Summer Poems Index

The poems I wrote during this year's summer job, all neatly indexed in one place for anyone who cares to read them all.

The Return of the Invisible Fish
Ten Items Or Less
Milking The Cash Camel
Limerick
My Brother's Hobby
Day By Day
From Out of the Deep
All Things To All Men
You Are Mister Potato Head
Watching
Advice About Diet
Summer On The Hill
Favourite Things
Build A Better Mousetrap
The Death of Silence
The Conflation of Alternate Forms In the Minds Of the Artists
No One In Particular
The Metaphor Machine
The Lost City
Three Haiku
The Pig
Traces
A Trivial Observation

Ongoing #68/Harrow Daily Poem #24

The final Harrow Daily Poem , then.
The doodle for the Ongoing project shows a lot of TV screens.
This isn't really a Haiku in anything but shape, moreof a trivial observation to round off the series.

Summer is over
Normal service is resumed:
Or is that backwards?

Ongoing #67/Harrow Daily Poem #23

Loosely inspired by the next page which isn't really a doodle at all. It shows a lot of finger and thumb prints for people to draw faces on.
Actually more inspired by the fact that my last class has now ended. The kids have gone but I have yet to clear up the room.

The room still bears their traces
Surrounding the spaces where they sat:
Abandoned books, forgotten pens
Notes they will not see again, notes that
They made with half-attentive care,
Left scattered there on the final day
Jetsam cast away, driftwood on the beach.
There's no one left to teach.
I sigh and start to clear away.

Ongoing #66/Harrow Daily Poem #22

The next picture is a partially completed jungle, or possibly forest. So here is a piece of blank verse about a true story that took place in a Karin village in Northern Thailand.

The Pig

Under the villager's hut,
Between floor and muddy ground,
There is a pig.
We stand in a semi-circle,
And take its picture.
The villagers stand in a semi-circle
And watch us standing in a semi-circle
Taking its picture.
An old man smiles proudly.
"In England," he says,
"They do not have such fine pigs.

Ongoing 63,64 and 65, Harrow Daily Poems 19,20,21

I was struggling with the next few pictures and I have several half written attempts which I don't like for each of them. Then it occurred to me that the three pictures in question would actually fit quite well together.

There is a dog. There is a cat. There is a frog sitting on the edge of a pond.

I had seen two children playing under the trees the other day, teaching a dog to fetch a rubber ball, a task it was attempting with considerable enthusiasm but very little skill. Meanwhile, lying in the sun on a nearby garage roof was a large tabby cat, just watching them. There were no frogs in the real picture, but real life is rarely perfect.

Three Haiku

Children and their dog;
Catch-ball choreography
Beneath whispering trees.

The pavilion roof;
A comfortable cat watches
Children and their dog.

Shaded by reeds
Frogs grumble in the water;
Park life surrounds them.

Ongoing #62/Harrow Daily Poem #18

A loose connection with the doodle today. Two explorers are looking out from the trees remarking that they have found a lost city.
Last week I was walking around an area of London that I knew quite well about thirty years ago. I recognized nothing. It was completely unfamiliar to me and I didn't know if it had changed or if I had just forgotten it all in the intervening years. It had become a lost city to me.

The Lost City

I used to know each city street,
Each path remembered by my feet,
Each doorway in its proper place,
Each window that contained my face.
I used to know each turn and twist,
Could close my eyes and make a list,
Of every building, every road.
Their ways became my secret code.
But then, one day, I went away -
Did not return until today
And I found I'd paid the cost,
What was my city had been lost.
We met as strangers not as friends
For left untended friendship ends,
And my friend, the city, knew me not;
Like me, alone, it just forgot.

Ongoing #61/Harrow Daily Poem #17

Another day, another doodle. This one is part of a machine made up of cogs and levers.
Here's the rather short poem to go with it.

The Metaphor Machine

Pull the lever, press the button,
Turn the dial and flip the switch.
The machine begins to work;
It all goes without a hitch.
No one seems to notice
That it doesn't do a thing
The machine we know as life
Has got a broken spring.

Ongoing #60/Harrow Daily Poem #16

The next picture in the book is a doodle of a woman's face with hair and the top of the head missing. You are, I suppose, meant to draw in her hair.

