Do you have the ticket / we all are always never going home

I have two poems We all are always never going home and Girl with degenerate matter earring in Corporeal, and another in their sibling publication En*gendered, so I recorded this performance of one from each...

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Ian Badcoe · Do you have the ticket / We all are always never going home

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Nonbinary bus image from:
libragender on tumblr

Featuring bus and bus station sound clips from:
Julien Matthey, abrahemp, and Ubehag on Freesound

NaPoWriMo - 2021 - VII - The fog being what it is...

The fog being what it is...

...the bellman comes and tolls his bell.
His creaks tread up the outside stairs.
The last few drunks lurch up from chairs
and stumble off to bunks and lashings
of blustery words from bosun's lips
on ships which may not sail in the morning
the fog being what it is.

Between the chimes the sailors' feet
are fading flatly down the street
as the bellman tolls his mournful bell
but whether to summon or to dispel
some troubled spirit of mists and seas
is quite beyond my power to tell
the fog being what it is.

I too had better rise and leave.
My tiny garret coldly waits
and I have tangled threads to weave
into tattered nets by the whale-oil's flicker
which only I shall light in my window --
but first I'll walk the bellman to the dock
the fog being what it is.

We walk in silent whitewashed haze.
Familiar streets are strangely mazed
and the fog-horn shudders the vapour
wound around the cast-iron lamppost
and if neither of us tells a ghost story
it is only because we are living one
the fog being what it is.

And see we've come down to the dock.
A fresher onshore breeze here blowing
vessels that rock and creak on dark water,
the bellman turns towards his light
and I ought to turn for home, except for
my empty window where the white sheets curl
the fog being what it is.

Fog vapours and the mists compete
to drive me from the sodden town
drag me along the strip of salt-wet concrete,
bollards, mouldering rope, and ships
where a man can put his name down for the tropics
—tell the bellman he can have my nets—
the fog being what it is.

NaPoWriMo - 15/04/2020 - The Engine Subcommittee

The Engine Subcommittee...


...meets, occasionally quorate,
and every Thursday evening
in the longtime beer spill backroom
of the Dog and Gun.

They consider the case for turbine rotors
the glasses of beer, the ceramic or titanium alloys
the questions of low, high and optimum temperatures
and whether the peanuts should be salted

or dryly roast.  They consider the boast
of Nigel of the Flat Cap, that he can route
all the required pipes and wires
around the belfries and spires

without making a single decorated Gothic
flinch.  Watch the Master of Combustion pinch
out his cigarette and say
for the thirty-seven thousandth time

that he is certain all engine components
should be situated in roofs and crypts,
and not disturb the bats, or visitor collection box flow patterns,
in any significant way.

The subcommittee has been meeting for fifteen years;
the cathedral hasn't moved an inch.

NaPoWriMo - 2019 #10 - Earthman! Do you have time to talk about...

Earthman!  Do you have time to talk about...


"We follow our book," the thing explains, "the star
we need to find's described in there." It offers
a battered paperback. The text's a block
of triangles and squares.  I squint at it.

"I like your words," I say, "it's artistic
but also information dense." "Oh, that's
not ours." The blue man says. "We had to hire
a translator, "and though not all he said made sense,

I feel we got the gist, take this bit here:
'ALREADY AFFORD EXPOSED, DO GLASS, AND ALL
THE TURNING TURNING TURNING WINGS THIN WINGS
AND TOWARDS THE MIDDLE: EDGE.' I mean... it's not

transparent,  but I think the sense is there. Still..."
He leaps up from the chair and turns to stare
into the sky, at the Sun. "It's pretty clear
that this is not the one." He sadly smiles.

"We'd best be moving on our way! So... greetings
from the Cosmos and all those things I'm supposed to say...
I'm sure another friendly UFO
will come your way, in not so very long."

Walking to Alpha Centauri

Walking to Alpha Centauri

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This is not exactly a Christmas track, but Hallam and I have not released anything for a while.  We just finished this and we were each struck with the idea of making it a demo track.

This features not only the usual combination of my words with Hallam's wonderful voice and music, but also my own voice, speaking the part of the interstellar traveller.

