I think it came from watching too many cheap science fiction tv series. You know the kind, where every planet looks like earth.
They land on a new planet,
step
out into a forest reminiscent of Canada,
because
that’s the cheapest location
for
American television series,
those
epics shot on a budget.
Space
travellers never offer
an
explanation for this carbon copy of earth.
No
vague reference to some pan-galactic seeding
by
a god-like forerunner species,
that
accounts for the parallel evolution
and
absence of anaphylactic shock inducing
nasty
little microbes,
that
you would probably encounter on a world
teaming
with its own take on life.
No,
it’s just a convenient other planet,
ready
to be plundered.
I read some poems I had not tried out in public before and one needed re-jigging. You can read the original here.
Poem for C
Given
the economies
of
supermarket squash
and
the cheapest of vodkas,
it
had always been
how
much could he drink,
in
the shortest amount of time,
to
keep ahead of blacking out,
to
avoid the grey dawns
when
monochromatic
migraine
imitating aftermaths
immobilised
him in a space
where
he could do nothing
but
relive it all over again.
I
met him in the fragile truce of sobriety
he
called it his
jigsaw days.
He
placed his pieces
into
shapes that just might work,
into
patterns that had eluded him on the drink.
Some
events, he confided, never end,
so
you have to find different ways of getting on with it.
I've been listening to Corrina Repp a lot recently, but I've already posted her superb album here.
Anne Briggs has also been on the turntable this week. I've just found this snippet of a BBC4 series Folk Britannia.
You can watch the series on Youtube. Here's part one.
No comments:
Post a Comment