I sit down
and my stomach flips
the way it did
on Spuggy's Bridge
years ago
on the run
to Jarrow
breathlessness
with every step
exhausted legs
by half ten
in the morning
the boredom
of more time
than its plausible
to cope with
watching quiz shows
on the sofa
even Richard
Osman starts
to get annoying
the way once-certain dates
in diaries
sprout question marks
then crosses
* * *
Today's poem is about, well, being ill. Just kind of popped into my head while I sit here getting my breath back for another epic attempt on the stairs before I get dressed to go to the doctors' and get my blood test results. I don't usually like the ee cummings 'I don't believe in punctuation' approach because it smacks, to me, of sixth form poets who've not got much beyond copying song lyrics onto their folders, but I've used it here because I think it gives the poem a sense of breathlessness. Ditto the short (well, for me anyway) lines.
Monday, 23 April 2012
Sunday, 22 April 2012
NaPoWriMo Poem Twenty-Two: May 'n' the Abu, a Hay(na)ku
May:
I deport.
You, May? Not!
* * *
Look, don't judge me, I'm three poems behind here! This is inspired by the prompt from Day 21 to write a hay(na)ku, a haiku-like poem, the lines having one word in the first line, two in the second, and three in the third, and by the continual difficulty the Home Secretary seems to be having in knowing what day of the week it is.
I deport.
You, May? Not!
* * *
Look, don't judge me, I'm three poems behind here! This is inspired by the prompt from Day 21 to write a hay(na)ku, a haiku-like poem, the lines having one word in the first line, two in the second, and three in the third, and by the continual difficulty the Home Secretary seems to be having in knowing what day of the week it is.
NaPoWriMo Poem Twenty-One: The Body of the Enemy
You tell me that you're zen
and all we have to do is wait
for the body of our enemy
to wash by on the river.
You tell me that everything happens,
and is happening, for a reason.
You don't know what 'teleological' means,
but when I explain you nod and say 'yeah, cool.'
I sit by the river, where I can see stones
amid the low-tide trickle. I wait.
A shopping trolley rusts.
I turn and walk away, passing, on the bridge,
a man in chinos and an All-Blacks shirt
carrying a cardboard Michael Gove.
* * *
Face-to-face (well, almost) with Cardboard Gove! I wasn't going to return to him yet, but suddenly the last verse of this one seemed like the perfect place to put him. But what happens now? Does Cardboard Gove get chucked in the river? Who knows?
and all we have to do is wait
for the body of our enemy
to wash by on the river.
You tell me that everything happens,
and is happening, for a reason.
You don't know what 'teleological' means,
but when I explain you nod and say 'yeah, cool.'
I sit by the river, where I can see stones
amid the low-tide trickle. I wait.
A shopping trolley rusts.
I turn and walk away, passing, on the bridge,
a man in chinos and an All-Blacks shirt
carrying a cardboard Michael Gove.
* * *
Face-to-face (well, almost) with Cardboard Gove! I wasn't going to return to him yet, but suddenly the last verse of this one seemed like the perfect place to put him. But what happens now? Does Cardboard Gove get chucked in the river? Who knows?
NaPoWriMo Poem Twenty: Ezra Pound Guest-Edits Nuts Magazine
The tedium
of pages and pages of boobs,
free-floating innuendo-lodestones
orbiting the radio-wave ghost-laugh of Sid James.
* * *
Getting caught up with NaPoWriMo after falling three days behind due to the lurgy that's currently knacking me up and which is, I think, a resurgence of my iron-deficiency anaemia. Anyway. This one is inspired by the prompt from day nineteen to write an 'opposite day' version of an existing poem, in this case Pound's 'In a Station of the Metro', and by this Observer story about the woman who, as an editor at Nuts magazine, had to edit their 'Assess Your Breasts!' feature.
of pages and pages of boobs,
free-floating innuendo-lodestones
orbiting the radio-wave ghost-laugh of Sid James.