Consider it our gift to you...

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Devotions (dedicated to Brenda Levy Tate)

(Dedicated to Brenda Levy Tate)

My favourite of Brenda's recent photos
this has everything: a galaxy, a self-portrait,
an outhouse...

Brenda is somebody I know but have never met.  Thus is the power of the internet.  Brenda and I used to hang out with other like-ish minded individuals on a poetry forum——many years ago now.  We shared and critiqued work, we chatted of this and that...

More recently I've known her on Facebook, and I've come to appreciate the great love she has for her family, and the region where she lives (Yarmouth in Nova Scotia); her on-going quest for interesting bargains in the local shops (the "interesting" is more important to her than the "bargain")...  She also often shares her concern for her fellow inhabitants, their political travails, and the local weather and its impact on the fishing crews (some of whom she's related to...)

But the most wonderful thing about Brenda is her unreasonable devotion to staying up all night, or getting up at 6:00 a.m., or even 3:00 a.m. and going out alone into the surrounding countryside for no reason except to photograph the stars.

This photograph here is my favourite recent example, and this poem is a recent one of hers that won first place in the IBPC poetry competition for January 2017.  This site contains some of her photography, although not a huge amount of the astrophotography which she admits needs updating.

Is Brenda my friend?  Can you have a friend you have never met and never will meet?

The answer, of course, is it doesn't matter!  Labels are not required.  The internet has invented several new types of friendship over the years, and no doubt will again.  The fact that, as a species we can invent new kinds of friendship: that's surely something hopeful, something worth devoting ourselves to...

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Devotions

After she leaves the nunnery, her suitcase waits
for the shuttle bus, patient in Italian dust.
She returns to Coventry, to rain and rooms
with a distant Aunt.  She is adrift.  She tries

to lift her mood in the public library
but chances into the reference section
and reads it all.  Three years later she upgrades
to a visitor's ticket at the University;

still lost, but finds Philosophy to be filled
with many helpful guides.  She chats with Plato;
hides from Nietzsche; finds Kant natural
but Heidegger hard and chances at last

on Teilhard de Chardin who takes her in hand.
They hike four hundred Dewey Decimals north
to land in Astrophysics, right next to Carl Sagan
and the world moves

the very next day in Morrisons--her palm
against fluorescents is filled with brighter light.
We are star stuff.  We are golden.  And as for the Garden...
it's obvious we've never left.
 
***

The check-out assistant frowns,
but sells the apple anyway.

***

Most mornings now she jogs, and in the afternoons
her job at the railway information desk
will let her set lost travellers on their way.

So much for the days.  In the evenings she returns
to the tiny room.  She has travelled now so far
that light leaving the Abbess at T = 0
will never catch her up.

Sometimes she works on relating theory
to everything; sometimes she sits
and watches stars go past the window. 

Sept 17th - Voyaging

Voyaging


The ocean of ships extends
all the way to the sunset, and even now
a valiant steam launch may be trying
to find out just how far that means;
bulling its way between kayaks in the sea of dreams
having skirted the American fleet
around tranquility base
so long ago
and headed into the ocean of night

porters.  There is no, probable, body at the front desk,
if it should even lie somewhere beyond
the point where all the black and white floor tiles merge
in formless grey.  If there was
some vessel to carry us that way:
you, me, the luggage and the parrot;
but every wave now seems glassy:

the frontage of some cabinet
with dark varnished wooden frames
and in each one the little printed card,
which puts the content firmly in its place.
This ocean of wax polish somehow
free from real ships, even as
the possibility of shipness sails forever.

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...

The guide to nine utopias - II - Fast

The guide to nine utopias


II -- Fast

The traffic for your area: I'm Dan
Trailer--and with values falling on the roads
the slump extends its bite. This minivan
on the M4, which two years back exploded
to upwards of a million pounds is priced,
today, at half that sum--and it's not selling.
For young professionals, my best advice
is stay right where you are: your car's a dwelling...

of course you'd like to be nearer the city
but cars don't move and negative equity
means neither do you. If you want a family
saloon, forget that dream, keep your money
for a better year.--Now, on the wackier side:
we've found more film from when folk used to drive.