This poem is purely inspired by the picture and is I must emphasise about no one in particular.

She fills her conversations with talk of clothes and hair
And the lives of famous people that she will never meet.
She does not read the papers, she does not really care.
She forms her few opinions from Hello, Vogue and Heat.
Her make-up is immaculate, each item plays its part
Coordinated carefully with every other one.
The face-painting every morning is the closest thing to art
That her butterfly attention ever settles on.
She can converse at length on the people in Big Brother,
Has a portrait of Jane Goody on her wall.
She knows the winners of X-Factor as well as every other
TV talent show, as she enjoys them all.
She's happy in vacuity, rejoices to be vapid
She doesn't want to join a brighter set.
And if someone disturbs her with ideas a bit too rapid
She finds it is no trouble to forget.

Ongoing #59/Harrow Daily Poem #16

and other random cross-threading.

Right.
Tougher to explain than write. Probably not a poem by some standards.
Possibly not by mine.

The doodle is empty frames in a gallery.
And where was I on Saturday? In a gallery of course. So there's the Newspeak cross-thread.
And what is my other thread about? The nature of the "explanations" in the guide book. Bingo. Cross-threading number two, or perhaps three. Artspeak.

This poem interlaces randomly chosen descriptions from the guide with made up descriptions from my mind. Where does one end? The other begin? With something that is nothing more, and nothing less, than an experiment in forms and parody.


The title is

The conflation of alternate forms in the minds of the artists

In new paradigms of transactional negation,
Paintings flirt between abstraction and figuration.
Studied genericism and fetishistic staging
Is both nihilistic and auto-erotically engaging.
An underlying discontent beneath the harmonious surface of serial production
Results in a development of thematic variations complicit in their own destruction.
The distinction of the reality, the image and the name
Is an oedipal autopsy, a semiotic game.
New and surprising value out of meagre means
Where the removal of essential elements, underpins the scenes.

Ongoing 58/Harrow Daily Poem #15

Another catch up poem half and half inspired by the next doodle and by my day out in London.
The doodle shows an empty glass. The day out was rounded off by a visit to a pub. We passed several, all blasting out loud music, taking over from the loud music that had blasted out of every shop during the day. Outside there were people blocking out that noise with the noise from their car radios and that noise with the noise from their i-Pods. Inside the pub where we finally settled there was just as much noise but as we were only yards from our destination we couldn't go on searching for quiet.

The death of silence

There is music in the shops,
There is music in the bars,
There is music on the streets
And there is music in the cars.
There's a soundtrack to our lives
That was never there before,
And music piped into the ears
Of those still wanting more.
There is music everywhere
As we go about the day.
Where did the silence go?
When did they take it all away?
And was the silence buried,
Unloved and unremarked,
In a graveyard of lost things,
Forgotten in the dark?
Does no one miss the silence?
Am I the only one,
That's ever even noticed,
That the silence has all gone?

Ongoing 57/Harrow Daily Poem #14

This poem should have appeared on the 5th.

The next doodle shows a couple of mice commenting on a new (and unseen) mousetrap. The poem is a bit misogynistic and is inspired in part by the doodle and in part by the parade of barely dressed young women that can be seen around the streets of the West End on a Saturday night. (So as I wasn't in the West End until the evening of the seventh I couldn't have written this on the fifth - that's time travel for  you.)

Build A Better Mousetrap

To build a better mousetrap...

Darken the eyes;
Redden the lips;
Uncover the thighs;
Gyrate the hips.

To build a better mousetrap...

On with the paint;
On with the show;
Out with restraint;
Never say no.

To build a better mousetrap...

Go find the mice;
Offer the bait;
Attract and entice;
No need to wait.

As the mice take the cheese.

Ongoing 56/Harrow Daily Poem #13

At last I can get back to it.

Here's one I wrote on the train on the way into London yesterday. It was specifically for use in class. The doodle shows Leonardo Da Vinci preparing a canvas while his model waits. His model is a very ugly Mona Lisa.

Parody always strikes me as bit too easy to do, but here it is anyway.

Frogs, snakes and spiders and all kinds of lizards,

Rainstorms and snowstorms and out-and-out blizzards,

An insect that bites you, an insect that stings -

These are a few of my favourite things.

