Fowler English usage

Fowler English usage

The elliptical hyperhyphen:
used in punctuation
to show no relation
between adjoining clauses;
in speech indicates voiced,
or imaginary pauses;
and, in lists, is for items
that do not exist
or which should have been written
somewhere else.

Two or more can be combined
to indicate a state of mind
which cannot be properly punctuated.

As a general guide,
use this when you can't decide
between an m-dash,
and taking a razor to slash
the document into confetti.

Your keyboard does not have this key --
a pity, since it is much use
but you can add them afterwards
with ink and quill
or for stronger emphasis you will
attach the whole goose.

Review: Paul Brookes "Please Take Change"

Paul Brookes is a poet I know through the internet.  We used to hang out on Poetry Circle, an online forum...

Before I begin this review I must reveal that I live a charmed life.  I have always found it easy to get jobs, and places I have worked have been more akin magical kingdoms, than grey Kafkaesque distopias.

I try to remain aware that this isn't true for everyone (should be... isn't) but awareness is one thing and knowing what living it is like would be something else again.  The main power of this book is it gives you a window into exactly that, and furthermore it paints subtly, neither glorifying, nor playing up to the grimness.

From the biography on the back we discover Paul has been a security guard, postman, admin assistant, call centre advisor, lecturer, poetry performer and now works as a shop assistant.  He has recently been interviewing almost every poet in the UK in  The Wombwell Rainbow Interviews and very interesting they are (you may find yourself, or even myself, in there if you look hard enough...)

This collection draws heavily on Paul's employment history.  Not all of those are the most glamorous of jobs (except "poetry performer" — literally the most glamorous job there is...) and you might expect there's a degree of arduous toil, unsympathetic bosses, wearying drudgery to be expressed.  In this you'd be right, and these poems do reveal a world of quotidian working days.

However, also running through this are threads of razor-sharp observation, human warmth and humour which keep the collection alive and make reading through the 75-odd short poems a light and rewarding experience.

Let's start with:

workaround

some systems don’t work

so you have to do

a work around

when this becomes the system

I don’t know

my bus

takes a detour for roadworks

or accident

something tells me

this is not temporary

I love the sheer universality of the experience related here, I have encountered the same thing in fields as separated as software design and cafeteria queuing; my home town had a "temporary car park" for four decades; and I've even worked for major international corporation entirely devoted to working around the things it failed to address previously.

Also the skillful way everyday language is put to work to illustrate the general principle, but simultaneously narrate the concrete example, is typical of the poems here.  Another that demonstrates this point is:

The List

Their companion gone
old men stoop lower
with less in their basket,

try to recall her shopping list,
was it Robinson's marmalade,
or Hartley's lemonade?

Spam. No she never liked spam.
Never enough fat on bacon.
Yes, I need a receipt, young man

Which is touching, humorous, and heartbreaking in roughly equal measure.  People who do or don't need receipts are a recurring theme, almost a running joke throughout this collection.

These two poems are perhaps a little unusual in using a symbol as a metaphor for something larger.  More pieces are essentially biographical, in the sense of relating wonderfully observed moments and characters from the author's working life, take:

Two Lads

at my till. I put first lad's
goods through while second

says to his mate,
I'm gonna get a kitchen knife
and rip your twatting head off.

Blip

I'm gonna put it in shoebox
Set fire to it. Piss on the remains.

Blip.

Do you want a receipt? I ask
the first lad.

There's the slyly comic receipt again :-) and also here is the acute observation of real everyday behaviour, skilfully juxtaposed against the mundanity of the till queue.

This is a fascinating collection.  The early copy I had was a little unevenly edited, but I hope that will be sorted out in the final edition.  The scenes from everyday life are compelling, and the understated humour and good will with which they are presented lifts them well above the mundane to a plane of their own.

The conflicts, insults and travails presented here are something to be accepted, but not surrendered to, and the ultimate message we take from this is one of optimism and — I said it before — good humour.

Lets just end with this:

Embarrassed

One of two young girls with flushed cheeks
who buy cans of coke and energiser asks

Please can I buy a lotto scratch card, #7?
I ring for the manager as per rule.

He asks the girls for i.d.
No. I haven't. I'm eighteen.