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NaPoWriMo - 2017 - April 24th - Cassini explains perspective

The (alternative) prompt I followed for this was "a place you've never been".

Cassini was an Italian "mathematician, engineer, astronomer and astrologer".  He discovered the gap in Saturn's Rings and it was this photograph which I saw today and which inspired the poem...

Cassini explains perspective


Everything you know;
everyone you know, have known, will ever know;

everywhere you've been;
everywhere you've never been;

everywhere you could be,
including even, if NASA would only play along,
the Moon;

every song that sticks in your head
all through some rainy afternoon;
every balloon, released accidentally
by any toddler;

every toddler;
every teen;

every thought you ever think;
every meme, you cut and paste on Facebook;

every face;
every book;

every member of the appropriate sex,
who has that certain style—all in

        In the sixteen hundreds, Cassini explained --
        for those travelling a long way --
        how to measure longitude with two clocks,
        the Sun, and careful observations
        of eclipsing Jovian moons.

        Cassini also observed
        the gap in Saturn's rings
        through which we today fling
        a careful dart and have it, looking back,
        photograph

that one pixel : this island Earth.


So I say: stuff your rather pointless election campaign,
pour your new recipe hair conditioner down the drain,
smoke or do not smoke, if you keep it away from me
because none of that matters—
let me tell you about perspective.

NaPoWriMo - 2017 - April 12th - Recital room on the edge of forever

Blatant cheating now, this isn't one I wrote for the occasion, but one I've had half finished in the pile forever.  So I dusted it off and forced it to reach some sort of conclusion.

This describes, pretty non-literally, an actual evening of Elizabethan music that we enjoyed some years ago.  The unlikely characters listed are caricatures of the people in the audience (including myself, guess which...)

The 'king' didn't actually die, but did fall asleep, and the time-machine wasn't visible but you could feel the possibility in the air.



Recital room on the edge of forever


I — This is not historically accurate.

The time-machine is off.
The lighting dims.  The audience contains:
one child, adhesive with toffee, snot and cough;
one king, broken as veins in his nose;
one faerie princess, warlike, but with boots off currently;
one sister, handmaiden, or clone;
one disembodied mind, chilling;
and full supporting cast of students, spies,
more musicologists than mind can face, journalists,
and surely an assassin.

 
II — Diagram not to scale.

The ensemble assemble and arrive.
They sit, to some applause, the lutenist,
recorder player, countertenor, viol...
as archaic arrangement as ever was desired.
The needle on the time-machine is hard
against the twenty-first century, but now
they start to play.  The lutenist perspires.  Flow my Tears,
as Dowland said and maybe they can flow
into some place where Queen Bess isn't dead
so much as lost around some corner neither mind
nor eye can see.  Perhaps we hear a hint,
musically, of a place that time misplaced.


III — There is no history.

The King is dead,
the music must move on, journalists
mutter into phones, and recorders:
descant, tenor, piccolo — flow smoothly
through musicians' hands.  Everyone
counts strings on the lute.  Students,
spies, and surely the assassin are flown
back to some safer, more-familiar timezone
and the needle on the time-machine
without seeming to have moved
is clear of the end-stop.

NaPoWriMo - 2017 - April 7th - The rough guide to peri-apocalyptic travel

The challenge was to write a poem using: translucent, black, ride, stuff, house, strike, purpose, yellow, peace, road


The rough guide to peri-apocalyptic travel


I am become translucent on my horse
and yet must ride, the desert not too far
behind, the desert not so far ahead;

its stuff and substance blow around your house,
as I pause to drink and strike some sort of pose.
What is my purpose?  You do not want to know—

the desert will be on you soon, all sere
and grey, and it's late within the day, and I
imagine yellow bricks upon the road:

it helps me go, my name was never Dorothy
and I am grown translucent on the horse,
which is still black.  His name is Acceptance.  Peace.

Late onset fallibility

This is a poem about dementia, which isn't something which has badly impacted me in my life.  Yet...

(My Nan had it, but I wasn't that old and we lived quite a long way away...)

