A final 'Poetry Sunday'

Or perhaps a penultimate one; I haven't quite decided yet.

I haven't posted anything of my own for ever such a long time (crikey - nearly a year-and-a-half, it seems!), so I thought I ought to dig out one last piece before I go. This one, although not particularly new, seems especially appropriate to my state of mind just now.

I have in the past tended to over-analyse these little scribblings of mine, or at any rate to over-explain the background circumstances which prompted them. This time, I'll just leave you to ponder it on your own.

The road

The road is not open

except in the hopeful heart,

the self-deceiving mind.

Not open at all, but closed on all sides,

hemmed in by fences, ditches,

cliffs and precipices,

scary dark forests and farmer's fields

you hesitate to trespass on;

shut off behind

by the past you're trying to escape;

blocked ahead

by another town

just like the one you left.

Going down a road

only brings the world on faster,

brings its confines closer to you,

narrows your possibilities

to the tyranny of destination,

to inevitable arrival.

The only thing to do

is be like the rabbit, the hedgehog:

Make your stand

in the middle of the road,

heedless, unmoving,

staring towards the far horizon,

waiting for the things

that move towards you.

A close call?

Just like the buses! You wait for months between sightings of a 'poem' of mine, sometimes, and then two come along in as many weeks!

I believe I knocked out this little frippery the last time I was so miserably ill I could scarcely leave my bed for a week and was assailed by fever dreams (it just happened again the other week), round about 18 months ago. I had completely forgotten about it, but stumbled upon it by chance a few days ago when rummaging around in my files.

Death sits in the corner

Idly reading a magazine

And drinking tea,

Looking at the crossword.

No ‘Reaper’ accoutrements;

Just a humourless, businesslike young man

In a grey suit.

He says it’s just a courtesy call,

Not THE END.

But I don’t believe him;

I think he’s lying

To soothe my anxieties.

It’s hard not to be anxious

With Death sitting in your bedroom.

I think to myself, As soon as he’s finished that crossword

That’s going to be IT.

Death dozes off in the chair.

I check on the crossword:

He’s not very good.

I fill a few clues in wrongly,

Hoping he won’t notice.

Death stays with me all week,

Fretting over the crossword.

Then, one morning I wake up

And find him gone.

His bony butt has etched its outline

In my chair.

He’s taken the magazine with him.

Another Classical Sunday

My selection of one of my translations of Catullus as my latest 'Pick of the Month' dip into the archives reminded me of this little frippery I was knocking around a little while ago.

It's inspired by an image in one of Horace's best-known Odes, 1.v, in which he tries to console himself that he's better off without his tempestous former lover Pyrhha. Dedicating one's clothes to a god in gratitude for surviving a shipwreck was apparently a well-established custom in the Roman world, and I rather fancy it may have been something of a literary trope in circumstances such as this as well, an apt metaphor for escape from a gruelling love affair. I'm pretty sure I've come across it in another of the Classical poets somewhere. Catullus, maybe? Or Propertius?

With Horace, it's just a concluding quip, picking up on a metaphor of the "rough seas" he imagines his successor having to learn to endure in a relationship with the girl. I thought the image could carry a poem on its own. Here's a preliminary effort.

After Shipwreck

Like a man escaped from drowning,

I should make a shrine

of my still wet clothes

in thanks for my salvation.

How fierce was the storm!

How hard I had to kick

against the undertow that pulled me

to the bottom of the sea!

Yet today the sun is bright, the wind calm,

the waves lap gently at the shore.

As I walk along the damp strand

gazing wistfully out to sea,

I remember only

sailing in fair weather.

A Classical Sunday

Hope on the horizon

A peninsula people,
born with the tang of brine
teasing their nostrils
and the wave-sound
soothing their cradles,
seafarers, or sea-watchers, by nature,
but landlocked these many months
and down on their luck,
months of mountains and dust,
the unfriendly sun on their backs,
now, cresting a ridge, they see
in the distance shimmering bright
the memory of home,
and an electric ripple of hope
races through the long weary column
so that even those down below
still at the foot of the slope
who have not yet seen
the familiar stripe of blue
between land and sky
taste its heady joy –
though still far from sanctuary,
a promise of journey’s end –
and the whisper becomes a shout,
ten thousand hearts and voices
swelling as one:
“The sea! The sea!”

Does anyone get the reference?  [Well, apart from you, Weeble.]  If uncertain, and intrigued, look here.