* * *
Getting caught up with NaPoWriMo after falling three days behind due to the lurgy that's currently knacking me up and which is, I think, a resurgence of my iron-deficiency anaemia. Anyway. This one is inspired by the prompt from day nineteen to write an 'opposite day' version of an existing poem, in this case Pound's 'In a Station of the Metro', and by this Observer story about the woman who, as an editor at Nuts magazine, had to edit their 'Assess Your Breasts!' feature.
Thursday, 19 April 2012
NaPoWriMo Poem Nineteen: An Absolutely Commonplace Apocalypse
There were coronal mass ejections:
phone signals were patchy
and those of us with analogue TVs
cursed like dinosaurs stepping in tar pits,
distracted by the strange lights in the sky,
and grappled with portable aerials.
'Fracking' was given the go-ahead
in Lancashire, depite the risk of earthquakes
or running water catching fire
as the Thames so amazingly didn't
at the Milennium Eve celebrations;
a biblical punishment, hot and cold, on tap:
the destruction of the cities of the plain
re-enacted at kitchen-sink level.
Increasing numbers of sheep were born deformed.
As the Jubilee Barge was completed, files,
apparently newly-discovered, revealed the extent
of massacres carried out in the Queen's name
when she was newly-crowned.
There were sightings of giants in Liverpool.
Disabled people closed down part of London.
There was heavy rain in Sunderland throughout the day:
the view from the canteen was grim.
Most ominous of all, however: every paper
in the hospital newsagents
bore 100 DAYS TO GO
beneath its masthead,
counting down, not to some Mayan
Armageddon, but, worse, the advent
of the London Olympics.
* * *
Perhaps it's the strain of having to come up with a new poem each day, but all I could think to do for this one was to write a list of the events that made the news yesterday. Ending with the Olympics in place of the Apocalypse just seemed...amusing, really.
phone signals were patchy
and those of us with analogue TVs
cursed like dinosaurs stepping in tar pits,
distracted by the strange lights in the sky,
and grappled with portable aerials.
'Fracking' was given the go-ahead
in Lancashire, depite the risk of earthquakes
or running water catching fire
as the Thames so amazingly didn't
at the Milennium Eve celebrations;
a biblical punishment, hot and cold, on tap:
the destruction of the cities of the plain
re-enacted at kitchen-sink level.
Increasing numbers of sheep were born deformed.
As the Jubilee Barge was completed, files,
apparently newly-discovered, revealed the extent
of massacres carried out in the Queen's name
when she was newly-crowned.
There were sightings of giants in Liverpool.
Disabled people closed down part of London.
There was heavy rain in Sunderland throughout the day:
the view from the canteen was grim.
Most ominous of all, however: every paper
in the hospital newsagents
bore 100 DAYS TO GO
beneath its masthead,
counting down, not to some Mayan
Armageddon, but, worse, the advent
of the London Olympics.
* * *
Perhaps it's the strain of having to come up with a new poem each day, but all I could think to do for this one was to write a list of the events that made the news yesterday. Ending with the Olympics in place of the Apocalypse just seemed...amusing, really.
Wednesday, 18 April 2012
NaPoWriMo Poem Eighteen: CN, Tanita, Dido, Ludwig, Annie
The singer's voice is neither male nor female,
a whisky sweet as mead
and smokey as the Romeo and Juliets
I chomped when I was trying to look butch
and fooling no-one. I drift down
back to the road out by the coachworks,
the bridge that made my stomach flip, Twist
in my Sobriety on radio, my father's angry voice,
'Is that a man or woman?' I pitch forward,
land on your sofa, resting my head on your shoulder
as a whole vinyl record of Tanita's voice
spills out around us. Thoroughly domestic,
all I ever wanted: what chance did I have,
what did she have, what chance any of
the objects in your gravity,
linked in non-locality, colliding atoms
bouncing off this moment?
That night I made White Russians like a tic,
kept that Dido song I liked trapped on repeat
and sang along - 'I want to be a hunter
again' - and somehow got home, drunker,
almost, than I've been before or since;
that repeated snatch of the Pathetique
hummed under my breath
following Maria round the seminary, shamming
that I knew anything real about music;
trying to reorder Asian History,
the last shelf of my section,
while Annie Lennox sings of changes drifting
the morning after when we talked divorce.
