Poetry Forum

The Common Reader 2.0

These kinds of things are wont to simmer
below the conscious mind: mud cakes, thick
night sweats and a sickly sweet scent of shit
catching the back of your throat
as you try turning up your nose.

How many days he boarded like this,
I do not know, but the routine
would always stay the same:
a back seat on the six-fifteen
and his calloused, outsize frame

clustered round a coffee flask's
screw-top cap, plastic leads trailing
from either ear. A century
ago and it would have been tea
and biscuits in the evening

down at the Lit and Phil,
a pitter-patter of echoes
falling through their cool corridors
like the petals of a rose.
After coalfaces and steel mills

everything had seemed possible,
and the future as clean-limbed
and self-assured as a classical
statue. The brightest dreams will dim
in the morning light, of course, and today

our modern refineries
will admit of nothing akin
to an inefficiency.
He can listen to anything
he likes, and does, shuffling through

playlists and audio books to blunt
the sharp edges of a thrumming mind
before drifting into a frictionless sleep
ahead of the next stop. His pungent
body still clings to the outside

as the rest of us smooth our coats
and peer into our shoes, and I like
to think I think of wheeltappers
and platelayers, of gandy dancers
and navvies, as I rise to go.

Incidentally I apologise for a staggeringly self-indulgent title, any suggestions for something better will be very gratefully received

I was enjoying the story, questioning some of the line breaks and querying the stanza breaks, wondering why you've put it in stanzas rather than one big slab, which would seem the natural thing to do, when I came upon thrumming and I had to ring the bell.

ray miller wrote:I was enjoying the story, questioning some of the line breaks and querying the stanza breaks, wondering why you've put it in stanzas rather than one big slab, which would seem the natural thing to do, when I came upon thrumming and I had to ring the bell.

Me too, apart from the thrumming bit. I finished and, after a while, went back and read it again. A couple of times. It's still not quite clear, but I think I'm getting there.

Which does suggest that it's not that clear. Or maybe it's as clear as - appropriately enough - mud.

HenryBones wrote:and his calloused, outsize frame

clustered round a coffee flask's

I don't think "clustered round" works.

Some beautiful references - Lit and Phil, and (especially) " wheeltappers / and platelayers, of gandy dancers / and navvies".

I still can't get it all to join up, and I'm not ready to make a stab at a précis of it yet, but I will eventually.

Cheers

David

I was with you until the rose petals, them I'm struggling.

Some lovely language.

I would drop stanza one and start with the rhetorical question at the start of s2. Is the Lit and Phil a pub? Great name. If so, would tea and biscuits be the likely choice of refreshment?

Not sure the petals simile works....at least I can't see the comparison.

Worth some work this one.

Luke

Thanks for the comments and insights all. The consensus seems to be that the second half is weaker and in need of some work, which I'm inclined to agree with. This is mostly based around a gentleman who gets on an early morning bus that I sometimes also get on, and who, as far as I can tell, does some fairly grueling, and smelly, night work. Luke - the rose petals are there largely as a stereotypical image of the more delicate things in life, in contrast to some of the coarser things which occur elsewhere in the poem. Ray - I had in mind a four line half-rhyming stanza when I started, but it just seemed to end up as a five lines with an unrhymed spare, dunno why. And what's with the vendetta against 'thrumming'??? David, thanks very much! That last stanza was great fun to write! The Lit and Phil is actually a nickname for The Literary and Philosophical Society, a still-functioning (and still beautiful) library in Newcastle, founded in the late nineteenth-century. For anyone passing through that part of the world, I'd urge you to take a look,

I shall try and revise, when I get a spare moment.

Thanks again all.