Roast beef with jelly, fish fingers and custard,

A chocolate doughnut that's filled up with mustard,

Circling vultures with sun on their wings -

These are a few of my favourite things.

False teeth and cross eyes and spotty red noses,

A weed-covered garden, bouquets of dead roses,

Vampires and werewolves and bloodthirsty kings -

These are a few of my favourite things.

When the axe falls,

When the blade sings,

When I'm feeling sad,

I simply remember my favourite things

And then I feel just as bad.

Ongoing #55/Harrow Daily Poem 12

At first I couldn't think of a poem for the next doodle, a partly drawn castle, but then it occurred to me that I am spending my Summer on the Hill, Harrow-on-the-Hill to be precise, as I have done for nine of the last ten years. And then it occurred to me how essentially those ten summers have been interchangeable.

Summer on the Hill

Another Summer on the Hill
With lessons taught and time to kill,
With kids that come from every place,
And run and jump and fight and race,
With beds that are a foot too small,
With weddings in the dining hall,
With mushrooms served for every meal,
With days that merge, become unreal,
With biscuits in the resource room,
With gardens that are in full bloom,
With visits to the only pub,
Within this thriving urban hub,
With one day off to go to town
And gossip of what's going down,
With conversation that's the same
As every other time we came,
With too much time we cannot fill,
Another Summer on the Hill.

It's been fun, Guy!

Every year I come down for my summer school in Harrow filled with optimism that this will be the year that the chef retires and is replaced by someone who has less of a  fondness for the dreaded mushroom. Every morning I walk into the dining room and find my skin prickling in allergic reaction to the steam from them. I suffer for as long as it takes to eat some breakfast and then depart. I scrutinise the lunch and dinner menus in detail to identify anything that might conceivably contain them. This year is harder than usual as my recently diagnosed gout means I am, by and large, also trying to eat a more vegetarian diet. Yesterday's menu contained, I thought, the ideal thing. I was looking forward to it but now I find I have another question.

What kind of maniac puts mushrooms in macaroni cheese?

tick...tick...tick...

Time is, as you may surmise from the title of this post, ticking away. It does that a lot just lately and a conversation in the pub garden last week, as we sat supping in the warm afternoon, made me realise just why it seems to tick by faster for some than others.
It's all down to the markers we use to measure the passage of time. I don't mean the seconds, minutes and hours. They are just the units. I mean the semesters, the annual contracts, the birthdays. They are the things we notice.
There goes another 3,153,600 seconds means nothing much to anybody. It's another year gone since my last Summer contract at Harrow School is far more telling. And one marker makes me think of  the others. I did my first Summer School in 2001. Good grief! That's a lot of time passed by.
As a teacher my time is marked as start of year, half term, Christmas, half term, Easter, half term, end of year, start of Summer contract, end of Summer contract and on and on in an endless march. The days, weeks and months don't actually matter. When I was travelling, I had no regular events to mark the passing time and it didn't feel as if it was passing quickly. Of course once it was over it felt as if it had passed quickly, but that's a different thing entirely.

It all makes me feel old. Not as old as that concert last night did of course, twenty eight years since that band played together, thirty since I last saw them. One of my friends brought his daughter with him. The band split up six years before she was born.

So another year has passed, has it?
Two more days and I'll be back on that Summer contract. I'll be slogging up and down the hills of Harrow, teaching English to teenagers and trying to fill the rest of the time with some kind of activity. The Hill isn't exactly brimming over with entertainment possibilities and this year that ticking clock has been taking its toll. I have developed gout and that has quite a number of implications. For a start it will make that slogging up and down the hills a lot more painful. Worse than that though is that my doctor has made three recommendations, none of which will make the filling of the hours any easier. I can, and have, cut down on the amount of meat I eat. Most of the vegetarian options (and most of the non-vegetarian ones, now I think of it) at Harrow involve mushrooms and I'm allergic to them. There's always the salad bar.
I also have to lose weight. That's a bit harder to do when people give you three very large meals a day. I know I don't HAVE to eat them but willpower is harder when it's all, quite literally, handed to you on a plate. Worst though is the cutting down on alcohol. When I said that the Hill isn't brimming with entertainment possibilities I was praising with faint damnation. What there is, is one pub. My habit of popping down for a quick beer on most evenings, just to pass the time and see who is about, will have to be curtailed. I suppose as I do only have one there would be no harm in having one fruit juice instead - just as well as it takes a stronger stomach than mine to drink orange juice in any quantity.

