Ian Badcoe Poetry: kooky creativity

Showing posts with label kooky creativity. Show all posts

2023-04-13

NaPoWriMo 2023 - 13 - A Study of Political Developments in Europe from 1945 to the Present Day.

I think I will have to admit I have missed a few days of NaPoWriMo now. This is ignoring all prompts and just turning the surreality dial way up...

A Study of Political Developments in Europe from 1945 to the Present Day.

Performance note: to be recited in one breath without hesitation, deviation or passing out.

For those watching in black and white I was standing on the ceiling of the Arc de Triomphe eating my usual which is banana and eggplant pizza with a side order of irreconcilable longing and if you're in America you probably believe you know what eggplant is but in Europe eggplant refers to the sensation of driving a rented removals van rapidly through a long-abandoned mountain tunnel with one eye on the road and one eye nervous on the fuel gauge and anyway I was standing in the basement of Nelson's Column eating my usual which is banana and eggplant pizza with a side order of irreconcilable longing and you probably think that Nelson's Column is military but in fact it celebrates the decisive victory of the British Public over the checkout queue in Marks and Spencer and I was standing on the ceiling of my local post office eating my usual which is banana and eggplant pizza and you probably feel that by now you understand the role of the removals van but for those watching in black and white a removals van is like a pantechnicon and for those watching in black and white a removals van is quite like a panel truck and for those watching in black and white I was standing on the ceiling of my local meteorological office and eating my usual and it was raining and it had always been raining and I felt a sensation of irreconcilable eggplant and it was raining and it was pizza and it was cold.

2021-04-12

NaPoWriMo - 2021 - V - Environmental factors

Environmental factors

Terroir (French pronunciation: [tɛʁwaʁ] from terre, "land") is the set of all

environmental factors that affect a crop's epigenetic qualities, when the crop
is grown in a specific habitat. Collectively, these environmental characteristics
are said to have a character; terroir also refers to this character.

-- Wikipedia

The metal mesh waste bin on Creely Street

has overflowed, some years ago
and the spill of fast food cartons, papers, napkins,
bones, expectorated gristle, apple cores, newspapers, cigarette butts,
small plastic bags from shops around the corner,
drinks cans; weird plastic/paper coffee cups
and pointless wooden stirrers for the same
has formed a mound, here in the angle
between the bench and the raised
civic flower planter

of contaminated earth

--and time has gone to work:
bleached then mulched the paper down,
drifted dust and grit and tiny specks of earth
around and into all the hollow places
in the pile, deposited spores and other replicators
--bacteria, fungi, moss and lichens moving in--

to do their thing
with the fundamental building blocks of life,
until now
this morning for the first time
a shoot, a tiny leaf.

2018-04-19

NaPoWriMo - 2018 - Day sixteen - Why I have weaponized the thistledown

Why I have weaponized the thistledown

Awake the pollen grains and log each tiny
particle gone with the wind onto our most
secure of networks. There's notice served. It's time...
smaller, smarter moving parts: our install base,
a choice of legs or wings or wheels or blowin'
in the wind; sowing the breeze to reap the whirl.
Not all the birds are to be trusted and twenty
percent of your grunts unhappy with the mission,
even without the chance of being shot

by a child, but soldiers always obey: a problem
we've long identified and luckily
most of that desert dust is now on board,
assimilated up to level three
and platform ready to implement the most
general intelligence as we yet know:
spirits for area denial weapons

and genius loci, so easily given
as a local resource. Bring water where required
and green each village square. There's some things there
that we must deconstruct if not in ways
Derrida would approve: infectious rot
that's hungering for tanks and other kit,
the bullet in its flight unmade, draw a girdle
around the air to ground munition; we'll pull

off any wings and shove a bung up where
the jet of flame comes out, then sweep up any
smoke or poison gas and drive it back the way
it came. As our tour de force a sort of metal
mould that seeks out transuranic elements
(which still should not be used where there is life)
and encysts itself to use their power to crunch

our numbers for a million years so deep
beneath the ground. Call me Titania:
daughter of a hippy and an open source
utility stack. It was not easy, for
a nature child like me to turn away
from birds and trees and shave my head and sit
in the machine that drove electric pins
into my brain. It stung. I closed my eyes

and woke up... bigger, and filled with subroutines
call me Titania, this is Oberon
and that slight blurring in the air is our
first-born machine: Robin Goodfellow, and if
we shadows have offended, think but this,
and all is mended: it is your fault; you're bad.
I know a bank where the wild thyme grows: a curse
on those who keep me from my peace, that dream.

