Ongoing #75

This started life as a sunset poem. The illustration actually shows a turkey in the foreground but has a setting sun behind a fence in the background. The poem mutated in its creation into something rather different.

Cemetery Sunset

there are lights in the sky
above the cemetery gates
above the ranks of standing stones

the colours, as the day begins to die,
shroud its corpse in crimson
gold and purple, hide its bones

and slowly blacken into night
as down among the silent angels
the day is laid once more to rest

amid prayers that perhaps it might
once more be resurrected from the grave
and with its light the world be blessed

Ongoing #74

Another of the doodles in the book shows several pictures showing the procession of the seasons with space for the artist to add some more.
This poem not only follows the doodle AND the same experimental picture technique that the last one had, BUT ALSO is a follow up to my metaphor and simile workshop.

I don't think it works very well but I'll post it anyway.

Unlikely Descriptions of Time

time

rolls like a wheel down a steep hill
freezes like a statue standing still
bounces like a kangaroo
waves in the breeze, red white and blue
crawls slow as an insect on the ground
keeps us tied and tightly bound
displays its peacock progress proud
threads different speeds among the crowd
falls as hourglass grains of sand
breaks like eggshells in my hand
drifts like clouds across the sky

and
then
you
die

Ongoing #73

Another picture in the doodle book I have used for inspiration shows a page full of blank faces to be drawn in. Only the first one is done and it shows an old man.
I have combined this with an experimental technique using a random section from the huge collection of picture prompts that I use in class.

The poem is called His Masks


he closes his eyes and remembers
all the masks he wore
when he was younger

he was an artist
.........................putting truth on canvas
.........................icebergs to sink complacency
he was a dancer
.........................plucking joy from motion
.........................and motion from joy
he was a musician
.........................trimming the shape of the world
.........................into topiaries of sound
he was a lover
.........................with the wildness of his youth
.........................and then the warmth of his age

he opens his eyes and he wonders
what mask he wears now,
perhaps an anticipatory
death mask

Ongoing #73

Finally, after prompting in the pub, I'm getting back to some of my neglected projects.
Ongoing, in case you have forgotten is a series of poems inspired by the cartoons in a book that I bought where the idea was that you complete the doodles. I prefer to use them as ideas for poems.
The next doodle shows three little old ladies knitting and talking.

And the poem that now goes with it is this.

Different in their day

There was a gaggle of gossiping grannies
Sat at the back of the bus,
Clucking and tutting and talking -
Eager to fret and to fuss;
Giving each passenger boarding
An overly critical eye;
Seeking to find any reasons
For a shake of the head and a sigh.
Disapproved of the teenagers clothing
And of the schoolchildren's noise,
And a mom with a child in a pushchair
|Had given her too many toys.
A guy with a spiky mohican
Sat quietly reading a book.
They loudly condemned his appearance,
Gave a stern and censorious look.
And a man in a suit with a briefcase
Was playing a game on his phone
Prompting the garrulous grumblers
To whine and to whinge and to moan
About how nowadays things were changing
How different their day had been,
How nothing's as good as it used to be.
They just go on venting their spleen.
A young man with a baby in harness
met with a withering stare
that compared to the vilification
for his wife with her pink and green hair.
At last when their stop was approaching
They stood up and still finding fault
Had a go at the bus driver's braking
As the vehicle came to a halt.

Ongoing #72

Today is Saint Valentines Day.

I've cheated a bit in trying to find a picture in my cartoon book that works as an illustration for this poem but I've managed it. The picture shows a wistful looking Japanese lady standing all alone in a cherry blossom grove.

And here's the poem.


I'd like to write a poem
Of a love that's deep and true,
That's brighter than the sunshine
And fresher than the dew,
That lasts for all eternity
Yet begins each day anew,
Adds music to the sounds of life
And grandeur to the view -
And the only thing that's missing
Is someone to send it to.

Ongoing #71

First the poem.

I'll dissect it later.

Alice waking, Alice sleeping,

Alice laughing, Alice weeping,

Alice singing, Alice dancing,

Alice fleeing and advancing,

Alice trying, Alice failing,

Alice healthy, Alice ailing,

Alice wanting, Alice needing,

Alice broken, Alice bleeding,

Alice falling, Alice flying,

Alice living, Alice dying.

Alice through the looking glass.

Alice in the underpass.

I have no idea if anyone will like this poem or not but I would like to talk about what it means and how it came to be written. 

Part, perhaps the major part, of what a poet does is to make connections. Each poem is in itself an attempt to connect the poet's experience with the experience of the reader. More than that though, the actual construction of a poem is an exercise in connections an many different levels. On the purely structural level there are the connections of the words to form rhythms and rhymes. There is the connection of lines to form verses and verses to form complete poems. But that's all purely mechanical. The real connection is the connection of ideas. The humblest limerick usually starts with a couple of lines which are joined by lines three and four to a twisting or subversion of the idea in line five. The greatest of poems link ideas in subtle and interesting ways. One of my favourite poems is Elegy Written In A Country Churchyard by Thomas Gray. Whenever I read it I wish that I could write that well, hope that one day I shall write something so nearly perfect. The beauty of the poem to me is the reality of the way that it links the ideas of life and death.

I don't pretend that my poem above has any such merit, perhaps no merit at all, but it's creation was a linking in  ways that not many of the poems in this series have been. It started out with a couple of lines based on my favourite book- 

       Alice falling, Alice flying

       Alice laughing, Alice crying

which went nowhere and didn't quite make it, in that exact form, into the final piece. I had been intending to write a poem connected with Alice In Wonderland but nothing more came to me. What came next was the doodle from the book that I have been using to provide inspiration - a doodle of an old lady on a bench, looking half-mad and quite frail. It occurred to me that she might be a very different Alice, an Alice whose inner world was very different to that of the young heroine of the book. I drafted a couple of versions on that theme but I didn't like either of them.

Then I saw a teenage girl begging in a subway in Birmingham. She looked even frailer than the lady in the doodle. She may well have been trying to get money for drugs - she certainly looked ill enough. As I continued on my way home I speculated on how she had come to her current situation and the poem, as it finally appears above came to me almost complete. 

I juggled the order of the lines a little to create a sense of narrative and finally had it done. The poem connects Alice Through The Looking Glass, a random doodle in a book and the sad life of a teenage beggar. I don't know if it's successful or not - poets are not able to objectively appraise their own work - but I hope so.

And I hope it makes a connection with some of my readers.

Ongoing #70

Still in a melancholic mood today.

The illustration in the book shows a distant stately home with completely empty gardens in front of it. This haiku is partly inspired by that and partly inspired by the view of my back garden from the kitchen window on this gloomy and miserable morning.

Mourning Haiku

The grass overgrown,
Apples lying where they fell:
Untended garden.

Ongoing #69

Well, circumstances notwithstanding, I think it's important to get back to normality.
The next picture in the book is a partially completed mosaic pattern. The poem, though a little sombre, should, I hope, speak for itself.

Mosaic



Each moment a coloured stone
Drawn randomly from the jar,
Placed carefully to the ground
Insignificant viewed alone
A fragment of who you are
Unremarked and unrenowned.
When death comes to claim its own,
 In the pattern viewed afar
The portrait, at last, is found.

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.