No more I love you's. Language is leaving me
in silence.
* * *
And, on the stroke of midnight, here's NaPoWriMo poem 18. This was inspired by listening to CN Lester's fabulous album Ashes, which I finally got round to listening to today, and which I recommend you listen to as well - they do a brilliant version of 'Joan of Arc', the Leonard Cohen song. Because I like to be peculiar, the title of this poem is taken, not from a CN Lester song but from a Rae Spoon one, 'Come on Forest Fire (Burn the Disco Down)', mainly because I realised when I ran over the draft that I'd left Rae out and couldn't see any obvious way to crowbar him in there. It's not in response to any particular prompt, but I suppose, in the sheer number of song lyrics quoted, there's perhaps a little bit of a hangover from yesterday's instruction to include a song lyric in a poem.
***Edit 19/04/12***: I've changed the title. 'Ask the Colonial Ghosts' was a nice way of crowbarring a Rae Spon reference into the poem, but didn't really fit on the day when the news broke that Britain had suppressed files about our suppression of independence movements in the 50s. So instead I've just gone for the names of the musicians featured in the poem, in order.
a whisky sweet as mead
and smokey as the Romeo and Juliets
I chomped when I was trying to look butch
and fooling no-one. I drift down
back to the road out by the coachworks,
the bridge that made my stomach flip, Twist
in my Sobriety on radio, my father's angry voice,
'Is that a man or woman?' I pitch forward,
land on your sofa, resting my head on your shoulder
as a whole vinyl record of Tanita's voice
spills out around us. Thoroughly domestic,
all I ever wanted: what chance did I have,
what did she have, what chance any of
the objects in your gravity,
linked in non-locality, colliding atoms
bouncing off this moment?
That night I made White Russians like a tic,
kept that Dido song I liked trapped on repeat
and sang along - 'I want to be a hunter
again' - and somehow got home, drunker,
almost, than I've been before or since;
that repeated snatch of the Pathetique
hummed under my breath
following Maria round the seminary, shamming
that I knew anything real about music;
trying to reorder Asian History,
the last shelf of my section,
while Annie Lennox sings of changes drifting
the morning after when we talked divorce.
No more I love you's. Language is leaving me
in silence.
* * *
And, on the stroke of midnight, here's NaPoWriMo poem 18. This was inspired by listening to CN Lester's fabulous album Ashes, which I finally got round to listening to today, and which I recommend you listen to as well - they do a brilliant version of 'Joan of Arc', the Leonard Cohen song. Because I like to be peculiar, the title of this poem is taken, not from a CN Lester song but from a Rae Spoon one, 'Come on Forest Fire (Burn the Disco Down)', mainly because I realised when I ran over the draft that I'd left Rae out and couldn't see any obvious way to crowbar him in there. It's not in response to any particular prompt, but I suppose, in the sheer number of song lyrics quoted, there's perhaps a little bit of a hangover from yesterday's instruction to include a song lyric in a poem.
***Edit 19/04/12***: I've changed the title. 'Ask the Colonial Ghosts' was a nice way of crowbarring a Rae Spon reference into the poem, but didn't really fit on the day when the news broke that Britain had suppressed files about our suppression of independence movements in the 50s. So instead I've just gone for the names of the musicians featured in the poem, in order.
Tuesday, 17 April 2012
NaPoWriMo Poem Seventeen: An Open Letter to a Hollow Man
Dear Mr Gove, I hope you don't mind me writing.
Today's prompt was to send an epistle
to an inanimate object. I thought of you
(I know, I know - we're not supposed to know,
but some of us have noticed, Mr G.
Your Secretary does a good impression
of that preposterous voice you used to do.
His talent for ventriloquism? That was just dumb luck).
It's fitting you've gone 2D. Not only since it's retro,
when even silver screens aspire to ape
our dance through pliant space. When holograms
of dead rap stars play live at Coachella. You were never
even that real, Mr G: a big hollow man
with a fistful of sham, and a shitty line in titles.