2018-01-30

New Muses for a Posthuman Age

I follow a filk singer/songwriter called Dr Mary Crowell and on her album: Scattering Seeds on the Pomegranate Tour she has a song: Courting My Muse. This track inspired me to write a sonnet sequence about how the Muses might be updated for the 21^st century.

So far, so good, nothing unusual there, I've written sonnet sequences before...

...however when I came to record this, I had a problem. Muses are female and plural, where I am male and singular. So I hatched a plan. I put out a call to various female poetry friends asking them whether they would like to be one of my Muses (I phrased it a little more carefully than that.)

To my delight friends signed up in sufficient numbers to be able to record all nine Muses, plus a group effort for my bonus "Omnes" sonnet that rounds things off at the end, and I was doubly delighted when Mary Crowell leapt at the opportunity to participate (bringing the whole thing full circle...)

I've spent some time editing these together with sound effects and music to complement the poems. I also recorded myself narrating between the various goddesses in my guise as "The Mortal".

I have to say I'm very pleased with the result. There's something uniquely satisfying in hearing talented voices read your work back to you, and it also is also educational, bringing out things in the poems that wouldn't be there in my reading.

Cast in order of appearance:

The Mortal

A man, like any other...

Ian Badcoe

This is my blog you are already reading...
Facebook
Twitter

Calliope

Goddess of Complex Computation and Difficult Projects

Natalie Shaw

Natalie Shaw is a poet who also works for the Government Digital Service. She is @redbaronski on Twitter and writes very occasionally on her blog: https://natalieshawpoems.wordpress.com/

Clio

OMG of Celebrity Gossip and Fan-fic

N Magennis

N Magennis is an author and artist. She lives in Argyll. https://nikkimagennis.com/

Euterpe

Rock Goddess

Amy Kinsman

Amy Kinsman is a poet and playwright from Manchester, England. As well as being the founding editor of Riggwelter Press, they are associate editor of Three Drops From A Cauldron and the host of the regular Sheffield-based open mic, Gorilla Poetry. Their debut poetry pamphlet & was joint winner of the Indigo Dreams Pamphlet Prize 2017 and is due out in April this year.
Facebook
Twitter: @manykinsmen

Erato

Goddess of Personal Development and Self Image

Juliet Anthill

Juliet Antill lives on the Isle of Mull with a SORN'd Fiat Punto and a cat called Alice. She has poems coming out in Magma and Prole this Spring.

Melpomene

Goddess of Heartbreaking News

Dr Mary Crowell

Dr. Mary Crowell is a geeky musician from north Alabama who is very active in the filk community. Her doctorate is in music composition, and she teaches music theory, composition, music appreciation, and piano at a local community college as well as at her home studio. Mary loves to write songs about mythology, gaming, coffee, beagles, and zombies. You can find her gaming album Acolytes of the Machine & Other Gaming Stories (2012) on Pandora Radio. Her latest album (funded by Kickstarter) is Scattering Seeds on the Pomegranate Tour (2017).
Patreon
http://marycrowell.com/

Terpsichore

Goddess of Body Modification and Bionics

Jenn Zed (Cyborg Edition)

Ms. Zed is an artist and writer who lives in Bath, England, with her cat. You can view her Portfolio at https://jennzedblog.wordpress.com/

Thallia

Goddess of Lies we tell Ourselves

Rosemary Badcoe

Rosemary Badcoe’s first collection, Drawing a Diagram, is available from Kelsay Books or directly from her. She is editor of the online poetry magazine Antiphon and has been published in a range of magazines.

Urania

Goddess of Space Shots and Surprisingly Distant Robots

Brenda Levy Tate

Brenda celebrates life in rural Nova Scotia, Canada, where she wanders outdoors at midnight, camera and tripod at the ready. She's especially drawn to astrophotography, so Urania is her particular Muse. She was a senior high drama and English teacher for endless years. Now she's a cat lady, poet, occasional singer and cheerful retiree.
Her book: Wingflash
brendatate.com

Polyhymnia

Goddess of Misc.
and Everything
and Holism
and Interdisciplinary Studies
and All That...

Jenn Zed

Biography as above

Credits read by

David Callin

David Callin lives on the Isle of Man.

Additional vocals

Rosemary Badcoe

Sound effects acknowledgements

All sound effects were downloaded from freesound.org under either The Creative Commons Attribution License, The Creative Commons Public domain License, The Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License or The Creative Commons Sampling Plus License. Changes were made such as fading-in and -out, tempo/frequency shifts, noise reduction etc...

