NaPoWriMo - 2018 - Day three - Lost in transliteration

Lost in transliteration

I could take your words and express
their anger, sarcasm and loneliness
in the secret language of penguins who have
six thousand, three hundred and twenty-two
words for fish, but have never needed
any words for cold feet
or the smell of fish.

And if that happened, you could reply
using pigeon's words for sky
inserted in the lingo of octopod
entanglement where anything with a knot
in it is rude, but there is only one word
for any hard object
that a beak can't break.

And then we would be courting;
assigning and assorting our endearments
(as thoroughly disguised as they may be)
in ever stranger languages and customs:
the words in which a tree
describes diagonals of light and shade,
in terms of friends who make them;

or the speech in which
woodworm explain the enclosed tracks,
their intersections, loops, forwards, backs
indistinguishably from their taste;
or the complaints of mayflies
about eternity
on any summer's afternoon.

But all this would be hypothetical
you speak only your own language
and in any case
you are not listening.

NaPoWriMo - 2018 - Day two - A voice in the crowd

A voice in the crowd



I - I

That's a number and a pronoun,
in case you are confused and if it puzzles you
imagine how it has to be for me:
the me that sits here writing.

I know who I am: I'm me;
and you know who I am:  I'm the person you're reading;
and neither of us knows a thing.


II - Narrator

I know who I am, and am the speaker
and everything I say is speech and you might ask:
Why aren't you quoted?  Why aren't you italic?
But that would never do

I'm not a speaker in the scene
but am ever removed, distanced
seeing everything, uninvolved.


III - Inner voice

I do get italics, when I say:
I get italics,
because I am when the narrator speaks,
the author speaks, or when

the author reaching into your head,
gentle reader, puts words right there
instead of on the page.


IV - Author

I am the voice behind the voices
everything you hear is me
and everything you read
is how you hear it's me.

I still am not reality, you understand,
I'm your interpretation
of my projection, of what I want you to think...


V - Author (on podium)

...and here I am again, saying:
when I wrote this poem I wanted to show...
and there you are in the audience, lapping it up
because you've paid

(at least in time if not hard cash)
to hear me say this and you wish,
you really wish, I'd just get on with the poem.


VI - Character

Ignore me,
I'm just someone
that one of him
made up.


VII - Poet

So I'm the sum
of all of the the above
or if you like I dissect into
the crowd of them

and yet, here I am again,
typing, with no mind on any of this,
just typing words.

NaPoWriMo - 2018 - Day one - Evil medieval rabbits

Evil medieval rabbits


What cunicular Hell? You may well ask,
lurks in the margins of otherwise coherent
medieval documents and it's not apparent,
to twenty-first century eyes, quite why

the bunny-eared crew should freak out so
completely. When leporines attack!
Do peasants stumble back: their former
food and fur supply rotating on the spot

and reaching out for weapons. The world turned upside down
is pretty much the message here these 'drolleries’
or ‘grotesques' as codicology explains
are symbols for our base biology.

Characters of cowardice and innocence; helpless,
and sexual. However, let's be clear
there can be nothing evil here
because rabbits don't do evil

(even when they eat their young). There is no evil
to preying on the leaves of grass
and even though medieval sex talk
has the wolves jumping on rabbits:

there was no fall there either. Animals
get on with it and don't reflect
on whether they are good or bad
or saved or damned. Those thoughts belong

in only the human version
of the story and even when the fox dines
there is no misbehaviour there.
That way of seeing's purely our perversion.



Reference material and some words taken from: Why Are There Violent Rabbits In The Margins Of Medieval Manuscripts?