleep.

She has never told the truth.
She wears deep cotton
colours, to contradict her skin.
She believes in coincidence,

that her sister's name is the same as hers
by chance, or possibly bribery.
Edward cannot love her
in the manner she deserves.

For all that she exists
only inside his noontime slumbered eye,
she visits infrequently
is cool about gifts
has never spent the night.