Poetry Forum

April 1st from a prompt in a FB group...

How to manufacture your very own emergency


When I was small
within the bathroom was a little door
some halfway up the wall
from which an adult
could extract
towels
by magic
and access to the airing cupboard
beyond

and I was very small
and I could climb
using, I'm a touch ashamed to say
the radiator and door handle
as handholds
how adult sensibilities will let us down
turn things around and show
how standing on a door knob
is a silly thing to do

but this is now and that was then
when
having climbed
I open the small door

(recall the door?)

and climbing through
the airing cupboard exit
via the larger door
into my bedroom
(which was purple
for reasons that need not trouble us
now)

and leave
the empty bathroom locked
behind me.

Mum reached through
the cupboard
slipped the bolt
without lifting a single foot
from carpet

no fire engines were involved.

This is great.

bodkin wrote:into my bedroom
(which was purple
for reasons that need not trouble us
now)

and this:

bodkin wrote:Mum reached through
the cupboard
slipped the bolt
without lifting a single foot
from carpet

no fire engines were involved.

I enjoyed the whole piece but the above really made me smile.

Sorry Pauline, am rushing off and haven't time to reply...

April 2nd:

On the rebound


a helix or a coil of steel
a balance point behind the wheel of a car
where creeping buttercup has bloomed
untroubled by the moon or tide
winter lied, lay on the land
for several months but was not forever
and never think your aching limbs
cannot carry you again
to the rushing on the hillside
the cup

Apr 3rd

Body of evidence body of information

you thought you knew what it was for
its knees and elbows and urgencies
the way it would obsess about something
for hours on end
when you had important tasks to do
or tasks at least the body told you were important
and then ignored
but every part of it slowly seemed to fail you
knees began to ache
toes began to creak
the waterworks began to water
and now you seem to have come to a place
where the starched white hats come into the room
and spend half of an hour
tapping at machines and never speaking
every test you do suggests you are still here
but their tests seem only to involve
shining bright lights in your eyes
and looking disappointed when you do not swear

Is April 2nd some kind of found cento? It's sort of Ashbery-like. And today's reminded me of A Clockwork Orange. You must be getting some very interesting prompts.

Cheers

David

bodkin wrote:Apr 3rd

Body of evidence body of information

you thought you knew what it was for
its knees and elbows and urgencies
the way it would obsess about something
for hours on end
when you had important tasks to do
or tasks at least the body told you were important
and then ignored
but every part of it slowly seemed to fail you
knees began to ache
toes began to creak
the waterworks began to water
and now you seem to have come to a place
where the starched white hats come into the room
and spend half of an hour
tapping at machines and never speaking
every test you do suggest you are still here
but their tests seem only to involve
shining bright lights in your eyes
and looking disappointed when you do not swear

I liked this....playing of the two senses of "body"....your body and a body of info obtained from it.

I wonder if it might gain from more specific claims about the body other than "creaking toes"?

I liked "urgencies" very much.

Does it need "come into the room and..."?

Seth

It probably doesn't need that 1/2 line, no.

Thanks Seth!

Today's offering will be delayed as I am away from home and also knackered...

Apr 4th (catching up...)

Brave new World-machine


But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.
― Aldous Huxley


assuming he's a bad man
still to be redeemed
he only can believe this gives him scope

to merely read the verse that shows
upon the floor
where he threw the book

but irrationally, now
the exact page
has a bookmark

although he's seen a lot of imitations
a supreme being
could only be encountered

beyond the clock tower
he drops them, one by one
the cushions from the Ottoman are overrated
he throws them, one by one
beyond the clock tower

he never has encountered
a supreme being
although he's seen a lot of limited ones
he has a bookmark
in the exact page

but irrationally, now
wants to drop the book
upon the dusty floor
and merely read the verse that shows

he only can believe this gives him scope
still to be redeemed
assuming he's not a bad man

Apr 5th - (still catching up...)

Starveling, seedling...

It's a comfortable bleak, the rain is somehow sordid
as it falls undiscerning on civic planters--
the empty drinks containers
always are in flower--and also on the meek
who gather in this concrete wonderland
on this day every week and at this hour
to gather in the crop
of gyro cheques. It's an unassuming grey
the sky washed out this perfect day
a nowhere colour promising
things of neither rain nor shine. So much
for the World. His time is his: to waste,
spend or invest; and on the rubbish pile
behind the tower block as recently as eight o'clock
this morning, he found a soap box

--and any corner of the square will do--

He drops it to the ground.
He takes one long step upward,
a breath...

