Ascension

[AnonymousPoet]

(Listen and read https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ATQNfW7 ... e=youtu.be )


“Oh no, Oh no
You’ve left me alone”

Said a sad, empty voice.

My voice, a white bird on a journey: flying between point A and B,
Listening to songs I can’t answer.
“Foreign to me!” The land I fly between is full of odd birds,
Cherp, cherp, tweet, tweet as they snap their beaks.

I can hear conversations behind me as I count the stations before me.
Conversations before me as the stations fade behind me.
Moving at an unnatural speed I feel dirty.

In a seat where I can only watch,
The wind beneath flapping wings,
Wings that whisper to winter’s cold ears.
So cool.

Winter’s teeth bite hard and deep.
She, she bites so deep, she bites me.

Her teeth sink deep when she bites me,
“Mother’s child, wicked descendant of nature!
Why are you so angry?”

Let me help you
Let me fly again,
Let me warm her cool breath; her breeze
And shit on the concrete beneath me: grey, bleak,
Hard grey sheets of man’s stone;
Man’s nature:
Metaphoric oxymoron.
Unnatural.

Honestly I don’t think a train or any similar thing is for me.
Don’t

Put me in a sweaty four wheeled red thing either,
Filled with dead things. Gluttony;
All beings fed up,
In beltless seats.

Don’t plant my bottom on a rock of a seat,
Hands on grips too slippery, sore feet from peddling.
Over every crack and urban tor, peddling, passed everything,
Missing everything.

I wish: I would rather be buried beneath six feet,
Then sat beside or beneath twenty.
Claustrophobic in some taxi or choking in any sort of traffic,

Or buried deep enough to fight for seats on the metal mole.
Crawling through its networked holes.
Dark flickering lights and popping ears: train in a tunnel
A joke!
Perverted innuendo.

I wish: I didn’t want a personal, polluting traffic-generator.
Shiny consumer for consumers. Murder; clutching
Mother Nature’s throat, violent; brutalizing bone breaker,
Waiting to be refilled
Mother dead in a pool of diesel.

But then again, to walk the concrete path that stands on her face.
Seems contradictory.

I wish: I can spread my wings and fly high,
Past the robot pigeons that carry the virus across continents,
Heathrow, Stanstead,
Past the interstellar phallus that wants to touch grandmother’s stars.
“Ascension!”
Past green God and his viral non-believers and believers and all inbetweeners.

Take me to where it all began, when we were healthy.
Irony; when to be… We were not.

[thoke]

Better than your previous, I think. It's longer than it needs to be, I think there is some dead wood so I would cut it down to the strongest parts.

I feel like it doesn't really start until stanza 3. Stanzas 3-5 are the strongest I think. The repetition works there, but afterwards it gets tedious.

"Mother’s child, wicked descendant of nature!" is pretty vacuous. It's six words where one or two would do.

The final line seems pretty much meaningless.

But there are good bits, so I think this deserves editing and redrafting.

Ben

[David]

I agree with Ben - it is very long. I think that a lot of the individual verses could be written up into poems in their own right, which would be interesting to see. On the other hand, I can see that, as a performance piece, the length would add to the cumulative effect.

Is that an intentional reference to Middle of the Road's great 70s hit in S3?

Cheers

David

[AnonymousPoet]

I agree with Ben - it is very long. I think that a lot of the individual verses could be written up into poems in their own right, which would be interesting to see. On the other hand, I can see that, as a performance piece, the length would add to the cumulative effect.

Is that an intentional reference to Middle of the Road's great 70s hit in S3?

Cheers

David

Sorry it's not, I think that was a bit before my time, its good to hear that my writing produces some nostalgia. Also, thank you for the feedback

[David]

I'm not really nostalgic for Middle of the Road - they were awful - but I enjoyed the reminder.