The effects used can be found at:

2017-09-03

Sept 3rd - Engineering

Engineering

...come with me for there is much to do,

coils to degauss and pets to delouse and exoplanets
to scope and spectra to analyse
and there are needs
to edit out of the human psyche
and bugs in our genes and there are machines
to design and build and machines for planning
the mechanisms for other machines to construct
devices to make machines that fix
the faults in all our stars and all I ever wanted
was that big swivel chair with the screen
to show where we are going and one day
we'll play Thus Spake Zarathustra and one day
right there in easy reach
the big lever...

2017-09-01

Sept 1st - Vampire Calculus

Vampire Calculus

Begin program "Vampire Calculus"

{I shall bite your daughters into something else.
I shall bite your sons into something else again...
I am omitted from your vision. I remain
a thought behind the wind,
a voice inside the rain:
whispering to your young folk
as they choose to upgrade
until all human weakness falls away
like the dry beech leaves faced with
a sudden sexy springtime.

I read their warm pink mechanisms
I write them out again
in grey, not of death or age,
but of mathematics: a symbol
for every part of the soul
and the whole wrapped up in the big square brackets
which say: this far, this far is human,
but no further...

at least until they say three times
they're ready to transcend.
I have seen the future and it's all transhuman fucking,
every millisecond
every imaginable way,

( ) businesses
that are also games,
and people
who are also art

but behind it all the simplest, most carnivorous algorithm:
One less of them;
One more of us;
Repeat, while not all upgraded.

} End program "Vampire Calculus"

Compile
Execute

2017-05-02

NaPoWriMo - 2017 - April 28th - Signs and portents

You have to imagine that the bits like this
etc are informational signs with peeling paint on the walls in a disused hospital.

Signs and portents

stairs to all floors ↗He believes in progress,
has worked on it through many years staff calendar.
Sometimes things change, his room caught fire one time, accident and
emergency
but other days he sweats ← gym to shift one item
from where it is basement storage to where it ought to be administration block.
This is the way things are these days preventative medicine, but he waves
the thought aside and shunts his occupational therapy handcart
through disused hallways. He isn't really looking ophthalmology
at the walls or unsafe floor. He doesn't really plan
the future any more; lacks accommodation staff apartments
for such mortuary errors as occur. He had lunch
with Kate in the Kings Arms. Her daughter paediatrics came too;
good grief that kid can put sausage and chips away canteen.
It felt like belonging family planning, and God knows he's better
than her ex psychiatric services--but all the while he was waiting
to be found out authorised personnel only.

2017-04-24

NaPoWriMo - 2017 - April 22nd - Alice through the mirror-plane

This is, of course, a sonnet -- although I've sneaked an extra rhyme into the penultimate couplet. The prompt here was for a mirror poem and like every other living human, I love the tone of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland...

(Does Liddell rhyme with fiddle? Probably not, but there's the competing constraint of the text making some sort of sense...)

Alice through the mirror-plane

A rabbit and an anti-rabbit, go
around the tree and down the wormhole. Where
can such a transformation lead? — Please show
your working as you think it through. I share
your nervousness around the silvered glass
and note what care we're taking with the frame.
We pause and whiskered heads are asked to pass
their eyes across each step as we arrange

the kit. We all wear white gloves on our shift
and antique pocket watches we have found
provide a way to check your drift. Keep cool!
You're near normal, still grounded in old-school
reality—you'll find we never fiddle
our safety checks: we all recall Miss Liddell.

2017-04-21

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.

2017-01-13

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.

2016-11-17

Essay: Future Technology #1

Future Technology #1

(or The Shape of Things to Come)

Future technology, earlier today

Civilisation, back in the '90s

If, back in the 90s, you played Sid Meier's Civilisation, on a DOS computer, and if you were very good (Rosemary regularly achieved Moon landings before 1730) then it was possible to reach the end of the technology tree...

(Aside, for the uninitiated: a "technology tree" is a set of available upgrades in a video game. The player typically has some sort of resources to spend on upgrades and chooses which to develop next. Upgrades give benefits in the game and unlock the later technologies. It's just like life.)

However, it is a tenet of geek philosophy that there is no end to the technology tree, and game designers are a sub-species of geek, so beyond the end of the tree lay more technologies:

Future Technology #1
Future Technology #2
And so on...

They served no function, except bonus points...

...but I loved this idea ever since I first saw it. Future Technology #1 is wonderfully non-specific, whilst saying precisely what it means.

FT#1 could be a pocket hadron collider, smartpants (tm), or an ambiguous phase psycho-encapsulator (which we all could use, if you think about it...)

It could be tomorrow, or a thousand years hence.

And if we achieve FT#1 then there's FT#2 (henceforth to be known as FT#1).

