Zoetrope

Well, I said that I would do a poem a day while I'm away. The intention was to keep me out of the pub. That worked well, didn't it? Yesterday's poem was certainly started in my room. To be strictly accurate line two was written in my room. (It was originally line 1 - editing and revision are the key!) Lines 1,3 and 5 were composed in my head as I walked down the hill to the pub. The rest was written as I sat and drank my pint and revised again this morning.

On the face of it, the poem has little to do with my job here - and, of course, there is no reason why it should - but first impressions can be deceiving. It was inspired (though some might say, not very) by my arrival here, which bore an uncanny similarity to every arrival here for the past nine years.

Nothing much changes to any significant degree, there is just a zoetrope illusion of motion.

Zoetrope

There’s an image of a boat on the ocean;
A zoetrope illusion of motion
It goes up, it goes down
As the pictures spin round
But its progress is only a notion.
The boat is stuck in this cycle for ever
And the captain, no matter how clever,
Cannot make it to port
For the whole crew is caught
In a moment whose ending is never.
This is not the way time should be reckoned,
In a handful of unending seconds.
In a trap they can’t see,
They believe they are free,
But there is no future that beckons.

There’s an image of a boat on the ocean;
A zoetrope illusion of motion.

I don't think it's one of my best, it's a bit too contrived and some of the rhymes are rather strained, but it's OK. And I must try to break myself of the habit of two line codas to my verses, though here, at least, it has a point.