Ian Badcoe Poetry: sex

Showing posts with label sex. Show all posts

2023-04-10

NaPoWriMo 2023 - 9 - Taking it under advisement

(I have not skipped a couple, I kept them private because they fell out kinda personal...)

Taking it under advisement

the first rule of dealing-with-the-particular-thing-
the-thing-that's-secret-to-myself-and-that-
I-do-not-like-to-talk-about-
club, is we talk about it
that is the advice

at any rate,
that one sex blogger gives, documenting
how she's lived her life
radically reimagined
and somewhat exposed
these last five years

and been happier for it
who talks
about the dirty underside of her mind
the very not-talking being
what enabled
the "dirty" judgement to persist
and possibly it works for her

in some degree
because exhibitionism
which I so don't have

so I take the limited supply
of advice
as well intentioned but with a big
pinch of salt

and the advice I give is:

avoid magical thinking
--such as believing that the aforementioned
talking-about-the-unspeakable
can fix everything--
because it always seems like
if we could only address WXYZ
then everything would be lovely
in the garden

but this
is a failure
of imagination
and the post-WXYZ world is still a world

(or garden)

still messy and dirty and filled
with human beings, complex,
and not all well intentioned
and there was no way
that merely sorting out the WXYZ
was going to fix that

no, my advice is:

walk on the grass
whether the sign says otherwise or no
our pleasures are limited
and none of us know
when we'll go

bare feet on damp grass
your father running the sprinkler
but that was then and now you are the father
with no sprinkler
because ecology

and in this newer world in theory
sometimes you want but think you should not have

a Bakewell tart for example

of the more industrial kind
with solid sugar icing to at least
a quarter of an inch
but you can

because,
ultimately,
apart for those we choose ourselves
there are no rules.

2018-11-30

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.

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:

2017-09-01

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

2017-08-27

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...

2017-07-21

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.

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

2017-06-04

The guide to nine utopias - IX - Traditional

The guide to nine utopias

IX -- Traditional

Lisa is embarrassed; she sat down on
the snide receptionist who was hunting
for something dropped upon the floor, on brown
commercial carpeting. He was affronted,
but, I assured her, he was sharply styled
with all chrome limbs and fuzzy dark-blue skin
quite like the furniture. He finds our file.
We watch the chairs until the doctor's in.

Conventional, the doctor's body. Standard
for human, but with extra eyes and hands
--all doctors love that stuff. He's sad. He thinks
we make a comely pair: my gills, her wings...
but says our custom genes aren't guaranteed
to do the right thing if we want to breed.

2017-04-23

NaPoWriMo - 2017 - April 18th - Possible taxonomies of the 1957 Yorkshire coast

I went to a writing workshop, some years back now. One of the exercises was to watch a "British Transport Film" similar if not identical to this:

-and write a poem in response.

It's the "poem" part that may be dubious here. Sometimes my response to something is more to its style than its content and seeing this I was struck by how much it was unique to the period. So I started thinking about how people might present the same information in other styles... and I hit on the idea of an overly abstract and academic study.

So what I am saying is that there may be nobody else in the world except me who gets this...

...but it is a list poem and you could imagine it came from the introduction of some dry-as-bones volume that a tweed clad professor has been labouring over for the best part of a decade..

Possible taxonomies of the 1957 Yorkshire coast

those involving sun hats
those involving beer
those involving knobbly knees
those involving simple foodstuffs : apples, sandwiches, cheese

as above, but also fish and chips

those involving model ships or boats
those involving racquets
those involving balls
those involving young ladies

excluding the most popular of all

those involving sand

with buckets and spades
with towels
with sandwiches

those planned a year in advance
those involving dance with various degrees of skill
the subset involving omnibuses
those involving ice cream

the subset with also small children

and the subset of those in which a seagull features

those involving other creatures:

donkeys
crabs
minute fish

those in which you drink too much, and wish you hadn't
those featuring special boys or girls

appearing at just the wrong moment

or where they don't arrive at all

as yet to be categorised:

sea temperature
sunburn
chilblains
lower back pain in the context of luggage
all the grades of rain

2017-04-21

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.