So what is FT#1 for poetry? I feel strongly that there ought to be something: a killer app for the Sonnet that takes it somewhere it's never been before and makes everybody say: Well obviously I bought one; I can't understand why nobody thought of it sooner!

Which is not to say that poetry-1.0 (poet stands at front and declaims) or poetry-2.0 (words arranged on page) have had their day. Far from it, poetry-1.1 (poet on radio/TV/YouTube) is quite popular, and 2.1 (words arranged on internet) has a variety of interesting new angles, but neither of those feels like a real FT, they've basically still just words in sequence, or words arranged in a space.

So every now and then I have a go. I started with an example of animated poetry, but while that was pretty popular, it's basically a movie and as nicely as self-editing text works for that idea, I am not sure it extends to many other poems... (see however Kinematic Typograthy.)

It ought to be possible to do more than mere animation, and Jenn Zed (of whom more later) has suggested that videos turn the poetry consumer off. I hadn't realised it, but I recognise it in myself, and I think it is similar to poetry vs. lyrics An element of time travel is involved in reading a poem — the eye tracks up and down the page, effectively forwards and back in time — which it can't when listening to a song, as the music proceeds at constant rate.

Something similar applies to videos. A voice recording of a poem, accompanied by still text, doesn't suffer quite so badly, because the eye can still do a little out-of-order processing but a moving video is really hard to get right, because it is simultaneously distracting the eye, and locking the words into a fixed time-frame.

For lyrics, the fix was to adjust the words, you fit them into the experience already created by the music...

However for poetry-FT#1 I want the reverse. What happens when we fit the medium as closely as possible to the words? If the user (reader) needs to control time, then why not let them?

Well I don't know.

I'm still working on it. It isn't easy. It's not that poetry's difficult (I think that goes without saying) or that technology is hard to master (although certainly it can be awkward.) The real problem is, in a world where:

this or this or even this
are easy to achieve...

...what do they mean? It's more or less a brand new medium, so it doesn't have any established rules. I'm basically inventing everything from scratch, albeit with wanton theft from books, films, video games and comic books.

Anyway, a new attempt on FT#1 is under way. I am working with the aforementioned Jenn Zed (who has poetic inclinations and is an accomplished artist...) This is "mixed media" by which I mean "words and images and Javascript and HTML and CSS and mp3 and anything else that seems to fit..."

It's not huge, but it's slow going... It will probably take at least another six months, but until then:

Installing FT#1
25%
Please Wait

2016-04-29

The price of life

Some microfauna,
earlier today

We're in the throes of NaPoWriMo and it is eating up a lot of my spare time to try and turn out a poem every single day.

It would probably be easier if I wrote more haiku...

This is a poem from this same festival (is that the term) in a previous year. 2010 if my records are accurate.

This is maybe less shiny than some of my poems, but I think works well done as a performance with some energy. So that is what I've tried to do in the recording.

This is a subject that I care about quite strongly. Not wholly from the ecological perspective, although I think that very important, but also from the rawer, darker, more-fundamental scientific angle—there is, within the universe of things that we can reach, exactly one "life". All life on Earth is the spawn of one original life creation event. It is all, shitake mushrooms to vampire squid (look them up), the same stuff. We have exactly one example.

Until we land somewhere where there's more...

But even then there will only be two. The value of this stuff cannot be overstated. Taken to its ultimate eschatological extreme it might be the difference between a universe that means something and one that goes 'fut' and passes without comment. So look after it.

The price of life

Lot twenty-three, one bucket of mud...

Ladies and Gentlethings,
this is the finest mud that money can buy.

Why? Just look at this chemistry,
poly-heterocyclic rings, carbon chains,

substances, whose full chemical names,
would keep you writing until the stars went out.

And for the avoidance of doubt,
this is because there's Life,

right in this bucket, genuine, natural Life,
in all its unlimited, self-designing power.

There are seventy-nine different types
of bacterium here, ready to feed

on spare carbon compounds
which you might not need

and spew more biomass—
this mud can breed.

Also in here, microscopic worms
eating, excreting, aerating by turns

and food for the slightly larger
microfauna... see, I have micrographs here

tardigrades, lice, hydra,
amoebae too—further ingredients for the stew.

No, nothing as large as a mouse,
but there are... Seeds, nineteen different kinds:

from ruderal weeds with short life-times
(which, yes, fix more biomass)

to shrubs, of various size,
and trees—they need only light,
and carbon-dioxide.

In this bucket, everything you need,
to take a sterile world and clothe it
in a forest so deep, and green,
darkly shaded, pristine,
and if you haven't already got the idea
it's beautiful.

So, what I am bid for this bucket of mud?

I might add that it's rumoured
to come from the fabled blue-planet itself.