We need to see your I.D. he says.
You're an embarrassment, one replies

How dare you embarrass me?
Both girls flounce out the shop.

Did you hear what she called me?
Says the manager, smiling ear to ear.

Please Take Change is published by  Cyberwit.

Paul's other books are available here.

The difference between a poetry open mic and the Albert Hall...

A mighty organ,
earlier today...

I go regularly to a poetry open mic now, it's a great evening and the only way to expose WIP poems to the real world in a performance rather than page context.

Standing up in front of people to read poetry terrified me at first, although the knee trembling has slowly declined over the last year.

Which brings us to the topic of confidence.  In one view confidence is precisely that characteristic which enables us to stand in front of an audience and recite your poetry.  It is often said that it is something you either have or do not, and this is very true.

I would just like to add from my own observations, however, that ninety percent of the people who do have confidence shouldn't.

Imposter syndrome: it's what the worthwhile people have.

---

---

The difference between a poetry open mic and the Albert Hall...


...lies mainly in the grand piano.
I wish I had a grand piano here
to hide behind.  Serious props!  It must be nice
to let them take the strain of breaking
the audience's hush; to let the instrument speak,
make clear there's something here to hear
a piano could do all that for me but...
can we do better?

How about an organ?

I don't mean some cheesy Hammond
electric thing, or even a theatre organ that rises
unexpectedly through the floor to explode
your expectations,
no...  this was the Albert Hall, remember.

I mean a world-class pipe organ,
rising from the stage, stage upon stage
to fill all available space with keyboards and stops
and pipes and valves and plaster grapes and flourishes
of gilded angel's heads.  An organ which, in fact,
neither Captain Nemo,
nor the Phantom of the Opera
would be embarrassed to play.

If the instrument is grand enough
then like the most committed electronic bands
-- their banks of keyboards, mixing desks and amps --
the audience need not be sure
a performer is in there at all

and I (we're back with the organ now)
could set the manuals on automatic,
climb to a vibrating eyrie, somewhere in the pipework,
and watch the audience
through powerful binoculars
lip read who makes what aside to whom
at special moments in the tune; note
who has to make a toilet run,
which melody they choose
to cover their retreat,
and are they embarrassed.

And in this hypothetical world,
I will always play an encore
but the audience will never know I did.

Sept 7th - When there's a murder in an old, old movie...

When there's a murder in an old, old movie...


Please try to keep sand off the body!
The SOCO shouts
for the seventeenth time.
However, with great solemnity,

and at one quarter speed
Wilson, Kepple and Betty continue dancing
the sand dance just outside the crime-scene tape.
Oy you!  Screams DI Blenkinsop,

I saw you hook that glove up with your cane,
Chaplin!  He fumes.  Let's have more happy/sad
clowning from you, and less sneaking off with clues
to check out in your own time.

In fact, he concludes, why don't you go
find Laurel and Hardy
and ask what's taking them so long
fetching me a bloody stepladder...

What kind of talk is that?

I posted a preliminary version of this during NaPoWriMo back in April, but since then I've revised it a bit, and also I read it at Gorilla Poetry to general approval — so I feel reasonably happy with calling it "finished".

This is not about what it is ostensibly about — obviously so, because if language did not exist then the poem couldn't either.  So where this comes from is my dissatisfaction with overly-academic analysis of literary subjects (in contrast to my mockery of under academic treatment in some other areas...) 

Basically what I am saying here is, never ask me for an "artist's statement" on a poem, because I'll say something like "I tried to get the right words in the right order..." and completely mean it.

Language is a phenomenon backed by the full sophistication of the human brain, and the utter incomprehensibility of the human psyche, only a god could actually analyse it meaningfully; everybody else is faking...

---

---

What kind of talk is that?


Language does not exist…

not in the sense of something we can touch,
attain, pass from hand to hand, feel the grain.  Even language
the shared delusion is an illusion.  We all understand chocolate cake,
but only I recall Paul, at two years old, smothered in the stuff...

Also the higher the fewer;
there's less to agree the more abstract we go: my love
is not your love; and my sovereignty
doesn’t exist at all.

And now, you have the cheek
to talk of things that I don't even know:
you say you like kayaking
but I have never experienced the semi-resonance
of millimeter-thick fibreglass rebounding
from underwater geography, or the feel
of near ice water draining from a helmet.


