Owen and The Old Man's Beard

Two things coincided very productively today: I read Wilfred Owen's collected poems on my Kindle, and I finally figured out the name of the plant that I always notice on roadsides in winter, with its clumps of white downy, wispy, cottony stuff - at one point, I even wondered if it was the cotton plant. It isn't, of course: it's Wild Clematis, a.k.a old man's beard. Thus a sonnet called Wild Clematis was born, and duly completed, informed by Wilfred Owen's poetry and making use of the image of the old mans' beard - the white beards that a generation of soldiers would never reach old age to grow. I'm quite pleased with the result, enough, even, to consider sending it to a magazine, which alas prevents me from uploaded it here. Still, when it wins a prize, I've documented the day of its creation; and when it doesn't, well, at least it has a blog to mark it out from the obscurity in which I and the rest of my poems languish.

            Closed Doors

 

They’re everywhere. From suburbs into town,

outnumbering the open ones by day

and, home by home, replacing them by night,

and leaving, flatly, plainly on display

the true and sheer extent of privacy,

which flanks us, wall to wall – a great unknown.

 

And in between, on narrow thoroughfares

is crammed the public space, itself scaled down

by cars, clothes, headphones, and, should there be talk,

the need for what we hear to go unshown.

Give me a hand to knock, or hold a flashlight.

A fire is on there, somewhere through the dark.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

An Addition to the DSM

There are many things that poetry is not. Big business. A way to earn a fortune. Trending. Something millions of people look forward to all day. What scores of foolish young hopefuls move to the city to make it in. What keeps Waterstones going. The cause of a sudden publishing phenomenon that fills warehouses and crashes websites. The force raising lines of tents from the ground outside ticket offices. Something to which personal assistants, or casual staff hired to deal with fan mail, owe their jobs. An art form generally loved, respected and, indeed, gone to by the public. (Oh, and what I should be doing with my life).
Nope, poetry is obscure. Poetry is minority interest. Poetry is... what ought to go and stand over there, in the place that, if we really admitted it, we all consider a bit weird and pretentious. And unnecessary: that's it, it just doesn't have anything to add to our lives after the novels and the music and the films have been in and bestowed their lavish gifts. Thanks for the stanzas Poetry: just hang on to them for the time being if you would, over there in the weird and pretentious corner. Yes, all the other art forms have office space within popular culture as well as without, but not you, I'm afraid. And by the way have you considered using a rhyme once  in a while?
Still, precisely because of that, Poetry should have the saving grace of being sparsely dusted with actual practitioners, of being easy to break into compared to the other more popular art forms. Shouldn't it? Surely the most underrepresented and non-lucrative field of artistic expression there is couldn't be twice cursed by also being one of the most oversubscribed, competitive and generally teeth-gnashingly difficult to actually make it in? Could it? And if that were the case, why in God's name would you ever want to try? What sort of masochist are you to endure poverty and prohibitive odds both at the same time?
A poet, that's what. And here I am: a poet. It surely qualifies as a genuine psychiatric affliction under the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. There are other forms of writing - ones that in all probability I'm better at - that I would practice instead, were my madness not of this incurable kind. Let's hope they can begin to cure some other people of it, then I might just have a chance. 

Some Rejections

I recently submitted some poems to Magma for their clothes-themed 56th issue. I must admit, I was rather miffed to get the inevitable rejection, at least until the dim apprehension that my ability to send off the very, very poorest of my work for consideration had struck again, and it would probably have been worse for such embarrassing stuff appear in print under my name.
Naturally, then, there is only one thing to do: post the poems here instead. Two of them, anyway. The third one is another sartorial confection I created specifically in the hope of getting into this issue - a not-so magic bullet, I suppose. Judge for yourself whether I should have included that one....

Iron

This is the steamboat that sails the lake flat;

this is Time’s arrow, forced to point back

to the shop and the promise. This the

implement we take to new skins, this is our everyday cosmetic surgery -  where do the creases go this pallet knife scrapes over the edge?

  

The Between-Coat The zip is stuck. It’s stopped doing up and the teeth behind it have peeled apart leaving my coat as its spreading wake. It hangs on me dead with mouth open. What if there’s no way to get out of this in private or public? I’ll pin on the looks. Inhabit the halves that no longer fit. It will be the spectacular frill I raise to terrify, my flying-fox cape as I swoop tree to tree, clerical robes of a surely absurd religion, and garbed in the moment of transition I will observe people in seams, unknitting.

Letter to the Editor, Scarf Enclosed

Sir, a certain haruspicy is possible

with all the ties, scarves and socks

we have received as gifts but never worn.

I have pulled mine from the drawers  like viscera

and, observing this heapof misbegotten largesse on the floor

seen rivers, seen motorways – maybe characters –

seen definitely, all of the train and criss-crossing

car routes that bring them to me

on Christmases, Birthdays, and other miscellaneous gatherings,

seen the bonds of a lifetime of inlawship and polite acquaintance.

             Sir, one cannot help but prognosticate

with all of this evidence before one

what a mess polite acquaintance will make.