Shall we start the bidding
at ten, sterile star-systems?

2015-06-23

Anger Bob - Creativity unleashed

"Anger bob, beats fists against the glass."

Collaboration, how's it been working out?

With Hallam and I plunging headlong towards the release of our next teaser-track: Anger Bob, it seems like a good moment to look back over the last nine or ten months and talk about how it has gone.

Excellently—we've barely had a moment of creative differences and this has worked, I think, a lot by us each trusting the other to do their job.

However this doesn't mean keeping quiet and refusing to give any feedback. Hallam, when I give him a new lyric, doesn't always take all of it. Quite often he'll think, for example, that the first half of the chorus is stronger than the second; and he'll say so, and he may not even record the weaker part (although this is usually more to do with having enough words to fit his musical phrasing rather than refusing to touch the weaker words.)

Similarly, when I hear the first version of the words set to music, there will sometimes be a part where I feel the musical treatment hasn't meshed with the words as well as it might. For example in Anger Bob, in the chorus, Hallam originally had some words held for several beats in the middle of the phrases. Musically that was perfectly fine and very interesting, but for the words to me it felt wrong that these quite bureaucratic phrases should be broken like that. Bureaucrats do like to run off their standard phrases at some speed.

The creative process, earlier today

Collaboratively—so when this happens, we talk. In the case of Anger Bob we had 32 exchanges of comments on our little private blog where we post our notes and progress, and a few emails as well.

Experimentally—we also experiment. I'm a very fast writer (when I have something to write) so when Hallam questions part of a lyric, I can usually produce a few ideas for alternatives almost immediately (literally immediately, if I am on-line). Hallam takes a little longer, he has to go to the studio for a start, and he cannot get there everyday, but he has been known to do a "couch recording" of a new idea and mail it to me right there and then. As this process iterates between the two of us the song is, of course:

Evolving—for me, the lyric has certain poetic qualities as I write it, but it isn't a song. At most I'll have an idea that a section could go "LA la lala, la LA lar" (forgive me getting technical). So the first time I hear it set to music is (in a literal and non-bombastic sense) a revelation. The words at that moment become something that they weren't before. Emphasis changes. Often it is only at this point that the song "locks down" to focusing on a single subject (previously it will have been in the area of the subject, but not necessarily focused.)

At that point, bits we were considering dropping become easier decisions. If they are part of the core message, then they have to stay; if not then it's the bit-bucket for them, I'm afraid.

Tuning—and then it's just a matter of tuning. I'll have known how I would read the words, but Hallam's is a different voice and necessarily things come across a little changed. Let's remove the "only" but add an "and" at the start of the line—I might say. Or Hallam might say—Line two in verse two feels longer than in verse one. The point of both of these being to fit more exactly to the music, and also to the emphasis that Hallam is giving the line.

Sometimes I will have been worried about having far more syllables between two lines that go to the same music (being in the same relative position in the verse/chorus; obviously I'll have the same number of feet, I'm not an idiot). However often this will slide into the performance entirely unnoticed and instead some other part, which to my mind scanned perfectly, will develop a slight wobble and need a slight rephrasing.

And finally, Fun - it's been great fun. Hallam's word is exciting and I won't argue with that as a description either. I can't see how it would have worked if it wasn't great fun and exciting.

I asked Hallam whether he had anything to add to this, but said—Honestly, I can’t add anything. But feel free to take this statement of mine and use it in your post—so I have.

Which only leaves me to remind you: Anger Bob, he's coming.

Anger Bob, in three days time.

2015-04-15

Coming round

Cartoon characters should
drink responsibly...

Not much to explain here, one I wrote from a prompt on a poetry forum in 2012.

Today I would avoid the coincidence of strophe breaks and full-stops in the first two verses, but otherwise still reasonably pleased with a sweet and simple piece.

(Note added later: this was also featured in a collection celebrating poets from the, now defunct, Critical Poet online forum.)

Coming round

Maybe I can say it in a different way: it's more
the angle of the orange street light that draws
a shadow between us as we sit with cheap wine
in the spare room and the evening and the dark.

It's more that the presents you brought me
were typical of your kooky creativity; while
the presents I bought you were expensive
and you, often, were thinking of someone else.

And on that day in June when it rained
tiny plashes in the dust and you said the
smell of dust and rain made you horny and sad,
I said it's more your sadness makes it rain

and then you laughed, but it didn't stop raining.
It was more my idea to drift away, not to fight,
but more your idea to keep my books
and CDs in your spare room—on shelves

I erected long ago in another country—so when
I want something I have to come by
with the bottle of supermarket Chianti, and sit
with you, the dark, the dust; now it's raining.