Language does not exist…
the dictionary says otherwise.
The words in the book of lexical lore
will claim to, with precision, pin a meaning on every
possible utterance. They do not... cannot...
dictionaries do not exist.

Language isn’t defined or declared,
it isn’t even functional at heart. It’s metaphorical.

When we get high, here on the hill,
with the stepladder,
you being very tall;
while your guitar solo goes up and up;
because you've been promoted, by a higher power;
and your salary is now so much,
but your meat’s off;
your electricity is strong;
your church is formal;
and your fashion sense is very sharp today.

All this is “high”
but the only way three octaves above middle C
resembles rotting meat,
is buried deep in our psychology.


Language does not exist…
not as something fixed
which you can grasp with thought or pen.
Continual flux is all there’s ever been:
spellings, meanings and usages
shifting beneath our tongues
like extreme sushimi.

You, I hope, understand me.
Shakespeare, however, would get me less
and Chaucer might think I was speaking
a foreign language.

I take my words back,
I take them back in time until,
somewhere maybe in the 9^th or 10^th centuries
we reach a point where they have no meaning...


...because language does not exist.
Not even in the other direction.
My words are of course
recorded for posterity, but after I die and as they age
what people understand fades.
Until there comes a moment
when my great, great, great, great grandchildren
—factoring, loneish their fluxward inspace—
wonder quite what planet I was from.

If I was truly great,
people would update me
once per generation,
but we can't all be Shakespeare
—if nothing else Shakespeare's already done that.
So there!  That's us evolving once again.


Language does not exist…
Je suis un éléphant.  I might say,
if I was French,
and an elephant, and those who are the sorts
who understand French elephants would shrug
expressively
and think I stated the obvious

but my words would be gibberish
to the less linguistically endowed.

English exists,
French exists,
and they’re languages, all right...
but they are not language itself, which does not exist.

English/French dictionaries, especially, do not exist.

Language is a maelstrom, language is a storm.
People think they pin it down, control it...
define it;
may as well bottle the hurricane.
Grammarians claim they can explain
and lay down every part of speech in grammar books.

Grammar books do not exist
and as for the people who write them:
I've never met one.


But... if language does not exist then...
why, we are free!

No ploddy, tetrapody emphraslement for me!
No lexical cling.  Talk toboggan listening
all everness towards myself true wordy
and ultimatic infiltrate the thing
of done magnificence, superlative, and evermore unstopped.

Nobody can stop me from saying this
and they cannot touch me for it...

...because language does not exist.

U.F.Ocracy

Alternative Forms of Government
(an occasional series)

Number 3


U.F.Ocracy


The Air Force issues an official statement that government does not exist, however leaked documents show that they were seriously investigating the possibility in the 50s and 60s.

A video surfaces on the internet which purports to show the autopsy of a political candidate recovered from a crashed campaign bus near Roswell, New Mexico in the late 1940s.  The picture quality is poor, and grainy, and filmed in low light with a hand-held camera, but whatever the creature is, it is hard to believe it is human...

Many people report close encounters with political parties.  Some claim to have even been taken inside the party, exposed to "unearthly logic", and in some cases unlikely sex acts.  Political organisations (or "saucers") are reportedly able to accelerate far faster than any conventional vehicle and change direction suddenly to avoid embarrassingly close investigation.

On election nights, voters gather with cameras and flasks of soup on hillsides where political encounters are rumoured have occurred.  Everybody stares at a patch of sky slightly to the left, or slightly to the right, and later swears they were paralysed by an unearthly beam that confirmed their pre-existing beliefs.

All those in favour, raise your right hand to greet the humanoid silhouettes walking out of the blinding light; all those opposed, mutter something about weather balloons and ignore the sunburn acquired in the dead of night...

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 21st - So, I said

The prompt here was a poem with overheard speech in it.

Sonnet again.  It is my default setting when I do a form.

Interestingly I have known people like this, not diplomats, but who use rudeness as a form of affection, and who even use it to test new acquaintances — if anyone takes offence: well you don't want the effort of people that difficult anyway...



