NaPoWriMo - 2021 - XVI - Unmake

 Unmake

Undo; undo; undo;
unspin the planet; undawn the day; unturn
the season; unproduce the play; unsing all songs,
we're out of time and key; unknow those few
close friends, whether platonic or carnally;
undo; undo; undo;
regress your life and lives; things
you must unsay; undo; undo;
this is all wrong; unbind the electrons; deorbit the moon;
unburn the stars; decolonise the new world; disinhabit Mars;
unsummon the demon;  undo; undo; undo;
I can't be having with this.

NaPoWriMo - 2019 #16 - Towards a new "towards a new metaphysics"

Towards a new "towards a new metaphysics"


Professor Colin Ledgate taps his ream
of printed handout notes lethargically
upon the wooden desk.  It's five fifteen.
Most students have already pulled their coats
or jackets silently from under chairs;

begun to bottom-shuffle to the steps
that split the blocks of moulded plywood seating
but Colin's thoughts are on competing

with Dr Maggie Frust who came across
the concrete quad from the Dept. of Modern Text-
ual Analysis and other poly-
syllablic words to cross cerebral swords
on the topic of her latest on-line coup,
a pair of lectures jointly called: "What's can
hermeneutics do with you?" and though
Professor Colin's almost sure the viewers
can't be more than half a dozen fawning
undergrads or people who, like Colin himself,
want to derail the sharply tailored Maggie's
so seemingly unswerving glide towards
the Creftung Prize, which rightly ought to rest
in that little cabinet beside the stairs
in his own beloved Dept. of Contemporary
Metalinguistic Thought.  He ought, he thinks,
to do some sort of on-line thing himself
he's almost sure there is a webcam on the shelf
in the postgrad common room and he is sure
that one or more of them would be up for
the project, possibly something populist
with "metamodernism..." Hmm, perhaps...
He knows he is a lapsed postmodernist
and possibly it's time to address that
with something new...  The sky is blue

beyond the non-opening double glazing
and most of the students are gazing at that, or waiting,
impatiently, for him to complete his sentence.
Where was he now, oh yes:

So I'll see you tomorrow when we'll do
the most exciting part.  We'll discuss how prior art
cannot be separated from the act
of writing text, and how the consequence
of that is that critique becomes a part
of the document studied, and thus we finally
advance on Blitherheimer's stance that there can't
be semiotics without an implied ontology
which everyone ignores,

and with that, the class flee.

NaPoWriMo - 2018 - Day twenty-three - Warning labels

Warning labels

May be acerbic.  May mock.  May experience
emotions not so easily described.  Grumpiness
can happen.  May want to help and get frustrated
when he cannot.  May mysteriously need
affection and although not ambitious, may
have a strange need to excel in everything,
without breaking sweat.  May guess your meaning
before you finish speaking.  May find the news
disturbing.  May find leaders unnerving
and likely think they all are jerks.  May conclude
that all of politics and media
are broken, beyond the wit of man to fix.
May look grim.  May mutter.  May slouch,
as if looking for something, along the gutter.

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.

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.

The Attics of the Dead

I've got stalled on this year's NaPoWriMo, I think because I'm still really tired following Rosemary's book launch on Thursday.  So I've dug up this old one from last year's poetry writing month.

This is an attempt to capture the mood and strangeness of a real recurring dream I used to have.  Where I'd be wandering the attics of some building which in real life didn't have any, and there would be and shelves and shelves of interesting boxes.  Not that in the dream I every got to open any of the boxes...

There's a reference to my Granddad in this, and that is how come this poem is "of the dead".  His and Nana's house was a common location for the dream, although not the only place it could be set.

All my grandparents are dead now.  You can never go back, can you...

---

---

The attics of the dead


I no longer dream the attics of the dead
but I recall the qualities of dust
and light and wooden shelving where I pass
my unshod sleep feet silent on the boards.
There are always more: more boards, more boxes,

suitcases, cabinets and old wardrobes...
more attics.  Up some turning stair, or through
a low door: a further shelfscape; hatches
in the ceiling through which unpainted ladders
climb higher still to attics which by rights

should be much smaller than the floor below.
They're not, of course, there's always more and I
will wander rarely distracted by a beam
of skylight cutting through or a corridor
window through which I peer to see forever

roofs and tiles and access ways and never
a hint of any world below.  Through windows
sometimes I will glimpse another distant pane
of glass though which, enticing,  I'll see the backs
of other shelves all filled with such exciting

packages, but which I know I'll never reach.
There isn't any lesson for this place to teach,
I am not lost, or trapped; I'm just aware
that granddad knows of every item there,
but still, somehow, my exploration
does not posses an end.

Days spent

A padded rooming house, earlier today...

Since Anger Bob was somewhat concerned with mental health, I was reminded about this one.

It's a bit old again, from 2010 I think, but stands up reasonable well against my current standards.  I might not say "himselves" now-a-days—it feels a bit coy.  (As I recall I hesitated at the time...)  Maybe also there are too many m-dashes.

This uses "hands" as a metaphor for the psychiatric staff.  It was only afterwards I was told that in the US "hands" is jargon for nursing auxiliaries.  I think the poem works well with or without this interpretation, however.

Administrative note: due to circumstances under my control, there will be no blog posting next week.  Talk amongst yourselves for a while.

---

Days spent

A hemmed head offers no escape
from the deftly padded rooming house—
sentinel cedars hedge it round.

Sometimes, in spite of care, he waxes
too strong for the watching hands—
needle-prick clouds breeding.

And on days too other, riddled
thoughts slam him sideways—
a soft wall to catch—no understanding

even for himselves. And days
spelunking and diving in the grey grains—
these days the hands call "good",

he does not know why. But perfect days,
they do exist, middling days drawn rarely—
everything balanced and in a place—

days playing to the gallery,
improvising on reality, insight,
variations on the theme of sanity—
even the hands applaud.