We shall see. Since I started this post another thirty minutes or so has ticked away. I'll be in Harrow before I know it. And then, just as quickly it will all be over and I'll be back at the start of the new year for my regular job.

tick... tick... tick...

A Summer School Poem

It's come to my attention that I've recently been shamefully neglecting the poetry side of this blog. I shall rectify that immediately with a brand new poem which has the somewhat-less-than-snappy title

"On Being Joined In The Pub By Two Female Colleagues Whose Limited Range Of Conversational Gambits Had Previously Been Remarked Upon"

It is, of course a true story, and the title sums up what it's about. The only other thing I can say is, "you know who you are!"
Actually so does everyone else who taught at Harrow this summer.

I'd have really loved to talk
To someone about something,
And I thought, before they entered,
That I didn't much care what.
When they sat down and joined me
I found their conversation
Was on topics they thought jolly:
And topics I did not.
There was colonic irrigation,
Beauty treatments, oral sex
And what to do with boyfriends
Come to visit for the day.
One turned to me and murmured
"I forgot your not a girl, Bob!"
But it didn't stop her finding
Some more similar things to say.
So I finished up my beer;
Said, "I don't think that there is much
I can contribute to this, or
Any other conversation.
So, if it's all the same to you,
Though it's early, I'll be going."
There's a lot to say for silence
In that kind of situation.

Random Gibberish

logorrhoea

• noun a tendency to be extremely talkative.
(Compact Oxford English Dictionary)

I don’t know whether or not my trips, every summer, to Harrow to teach English should be included as “travel”. They involve getting away from all my usual places and meeting up with other people – some familiar, some new – so they certainly have something in common with travel.
That’s actually one of the great highs, and great lows, of travel – the people you meet.
Over the years of moving around I have certainly met some… shall we say “interesting”… characters. There was the bullfight-loving bar manager Captain Ron in Quito, the stoned-out-of-his head felucca owner Captain Jamaica who took me down the Nile (and why are so many of these people captains?).
There was Murray, the security guard in the Chicago Art Institute, who insisted on following me round giving me his thoughts on all the pieces in the modern art section. There was the lady (whose name escapes me) at Wolfsong in Anchorage who explained at length about how wolves are much misunderstood animals, and the owner of a guest house in the same city who has filled it with literally tens of thousands of teddy bears.

And here in Harrow, there is Andrew, who insisted that I should write a blog entry about him*. Now, I’d like you to spare a thought for poor Andrew for he is one of the afflicted. He suffers from the terrible condition of logorrhoea. He cannot stop talking. That in itself would be less of a problem if not for the nature of the random gibberish ( • noun unintelligible or meaningless speech or writing; nonsense. Ibid.) that forms the backbone of his conversation. Take dinner yesterday. He had eaten most of it but left some peas which he had spread out on his plate. Looking at his own plate, and the plates of his fellow diners inspired in him a surreal flight of fancy in which they were all planets, his – if I recall – being a society divided and at war, mine being a garbage planet and others being variously a society living on the edge of the ocean, a barren and desolate wasteland and a jungle planet which caught fire as the diner in question dropped a screwed up napkin on top of it that reminded Andrew of smoke.
All of these thoughts and themes were lovingly developed and shared with us.
It didn’t get much better later in the pub where the conversation was so utterly random (not to mention being devoid of actual content) that it’s hard to recall with any accuracy now, next morning, though I do recall his previous pub pronouncements that "pigeon hole" is not a very good description because you can't get a pigeon into one so he was going to call them "information holes" from now on.)

As I left him he was off in search of a time machine to return me to my native second century. (I find it’s best to go with the flow and join in with the bizarre world that fills his head but by then I was a little confused and had forgotten whether my time machine was a blue telephone box or a silver De Lorean. He did keep suggesting that I should try the red telephone box at the top of the hill)

So, as I said spare a thought for this poor afflicted soul and his logorrhoea, and while you are at it spare a thought for me. I think I’m developing logophobia.

*There you go, Andrew, how's that?