So, I said


So I said: you are a diplomat, are you?
Because I had by chance happened to hear
him call the Finish Attaché a weird-
arsed hybrid of a reindeer and a shrew
and he said: I'll tell you, since we have a while.
My brand of statecraft is my very own
and amongst the cognoscenti I'm well known
for slandering my best friends with a smile

and I can never change because all like
me how I am.  I can't be too correct,
except... just sometimes when I want to crack
their composure, well then I need to go icily
polite -- never fails.  I know he'll be a chum
'cos as he went he said I was plain dumb.

NaPoWriMo - 2017 - April 11th - Towards a theory of knowledge

When I put up my April 9th poem, I was only a few days late, and I was very pleased because I'd nearly caught up with the alleged one per day nature of NaPoWriMo.  Since then I've not done well at all, I've been quite busy and also quite tired and poetry just doesn't seem to happen for me when I'm tired.

I've also not been very inspired by any prompts I've seen, which I suspect is another aspect of the tiredness.

Anyway I have now managed to write this.  It's not from any prompt but rather six lines of notes that I've had around for years.  I'm also not very happy with the character "she" as she's a bit of a cypher, even allowing for the fact that the two characters ("she" and "you") in this are only really caricatures.

However it's what I had time for, so here you go, a belated poem for the 11th.


Towards a theory of knowledge


Everything you think you know is wrong
or at least grotesquely out-of-date.  The speed of light
crawls, glacier-urgent, towards you past her empty plate...
Whole nanoseconds pass, she starts to frown,
and do not get me started on the sluggishness of nerves:
ion gates creak open, electric charge
only just starting to move
and maybe, in some previous life, you were unwise
to criticise her shoes.

Everything you think you know is wrong
or at least statistically poor, you've sampled her
at most four times this weak,
a fistful of data points and who's to say
what subtle changes may have happened
beneath the resolution of Student's t-test
for a population of this size
while you were off working on another dataset.

Everything you think you know is wrong
and philosophically suspect
solipsism cannot be disproved
and if you're moved to say
the Universe is vast and so complex:
it is no thing you could express
and thus you claim you cannot be
imagining reality, or even just the slope
of her nose -- well, sure, OK, there's something there
outside your skull, but still no proof
that she exists in anything like the form you hope.

Everything you think you know is wrong
your brain is built of only one device
-- the neurone --
and yes, you have a billion
but I know no proof
that says precisely what the wetware
can or can't embrace.  We know, for example:
face recognition is strong,
you did not kiss her sister for all that long
but there could be so many things
you cannot ever grasp --
although that slap was fairly comprehensible.

Everything you think you know is wrong
your base psychology is tuned
not to experience reality, but rather
to focus on those bits of it that get you by,
that get you fed, that get you sex, healthy children,
a seat closer to the fire, avoid pain,
and maybe another younger woman on the side
-- which is really just the healthy children thing again.
Oh yes, protest you understand
politics, economics,
the servicing of the small, about-town cars
but you don't know, you really don't
if your core program only goes this far...
and way beyond there lie the deep, bleak truths
that you will never see
or, more subtly, be able to accept:
like those things that she just said.
Were you even listening?

Everything you think you know is wrong,
quantum physics stringing you along
with the idea that the world makes sense
but underneath and not so nice
it seems to roll dice
and there's a chance, tiny but real,
that at any moment it might
rip off the concealing overlay
of sensibility and start to play
with the whole non-local,
anything-might-happen, no consistency thing.
And now she's talking to her ex?

Everything you think you know is wrong
and the quantum serves us also up another mystery
the past can only be explained
as a sum over histories
where just as anything might happen next
with some probability
however small, then in the other direction
in the past, there's nothing at all
which didn't happen
it's just most of it has a magnitude so small
that it can be neglected
and this is why you feel you can explain
how Friday night, is not as she suspects.
You weren't out with the sister again
but home all evening with the phone off the hook
and no lights on.

This really could have been the case, after all:
everything she thinks she knows is wrong.

NaPoWriMo - 2017 - April 9th - Nocturna -- unquiet

The challenge was to write a nine line poem and some examples of form were given.  I've never written a nocturna before, it's nine lines, iambic pentameter and has an ada bdb cdc rhyme scheme...


Nocturna -- unquiet

I never should so late at night eat cheese
although that Stilton is so fine on toast
I can well do without such dreams as these

I started trying to take you to the park
I thought to buy ice-cream, play perfect host
but now we're in the graveyard and it's dark

and creepy, gloomy, all in mist bedecked
but this is my dream, I could be the ghost!
I'll jump out on you for the best effect...