Apr 6th (still still catching up...)

So you want to know about short-angle mesography...


I can give you a basic talk. Note first
the colours of the chalk, I'll use blue
for in box processing and green for rocks.

So... Oh, OK, let's use the fat red stick
for hand-worked corner bracing sets and pins,
so if I sketch the first block in, I'll mark

the knot locations in yellow and see you cut
always between adjacent cords. It's hard
to grasp at first but when you start you'll see...

Now, for me, the usual protractor guides
aren't great. I use a cheap disposable
a lot and with a pencil mark align-- Well yes

that happens all the time but then it will
you have to use some skill, rework the link
and bind the edges with matte tape. I take

two spare blocks from the end, that's just in case,
and I label them with names of pets and friends.
They're not in sequence. The glue's quite strong

you do not want it on your hands. I'd planned
that at this point I'd show my latest work
but this one seems all twisted
I don't know how that happens...

Apr 7th (nearly caught up)

The consultation


Need

About your daughter's heart,
she needs a better one. Especially
as now she's reaching puberty.
There is an art to matching...

...let's see. You're on a budget here
and naturally you want the best;
it's a serious investment
and she'll live with it for years.


Mechanical

This is the Cybertech 12000,
it's guaranteed for five decades;
it's also Swedish made
and after that, she gets a voucher

towards the upgrade.
Good question! There's a panel
we implant it in her temple
and the little lights inside will change

to orange when she needs
a service. And this is a point:
she will of course be literally at heart:
machine. Robotics will bleed

into her personality.
She'll be more persistent, unremitting,
direct, forceful, unforgiving...
...well it isn't for every family.


Vegetable

Now this is a heart of oak
it will never need replacement.
In fact, it grows in place, is best
left to itself. She may fear smoke,

feel nervous around axes and fire.
Small leaves, eventually, may spread
amongst her hair in spring, they come
right off in autumn. Of course she'll lose some drive,

weather storms placidly; be tougher
but calmer, stiller; take a long view...
Oh, she coxes a rowing crew?
Well probably she'll give that up.


Dark

Which brings us to this.
Human,
not a new one:
second hand. Nothing amiss

with that. Guaranteed healthy,
young, reliable, strong,
long-lasting. It's going for a song
you don't need to be wealthy.

It's just that... this may be a concern...
this heart is evil.
It isn't always people
can love a child of evil heart. You'll learn

to live with it? Yes, it's the lesser
of two evils, or I should say:
of one evil verses death.

You have to pay a fee
for strangling the current owner.

Brilliant! I think I'll quit now.

Ros

http://www.academia.edu/2529112/From_Et ... thropology

Look at that abstract. It's practically a poem itself.

I cannot imagine who wrote: The prevailing geopolitical relations between parts of the world have always provided the enabling matrix of anthropological practice. Given the emerging global power alternation and its reconfiguration of the political and epistemic relations between regions of the world, which I call a postexotic historical conjuncture, anthropology must recalibrate its practices. This article suggests 5 domains of disciplinary adjustment: First, the reconceptualization of our metageographic imagination from one that assumes hierarchical relations to one of horizontal or radial relations between the world’s regions. Second, the abandonment of an egocentric intellectual sensibility in favor of a sociocentric one, as orientation to fieldwork. Third, the disassociation of fieldwork as a distinctive research practice from ethnography. Fourth, the substitution of mesography for ethnography as an alternative approach to inquiry for a postexotic anthropology. And fifth, the adoption of an ethic of reciprocity as a remedy to the chronic unequal exchange between anthropologists and communities.

Damn! I thought I'd made the word up...

Ian

Your poem makes considerably more sense.

I never took this step


I never. I never quit my job
Friday last week, and went out on a spree
with soon-to-be quondam workmates.

I never. I never started on my super
spiffing new job, this morning
at nine a.m. to spend
the whole day reading
introductory texts
not reaching the next step.

And because I never, ever
did either of these things,
I didn't get four days behind writing poems.

So I can be grateful
for that.