It's going to touch me at some point however.  It's bound to.  About 1/6 of people over 80 are affected, and I know many more than 6 people.

Some see Alzheimer's as the worst tragedy of the modern age.  I am not sure I entirely agree, it's certainly one of the most painful for the victim's family—possibly worse even than having them in a persistent vegetative state, at least in that case the wreckage of the person you loved isn't still trying to talk to you.


However, to my mind dementia, horrible as it is, is a subset of the big tragedy, which is that people die.  I have written about this before: the inevitability of death, how it gets a little more evitable every year, and how that in itself brings interesting, new, social problems.  Those are good problems to have, however.  People living too long is infinitely preferable to them not living long enough.  The increase in diseases we can't yet fix: dementia, cancer, diseases of senescence in general—is the direct effect of taking out all those lesser deaths who were more vulnerable to our sorcery.

None of which makes the failure of a beloved mind any more bearable.


I have been asked why this is late onset, when early onset is even more tragic.  The answer is because early onset dementia is more like a horrible disease, striking down only a subset of us; however the diseases of old age, of which dementia is the one example, get everybody who lives long enough...

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Ian Badcoe · Late onset fallibility

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Late onset fallibility


He returns from walking the dog
no longer quite your father.
It's nearly your dog.

He returns from walking the dog;
he's only been gone two days,
which admits no ready explanation.

He returns from walking the dog
with a jaunty stride
and somebody else's shoes.

He returns from walking the dog:
your mother leaves without a word--
she has been dead for five years.

He returns from walking the dog
smiling strangely to himself;
scowling at you, your brother, the front room paper.

He returns from walking the dog;
seems like he's acting younger
and looking frailer than when he left.

He returns from walking the dog;
wants to speak to your sister, oblivious
that she lives in Queensland now.

He returns from his walk
with a cat on a piece of string
and seven tins of the wrong dog food.

From Lark Rise by Standard Candles

Another one written from a prompt on a course.

To my mind this is pure science fiction: uncontaminated by plot or character or spaceships or robots or sexy other-worldly women who want to know about the "Earth thing called love..."

There's the local and the distant, the distant is by definition alien...  But equally if you merely struggle up onto the shoreline and dip your toes in the water, you are already touching the near edge of infinity.

There's a real sense in the opening of From Lark Rise to Candleford that to many of the locals, Oxford is as far away as the moon...

I wonder what it's like to stand on the moon?  White dust...  Stars...

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From Lark Rise by Standard Candles

With a calibrated period-luminosity relation astronomers

could use Cepheid variables as standard candles to determine

the distances to distant clusters and even other galaxies. 

-- www.astronomynotes.com, Nick Strobel -- 

Period-Luminosity Relation for Variable Stars

All along the greensward wanders,
outlining our mile-around;
a frame upon the white road reaching
even so far as OXFORD XIX
where things are so unlike. Why,

it is a different world there.
It is different here for such as we
struggling from our hamlet's mire-dark ways
to stand upon the alien, the local absolute.
Who lurks near? What star here

shines so starkly on the white dust?
Is this road forever?

To steer by

(OK, so the northern star isn't a quasar, call it artistic license...)

What's to say here?

Maybe nothing.  Let the poem speak for itself.

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To steer by


If I should go to seek the northern star
I'll shoe my stick in adamant
and take whichever road winds farthest
through wider and more disjunct lands --
a drunkard's life journey, endless in retelling
while the eyes fuzz at 3 a.m.

—although I'll leave before the end of this
or any other tale. Many miles expect
unhurried feet and gaze which notes
the climate cooling as I walk, sees
how a plant displaces softer weeds,
and feels it satisfies some need:
translating feet to miles.

But is there any effort of the patient stride
to bring one to the place of total ease,
to stand upon the landscape where it's clean,
unstirred beneath the empty air,
and the sky a passacaglia
for unaccompanied star?

If I should come beside you as I walk—
in dust, or mud, or chill with sprinkled rain—
maybe I will ask about the road ahead
and while you'll think me friendly in my way,
you will not drag my eyes from the horizon.