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

Red fish, blue fish...

This one was written from a prompt during NaPoWriMo this year, I forget what the prompt was, put possibly something quite distant from what I actually wrote.

Fish famously have only a three seconds of memory—this is of course untrue.

People famously will all be happy come the revolution—this is of course untrue.

Goldfish famously possess no revolutionary zeal—this is of course...

---

---

Red fish, blue fish...


Under the bridge

Under the bridge

Through the weed

Through the weed

Past the buzzing pump

Past the buzzing pump

Into the current

Into the current

Whee!

Whee!

Under the bridge

Under the bridge

Through the... hey!

Through the-- Hey?

Yes.  Hey!

What?

I just now thought, and have you ever thought:
the quality of fishness is the same
in each and every day we play no sport,
make no love, sing no song; we hunt no rhino, tame
no fairy creatures.  We just go round and round
within the same old rut.  I cannot put
my fin on it, but there's something profound
about the World.  We swim with our eyes shut

and do not see.  I heard a joking man:
he asked if we had ever heard the one
about the two fish in the tank, where neither
one could drive the great machine.  They had no plan,
you see?  So if our chance should ever come...
let's seize the day.  I'll captain, you're the driver.

This again?

It has to be said.  Solidarity brother!

Anyway...
Past the buzzing pump

Past the buzzing pump

Into the current

Into the current

Whee!

Whee!

Under the bridge...

Acquaintance

Uriah Heap who, had he known
Mr Jethencorp, would not have presumed
upon the acquaintance.

Charles Dickens knew a thing or two!

And the principle things he knew about were:

1. Characters
2. Serialising a story into handy sized parts
3. Ending parts on a cliffhanger
   (A technique later used to great effect in Flash Gordon...)

None of which means I'm not prepared to mock a little...



(The sound quality here maybe isn't quite up to the usual standard.  Please remember that a shoestring would actually represent a 300% increase in my recording budget...)

---

---

Acquaintance

My dear Mr Jethencorp, may I express delight?
How wonderful it is, that you are here tonight
and I wonder, friend, if I could prevail
upon the strength of long acquaintance
for a pint of ale?

...

Say no more, Mr Jethencorp, I would not desire
to make you uncomfortable, glum or perspire
with any hint of awkwardness or strain.
If you cannot spare the money --
no need to explain.

...

Why yes, Mr Jethencorp, I understand your claim
that in truth "Jethencorp" is no part of your name
but our friendship, possessed of such perfection,
I had to construct some term of affection
for all I have known you just a little time.

...

As little as a minute? Yet I have such respect
I quite failed to notice my great neglect
in asking your name. So "Jethencorp"
I coined for you which somehow expressed
the complex emotions inside my chest—

in deference I leave the exact pronunciation to you.
And now, I regret, I must bid you adieu
and wander along to see what I can do
for the price of- but ah!
Who do I see at the end of the bar?

A man, he looks quite well-to-do...
Why? It's dear Mr Scratsenfrew,
allow me to introduce you...

The police in different voices

He Do the Police in Different Voices was T. S. Eliot's working title for The Wasteland.  Eliot was quoting Dickens:

...Sloppy is a beautiful reader of a newspaper. He do the Police in different voices.

The idea for this poem sprang to me fully formed one day.  The idea being to take a narrative, such as might feature in a detective or police procedural genre novel, and tell it using different characters to provide the different voices.

I'm not sure whether the idea of using historical characters was there from the beginning...  I think so, because I started looking for a suitable philosopher very soon.  When I hit on Heidegger, who was infamously sympathetic to the Nazis, then that gave me the fully formed idea of using European historical characters who lived through WWII.

Magritte lived in occupied Belgium.  Stanley Unwin was a Morse code operator at the BBC.  Marcel Marceau (Marcel Mangel) was a hero of the French Resistance and claimed to have first developed his miming as a way of keeping children quiet while smuggling refugees.

Unwinese is a marvellously expressive language (marvespress languicity uply grail) and I recommend its study to all those who are truly serious about linguistics.