At Zero


It isn't emptiness per se
because to be bare and empty dry
implies there is a thing
the hand could coffee cup grip
and the eye could sip
and the mind could say
why... there's nothing in this pot. This...

is not what we're talking about, here,
because
there's nothing,
no pot, no hand,
and no mind.

bodkin wrote:I never took this step


I never. I never quit my job
Friday last week, and went out on a spree
with soon-to-be quondam workmates.

I never. I never started on my super
spiffing new job, this morning
at nine a.m. to spend
the whole day reading
introductory texts
not reaching the next step.

And because I never, ever
did either of these things,
I didn't get four days behind writing poems.

So I can be grateful
for that.

Three cheers for any poem that has "quondam".

Good luck with the new job.

Thanks Seth!

Apr - 10th - (falling behind again)


Advanced Linoleum


Allegro alla agro, he remembers
even from the moment he tail-gated in.
He slurs his phrases carefully to pin
disparagement on each staff member
as required -- he likes to be precise. No jazz.
No simply making it up as he goes along.
This is no accidental, it's a thing done
in full knowledge, a happening rehearsed

with friends in other bars, but now it's time
to solo. He's already captured hearts
with his delicate glissando through the door
en route to pointing baton at the china;
he's insulted the wrong guy--it's an art--
and now he's beating time, face first, on the lino.

Apr 11th

Brown study


Since she first learned that counting
was a thing one could apply
to many other things
she's waited every autumn for the geese.

They're here, a seven
and a gap and an eleven
and then another thirty-two;
some honk elegiac in frissoned air.

The harder lesson was some things
are not amenable to number.
She lets the paper brown beech leaves
chatter softly, uncounted in the breeze.

As they aren't so loud
as to interrupt,
she sinks into her musings.
Polite, they leave the stranger to herself.

You're still going! Well done, Ian.

I like your latest offering (and quite a few of the others).

They're here, a seven
and a gap and an eleven
and then another thirty-two

I love the cadences of that.

Cheers

David

Apr 14th -- (yes, I've skipped one, I'll come back to it later...)

Speciality of the house

[center]Ask us about your special function!

Notice on:
The Sportsman Inn
Lodge Moor, Sheffield

16/04/2016[/center]


Tell me indeed about my special function...

Is it to do
with being the watcher
the constant observer
the one write-only server

which makes all the quantum wave functions collapse?
Is it more, perhaps, that I'm a reference
a point unspecial, save only in its label:
we measure everything from here?

Or is is something less clear? Does the maths
of human interaction come as a net
of one-way arrowed interactions
where some point must come first?

Or last? Is it something vast
in economics? Am I the bellwether
and if I don't buy a taco,
the feedback takes it's time,

but basically that it--
the economy, stupid, in decline?
So, tell me about my special function, do I bisect
some angle? Is it something about sex?

Apr 13th

First catch your hare


First catch your hare
First buy your outdoor gear
First relocate to near where hares are found
First study your quarry in theory and in life
First get a shotgun
First get a gun license
First build a hide
First hide
First wait all night on the cold hilltop
First eat McDonald's while waiting for the supermarket to open

Excellent specialty. a few typos.

Apr 15th -- (adopting a female persona here...)

Time future contained


Coat hooks...

...beside the door in the hall
of the old terraced house
where everyone grew up. There was
a smell of people, must, roasted dinners
and naturally the dog. There was also the fog
of grandfather's pipe. He stopped
smoking in in nineteen eighty-three but still
the smell returns to me
as I pull down the jackets. See here's
that scarf I used to borrow
for dressing up and here's the plastic
raincoat, which at sixteen Mum thought
fantastic (or fab: the idiom of the day)
but which she put away, forever,
when it got a cigarette burn
at a party and this...


After...

...my Gran's cremation, we all trail back
one last time home, to take out anything
a family can't bear to lose. Mother heads
for the kitchen, and Aunty Bren, upstairs,
roots through the sewing basket
in the small front room. I enjoy
the scented gloom in the larder, as is
my habit of years. There's supposed to be tears
but weirdly no, until Mother gets upset
at a sugar bowl, for no clear reason
and orders me go to sort
the garments hanging on the hooks. After
her husband died, Grandma, facing twenty years
alone, turned to books--my natural focus--
but couldn't read these last few years;
so those are gone. I turn, daughter obedient,
to dust and cloth and digging through
archaeological layers, find
the smell of pipe tobacco and an artefact,
two decades adrift...


...is Granddad's hat.