A poem about a dream that I did not dream. It arrived obliquely when I was thinking of something else.
as I slept
I
lived underwater
no
longer earthbound
cast
free as a fish in blue currents
I
swam through REM and
awoke
with the sun
my
body strangely weighted
beached
in tangled sheets
Thanks must go to the Secret Poets once again for helping me tidy it up. I hope you are keeping safe and well during this troubling time. Here is Electrica Dharma as yesterday was San Jordi in Catalonya.
Thanks to the wonders of modern technology [Zoom] I was able to chat with the Secret Poets this week. It was a tonic to talk poetry for a couple of hours. With their help I was able to revise a number of poems including the one from the last post.
Walking in Crystal
Palace
unexpectedly
an iguanodon
take
in its botched anatomy
how
it sadly sheds its concrete skin
nothing
that ever lived looked like this
truly
it is a terrible lizard
Hopefully it is clear. There was some discussion as to whether people would know that there are Victorian dinosaur sculptures in the park. I am trusting the erudition of my audience. The other change is the layout which allows the poem to breathe.
This is a new poem, hopefully self-explanatory.
Torquay 27.3.20.
I
watch the empty bus
the
last one of the night
indicate
then turn left
the
driver lost in his own thoughts
in
the daylight hours I never see
more
one passenger per bus
but
as the sun falls
who
would want to be Harbourside
in
that cold wind
in
this empty town
The photographs are all from Deal Fun Fair a number of years ago. I've been listening to Graham Nash a lot recently. I think it started because I'd read Pete Doggert's book about CSNY. Here's This Path Tonight.
These ferocious chaps are supposed to be Iguanodons. You can find them in Crystal Palace in London. They were constructed in 1852/5 for the Great Exhibition. Sadly they are now in need of repair. Dinosaurs were named by Robert Owen in 1842 and the name means "terrible lizard." In those days all dinosaurs were imagined as large, lumbering lizards, cold blooded and not the sleek, feathered wonders we know of today. When these models were made they thought the thumb spur was a horn on their nose. I mention all of this as background to the following poem. It arises from a prompt from those wonderful people at #iamallstories. The prompt asked me to cut a poem in half and complete either half. I chose to cut the poem vertically and see what I could do with it. You can read the original here. I was never happy with it. Dissected it looked like this:
A car with one headlight,
the
near near side,
fitful,
flickering at best.
Unexpectedly
butterfingered when it came to love,
dyspraxic even,
he
dropped dropped hearts.
Women
remained an irrelevance to him,
men
fared no better,
a
human solvent
he
sundered ties expediently,
so
the path of his life was strewn with debris,
disgruntled ex-lovers,
metaphorical
corpses with too real knives in their backs.
But
how he he can talk,
silver
haired, silver tongued
dangerous. Dangerous.
An
iguana basking in the flash light glare.
Upon reflection I came up with this:
A car with the doors open
the
nearside indicator’s
fitful
flickering winds down the battery
unexpectedly
butterfingered, self conscious,
he
dropped his act.
Women
remained a mystery,
men
fared worse.
A
human cold fish
he
sundered all ties
and
the trajectory of his life
came
down to a big car
nowhere
to go and no one to go with.
Which is ok but nothing special. However the iguana set me thinking of dinosaurs which in turn led to this:
Crystal Palace Blues
unexpectedly
an iguanodon
take
in its botched anatomy
how
it sadly sheds its concrete skin
nothing
that ever lived looked like this
truly
it is a terrible lizard
I think it works, but you need to know what dinosaur means to get the payoff. This is what I've been doing all week and listening to music. Here is Laura Nyro.
I wrote this post's poem in response to a prompt from #iamallstories, a creative project that offered people 31 envelopes, each with a different prompt. I have to say I am enjoying the challenges of the envelopes. This particular prompt was:
What were we thinking when we wrote this
prompt?
he
holds up a mirror
tells
me to look in the glass
left
is right and I’m left handed
secure
in my penmanship
even
if I cannot read half of what I write
this
could be the counter earth
always
half a hidden orbit ahead
the
other side of the sun
right
is left and I favour the right now
so
I’m looking for a second mirror
to
make it all better again
hoping
to avoid that infinity thing
left
is right is left is right is
all
too much for me
so
I stare and stare
and
normalise what I see
a
man in a mirror
looking
back at me
I suppose I could have been paranoid, thinking that whatever I wrote would reveal something hidden of me, but every act of creation does that. There will be more poems from these prompts later.
I was listening to Murray Head recently. Here's a recent version of his big hit.
I have been long distance writing with the Secret Poets. Annie supplied a photograph of a museum diorama of a Diictodon. It was a proto-mammal that lived millions of years ago. It promoted me to write this:
Diictodon’s
Dilemma
they
ate
and
they fought
and
they fucked on
tumbling
into to an ecological niche
they
could exploit until over population
we
have even found their burrows
the
now fossilised spaces they crawled through
drowning
as
the hazards of flood plain living
became
too apparent
This set me thinking about mass extinctions. I wrote this about brewing beer.
I
think of the Paleoprotozoic extinction
every
time I make beer
cheering
on that powered yeast
to
drown in its own waste product
excreting
alcohol
itself
a poison
I
welcome
photosynthesis
began like that
food
for free
all
those cells amazed at how easy it was
until
the oxygen bi-product did them in
Essentially that's what happened. Here's the Larkin Poe.
Two poems about our present predicament. The first concerns the Babacombe Cliff Railway, which is now closed for the duration.
The last ride on the Cliff Railway for the
foreseeable future
we
remain the safe social distance apart
smile
but do not speak
for
what is there to say
at
least the spring has been closed
each
person’s isolation beckons
This second poem was written in response to a prompt from Secret Poet Liz. The prompt concerned two people and a discarded Corona beer bottle.
once
she would have picked up that corona bottle
the
morning after the merry makers had left it there
along
with any other litter
thoughtlessly
scattered by the through traffic
wary
of infection
she
leaves it be
notes
its seeming permanence
every
morning now she keeps herself to herself
he
concentrates on keeping his distance
no
jane austin character was ever more precise
they
pause they do not speak
he
double checks the space between
Liz suggested scrapping the first two stanzas and on reflection I think she is correct. I'll let you edit it for yourself. Here's Sean Taylor. Like all musicians he makes his living from playing live, which in the present circumstances is impossible. Please do what you can to help Sean and other creative people like him survive this crisis.