Celsius 7/7? We're lucky, I guess,
that the only writing you'll be known for now
is the price tag sticker on your back
and the Property of Rupert Murdoch
which I guess someone from the NASUWT
has scribbled where your arse should be.
Anyway, my mission for today, as I say,
is to write to an object bereft
of consciousness, indeed, of conscience - you, in other words -
and, furthermore, to proffer both a fact
and some form of fruit. So, first, let me take you back
to 1989, a viaduct in Aberdeen, a young man
fuelled by commie rage and Tennent's,
detourning a piece of the state apparatus
- a traffic cone, to be exact -
forty feet from Union Street
into the path of traffic passing
on the road below, then finding himself
bundled in a police van. Did you call them pigs?
Because that was you, of course, when you were still 3D,
before you sat in committee rooms and labelled teachers Trots
for objecting to your choice of Commisar;
before your flatpack afterlife propped in the office cupboard,
where you rest now, waiting, patient, for the morning
when your underlings will drag you out, unnoticed.
Long time to wait. Would you like a banana?
No - fair point. Nothing to digest it with. No matter.
Tell you what. I'll leave the skin down here.
* * *
Today's NaPoWriMo prompt was to write an epistolary poem - a poem in the form of a letter - to an inanimate object. Who better to write to, then, than Cardboard Gove, last seen in NaPoWriMo Poem Nine?
There were a number of other things the poem had to include: a song lyric (here taken from 'Big Hollow Man' by Danielle Dax); an 'oddball adjective-noun combination' (in this case, 'pliant space' - not that oddball, I know); a fruit (the banana); a street name and a measurement of distance ('forty feet from Union Street') and a historical fact - in this case Gove's arrest for chucking a traffic cone off a viaduct in Aberdeen back in 1989. I bet it really annoys him, that people keep bringing that up...
Today's prompt was to send an epistle
to an inanimate object. I thought of you
(I know, I know - we're not supposed to know,
but some of us have noticed, Mr G.
Your Secretary does a good impression
of that preposterous voice you used to do.
His talent for ventriloquism? That was just dumb luck).
It's fitting you've gone 2D. Not only since it's retro,
when even silver screens aspire to ape
our dance through pliant space. When holograms
of dead rap stars play live at Coachella. You were never
even that real, Mr G: a big hollow man
with a fistful of sham, and a shitty line in titles.
Celsius 7/7? We're lucky, I guess,
that the only writing you'll be known for now
is the price tag sticker on your back
and the Property of Rupert Murdoch
which I guess someone from the NASUWT
has scribbled where your arse should be.
Anyway, my mission for today, as I say,
is to write to an object bereft
of consciousness, indeed, of conscience - you, in other words -
and, furthermore, to proffer both a fact
and some form of fruit. So, first, let me take you back
to 1989, a viaduct in Aberdeen, a young man
fuelled by commie rage and Tennent's,
detourning a piece of the state apparatus
- a traffic cone, to be exact -
forty feet from Union Street
into the path of traffic passing
on the road below, then finding himself
bundled in a police van. Did you call them pigs?
Because that was you, of course, when you were still 3D,
before you sat in committee rooms and labelled teachers Trots
for objecting to your choice of Commisar;
before your flatpack afterlife propped in the office cupboard,
where you rest now, waiting, patient, for the morning
when your underlings will drag you out, unnoticed.
Long time to wait. Would you like a banana?
No - fair point. Nothing to digest it with. No matter.
Tell you what. I'll leave the skin down here.
* * *
Today's NaPoWriMo prompt was to write an epistolary poem - a poem in the form of a letter - to an inanimate object. Who better to write to, then, than Cardboard Gove, last seen in NaPoWriMo Poem Nine?
There were a number of other things the poem had to include: a song lyric (here taken from 'Big Hollow Man' by Danielle Dax); an 'oddball adjective-noun combination' (in this case, 'pliant space' - not that oddball, I know); a fruit (the banana); a street name and a measurement of distance ('forty feet from Union Street') and a historical fact - in this case Gove's arrest for chucking a traffic cone off a viaduct in Aberdeen back in 1989. I bet it really annoys him, that people keep bringing that up...
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