2017-04-16

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.

2017-04-02

NaPoWriMo - 2017 - April 2nd - There's a certain formalism in these things

There's a certain formalism in these things

When she is willing, or even keen, she strips
the flowers from her hat and scatters them
upon the treacherous back step. For him
he'll try to get her attention, by reading, silent,
in the outside loo. There's other things they do:
she smokes a cigarette -- some hours before
and far away -- which weaves faint smoke smell through
her hair; he moves her chair an inch, no more;

she wears that old torn dress, that still a bit
reeks of sweat and other fluids. He picks fights
over small things. She invites him to fuck off,
cordially. Eventually they will both hit
upon the same room, mood and time, and minks
would blush. Usually ten minutes is enough.

2017-02-13

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

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.

2016-09-10

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!

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?

2015-11-13

Focus

It's good to have a hobby. It's good to have an interest. An over whelming passion can be a good thing too.

Then there's the ones with something of a bee in their bonnets, shading all the way up to the ones who are, frankly, obsessed—I mean Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Tich there's only so many hours one can devote...

Then there are the people whose item of interest has that slightly more urgent a grip upon their minds, a compulsive, unforgettable, compelling, all-embracing matter that holds their attention approaching 100% of the time; a thing which for them is almost a physiochemical necessity...

Focus

No spaj is left in this vehicle overnight.

The whole gang view the sign
and Roddy puts the case
that this is what they have to say
to stop you breaking in. He finds a brick
but there's wire mesh
inside the van's rear window.

Rod is no philosopher
but if he was, he would call it an axiom:

There is always mesh between you
and a place where spaj might be.

Lisa's twenty-three and feels
that she should live more cleanly
at this time, but the need for spaj is refined.
She's invested much in making it so,
hours of evenings devoted
to chasing freak-angels.
When she didn't have them,
she looked, and when she wasn't looking,
she discussed the matter,
or thought on it.

She's had to stop reading the leaflets which say:

Exposure to spaj during pregnancy
can harm your unborn child.

Wendy isn't beyond begging,
or bargaining with sex
but none of the gang
on the loitering corner
is any better fixed.
In her head, she is a philosopher
but her thoughts at length have shown
there are days that are nowhere
and life's just like that. She stands back,
smokes, and leans on a poster reading:

Spaj—just say no.

With which Ed can't agree, he's always known
a craving. Even before he tried it and even before
he heard the word. He remembers
a day...

...a day as a child
in geography class. The substitute teacher
leaned across the board
with a curve of her arm
and the chalk broke—ping—
on the "a" in "continental". There was dust
in the beam of stuffy sunlight,
on the swell of her blouse.

It was pure spaj.

A police spokesman said it had a street value
of twenty-five million pounds.

2015-05-08

Massachusetts State Behavioural Risk Factor Surveillance Survey System

A sonnet... This came from watching a YouTube video about sexual health in various populations.

I had no reason for watching that, but YouTube is the master of the random education. Everything I know about large explosions, wacky Japanese marble-runs and They Might Be Giants comes from YouTube.

This study was interesting and noted several curious points, none of which I intend to repeat here. However it was conducted by the eponymous Massachusetts State Behavioural Risk Factor Surveillance Survey System, whose name is excellent, and whose stock in trade must be phoning random strangers to ask about their sex lives. Presumably during the evening meal.

Massachusetts State Behavioural Risk Factor Surveillance Survey System

People who have sex, unprotected by the bonds
of matrimony; people who elect the wrong candidates,
spend too many evenings getting canvassed
in their offices; people, people who need people;
unlucky people; people without two coins to rub
against a pie; people who lie, or whose friends lie
and who do not know; people who eat lotus,
junk food, polystyrene cups; people who pour syrup
left handed into the bath; people who laugh
at the staff with the questionnaire; people who care
too much, know too little, do not read
the warnings which are amply provided; and,
above all, people who were out on the evening
when we picked their number to randomly call.