Flash fiction

Sometimes - not often enough - I have the insight to realise when a piece of my writing is throwaway. Here's one such example, a piece of so-called flash fiction, which format I'm indulging in because you can win big prizes with in national competitions, and three and six figure sums for less than 350 words seems like rather a good investment and not much effort wasted in the event of failure. Someone else will be winning these fabulous riches, of course. In this piece, I just don't care about the characters or the human situation (nothing new there), and that has to matter, even in 350 words. Squashing all the action in at the end when I start to run out of words is not really my shrewdest literary decision either.
Nonetheless, maybe it has a certain something in the idea...

                                       High Noon

Exactly the sort of thing billionaires should be seen in: private aircraft, skywriting Saturn-style rings around the equator as they soar at the precise speed the earth turns, so that wherever we are, it’s always mid-day. Yes, in this state-of-the art uber-contraption we’re magnetised to the high noon sun; we will never lag behind the planet and get caught up by its dark side. Not since I was held up in Indonesian airspace last year have I seen the night sky. All the right people have been paid off now, and I don’t expect to be bothered by the agents of darkness – sorry, that’s you – for as long as this baby holds together.

From the glass belvedere at the top of the craft, I watch a refuelling jet sidle up. Whatever was night like? I imagine it as an oil-slick. I imagine you waking up in the morning with gloopy black night all over your pyjamas. It sullies you, spoils your natural oils like ambition and ego. As for morning, it is either an intruder or a false prophet: I suffer no such tawdry characters up here. Likewise, the afternoon’s not to be trusted, stager of siestas, Sisyphean slope the sun rolls down. And evening is the brothel we all fall into. Up here there is only noon, the fulcrum, the balance. Dynamic equilibrium, as they say: the serenity of rushing around at beyond the speed of God-knows-what.

The plane is almost level. There’s that squeaking again.

I go get more champagne. Once, I caught a pilot in a bubble. But in the chill cabinet something else is reflected: a second plane, which can’t be right. Are we over Indonesia again?

Then I get the tweet. Ernest. Arbuthnot. Care for some company? He can’t have. Pop over, it’s twice as roomy here! He has. The sky darkens; the belvedere filling with shadow. His craft arrives.

Right. I have my own dark, thanks very much. And he’ll never have thought of it, the plodder. I press the button and, smooth as oil, down come the blinds.

Unicorns... and far more silly concepts

Do you believe in unicorns? Me neither. Dragons, then? Thought not. Alright then, how about an all-powerful creator of the universe who pervades time and space and can witness every thing that you do and every thought that you think? Whoa Nellie – let’s just stick with horned horses and firebreathers for now!

Even at their comparatively short remove from plausibility, too few people believe in unicorns to muster a respectable congregation of horned horse worshippers. But consider how much further removed from plausibility God is. Unicorns are not assumed to interfere in human affairs. A Unicorn that did would be a more implausible beast than one that simply trots around the forest munching moss. Now, more implausible still is the Unicorn that, not content with simply sticking its nose into towns and villages from time to time, interferes in ALL human affairs. Busy Unicorn, but nothing compared to one that not only interfered in all affairs, but has power over them. If that isn’t bad enough, here comes the next one, who not only has power over them but guides and ordains them to the last detail. Still, even he doesn’t last long, being displaced with a swift kick from a Unicorn that, despite being the puppetmaster of all, is somehow able to invest his human puppets with choice and responsibility for their actions.

We are barely halfway there yet. Here comes a unicorn that can raise you from the dead. After that, a unicorn that can raise everyone from the dead, even those whose bodies have rotted down to bones; after that, one who raises everyone from the dead and then proceeds to send them either to eternal bliss or everlasting agony without reprieve. Naturally, this unicorn also possesses infallible judgement. By now, we are not even in the same galaxy as plausibility. But hold on for the grand finale: the unicorn that can do all this, and who created the very universe, perchance with a few deft stirs of his magic horn. A unicorn who could exist before the universe. A unicorn who will outlast it. Now at last we have the cerosequine counterpart of God.

Astronomy

The stars. Sirius, Betelgeuse, Rigel, Bellatrix, Alkaid, Dubhe, Arcturus, Vega, Alpha Centauri... the tiny and unwilting flowers of the dark, of the vastness, blooming for us, waiting for our spaceships as if for pollinators. We feel for them with the antennae of our telescopes, but never fly out to find them. How frustrating to have been born in the 20th Century, when attempts at them first got off the ground, when men people first left the Earth in body as well as imagination, only for the entire project to have stopped dead in the early Seventies. In centuries, perhaps millenia to come, we will surely be out there, it's maddeningly certain - but not now, oh not now, now all we have is the moon fizzing on our tongue, a first tantalising taste of human presence in space. The last space shuttle has already been mothballed. Things are so bad that Richard Branson has supplanted Nasa as our best hope of a chauffeur onward into the heavens...
Still, they will always have that extraordinary magic of being signals from the past. No, more than that: actual visitors from the past, real time travllers here in our present night sky. Sirius is a traveller from about six years ago: who was I six years ago when the light I am seeing from that fierce blue point first left its surface? The light hasn't gone: perhaps then neither has than person, perhaps he is, as I write, just zipping past the Sirius sytem, squinting and sweating in the glare of the huge young star, and from there passing inexorably onward. What an irony: we ourselves must lose our past the moment it is created, but  it grows instantly into the universe, ripples and ripples of it bursting out to find new presents, done with ours. And they can never be stopped, their thirst for new being is insatiable.
Some thoughts, anyway, on the stars.