---

---

The police in different voice


DS Martin Heidegger

Must crime imply a criminal?
—is what we need to know.
Let us consider evidence,
the crime, the criminal,
and the theory of the crime
as separate ontological domains.

Let us bag the remains
and also these fragile fragments
from the floor.

The body is being dead,
the knife is being on the ground,
the fragments have a quality of brokenness...

...however, I shall show
that evidence is not fact,
fact not real,
and reality is not "Being"
in any sense I can relate to
and also the witness may have lied.

DI Rene Magritte

Ordinary objects in extraordinary light:
some object did not hang, unsupported,
and when it hit the ground it broke—

why?  Did the victim or the assailant smoke?
And if so how?  We may believe what we perceive
paints a picture of what took place
but this image is treacherous
as any other, and these fragments
are not a pipe.

DCI Marcel Marceau

(Because the Chief Inspector is a man of actions
more than words, his statement will be read
by the renowned criminologist,
Professor Stanley Unwin.)

Observe the chiefspector looksee the crimescenery
and glassnify large-up the tiny bits
the sergeant found. Indeed not a pipesmokey
but a woodflute! Commency source
this crime outside the buskstreet. Where

nothing for but bravely clamber the roadlength as the wind
puff to blow him back the way he first strole in
and at the finial end bang slap
straight into the suspicial stranger
lurking the other way.

But what now?  Oh no!  The criminole
somehow identitheive the chiefspector
and he's carriage of misjustice slap bangy locked up
trying to find his way out of the invisicube
for thirty years without parade.

For your convenience and safety...

Rampant commercialism, earlier today

Apparently it is Black Friday, although it isn't of course because I live in England (where we don't have anything to do with this kind of silliness) and Yorkshire (where we don't have anything to do with this kind of silliness) and Sheffield (where we don't have anything to do with this kind of silliness.)




This is an old, old poem and very silly indeed.   (It's not the quantity of silliness we object to, it is the quality...)  It is also one which, entirely unprompted, my son once memorised—making it my most-quoted work.


I can't help but think that Anger Bob would probably have something to say about this, well...  he'd mumble or maybe shout about it.

---

For your convenience and safety...

Carting in the shopping mall
foody in the hall of offers
coinly coffer outwards flowing
smiley, knowing, through a camera candidly.

Imaged in the mirror beasty
planning feasty for the week
sotto-voce speaking we
of tea and further meals.

But in securitoid recordly
imagined me and imaged you
what we do fully engraved
and patient saved on viddy-tape.

Risk the machine our souls to prey,
before we pay, if we should die,
and I and you archived to be
entombly on C.C.T.V

By the book...

Funny isn't that easy to do in poetry, and sometimes isn't productive.  Amusing is easier to achieve, and I think less likely to get in the way of the poem.  That's what I've done here...  or so I think.  I hope you agree...

Kidderminster is a town in Worcestershire.  Croydon is a place in London.  The British Museum is where we keep our loot, and well worth an afternoon's perusal if you are in London.

In this there are two characters, represented by being left justified and right justified, respectively.  There's also a occasional narrator, who is centred, but then aren't they all?

Feel free to read it in three distinctive voices.

I had forgotten, but this was another poem from Making Contact...

---

---

By the book

She reads books,
this is where it all begins.
"Planning the crime of the century,"
was just a way to pass a rainy day
in the library
in Kidderminster

but here she is
leading Crusher, Sparks and The Countess
through the British Museum at three a.m.
with a silenced pallet truck.

He reads books
this is how it all begins.
He read "Lives of The Real Detectives,"
which seemed harmless enough
waiting for the 7:15.

The radio coughs nervously,
a glance at Constable Granger,
a nod to Dave from the Art Squad.
They've all seen the shadows moving
behind the glass.

She's read: "Alarm Systems Explained."

He's studied:
"Weakness of the Criminal Mind"
at some length.

"Transport of Art Treasures."

"Traps—their design and construction,"

"The Great Escapologists."

"Anatomy of a Manhunt."

"Losing Yourself in London."

"Forensics for Beginners."

An abandoned factory in Croydon—
armed police converge.

But she's memorised:
"Victorian Sewers Revealed."

And he's left
flipping the pages
of "Sealed Room Mysteries,
Volume 4."

She opens a small bookshop.

He's in there buying
"Should you Trust Books?"

They nod.