A dark poem

I wrote this on Christmas morning (some measure, perhaps, of how depressed I was at the time). I had been shocked, outraged to read a few days earlier of the theft of the 'Arbeit Macht Frei' sign from above the gate of the Auschwitz death camp. I was relieved to learn shortly afterwards that it had been recovered, the ludicrously inept thieves (and the vile neo-Nazi who instigated their crime) caught.

The news prompted these reflections on the significance of the site. I gather it's not a particularly well-run or well-preserved memorial, and it is inevitably doomed to crumble back into the earth - probably sooner rather than later. And I worry about the kind of people who visit it; I fear it probably attracts a large proportion of prurient ghouls or Nazi sympathisers. I don't think I could bear to go there myself; its emotional impact is too overwhelming (I broke down in tears at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC a few years ago). But I would like to see it preserved for as long as possible. I think it stands for something far beyond the specific evil of the Third Reich. It should continue to exist as long as humankind exists: a reminder of our most terrible achievement, a reminder of the worst of which we are capable.

Auschwitz

What they killed here
Was humanity –
Their victims’ and their own;
The doers and the done-to,
Manufacturers and product marred alike
In this monstrous factory.

What it showed us
Was the darkness in all our hearts:
The capacity, the urge to hate and hurt;
And the tricks of losing feeling, sight,
Conscience, dignity, respect,
The checks that stifle the dark impulse,
The checks that, once removed,
Allow the hate to become habit, process,
The aberration to become the norm,
Wrong to become right.

What they killed here too
Was the last fond hope of God:
Where this can happen
There is no salvation,
No higher benevolence;
Alone we made this hell,
Alone they suffered it.

They re-made the world here:
Industrializing evil revealed
The impersonalization of modernity;
More than the Bomb
Or the Moonshot or the Electric Light
This place defined
The New Era for Mankind.

Let it stand forever
As a reminder
Of the fragility of human morals,
Of how easily civilization crumbles,
How easily decency is lost,
How easily cruelty conquers,
As a reminder
Of the worst of which we are capable,
Of the darkness in all our hearts.

And let the sign stand too -
Yes, that vile joke above the heads of the condemned,
The taunting lie of redemption –
Let it stand to injoin us always
To work to make ourselves free
Of this darkness within,
To make the world free of it.
Although we know
We never can be free of it,
Let us work always toward that end.

Therefore, let it stand.
Let it be the last thing remaining of us.
When the Alhambra and the Pyramids are long gone,
Let it stand.

Waking to strange sounds

the upstairs neighbour's shower sounds like rain rain in the tropics, heavy drops on a tin roof rippling rattles of bright thuds throbbing through my whole apartment dinning through my tin-roofed head loud, too loud, yet oddly restful conjuring sleep while still preventing it unwelcome noise but impossible to resent a reminder of rain rain in the tropics a reminder of another bed, another time a conversation about rain     A recent jotting, this, perhaps no more than a sketch.  Not quite a poem, but something in that awkward middle ground between poetic prose and notes for a poem.  All the same, I rather like it.  A pure stream-of-consciousness thing: the 'creative process' here, such as it was, consisted simply in suppressing a lot of what might have been included - trying to identify the source of the noise, trying to get back to sleep, the details of the images and memories that came to mind, that final conversation and where it led.  Less is more.

Dark metaphors

Well, it's been ages since I posted one of my poems. That's because I haven't been writing any. This one from the archive, though, fits pretty well the mood of glumness that has prevailed during this loony week in China. I wrote this - composed it, perhaps I should say - in the space of about an hour, while out for a run. The first line is adapted from something my friend The Poet (a proper one) had shared with me. Once I'd hit on the basic formula, any number of variations readily suggested themselves to me. That's the appeal of 'list' poems - they're pretty easy! It's possibly a bit raw and unfinished. I never did any polishing on it; just jotted it down exactly as it had first occurred to me, and then promptly forgot all about it. That must have been a couple of years ago. Bleak, yes; but not without shafts of humour. (And the Metaphor Game is one you all can play.) The city screams itself awake, The screaming never stops. Love's being tortured on the rack, Charity's in chains; Delight's a missing person, Enchantment's on the slab, Aspiration's choked at birth, Progress has lost its way; Compassion's on a hunger strike, And Friendship's bought with bribes; But the screaming never stops, The screams fill every day. Hopes are shoved in cattle-trucks, Ideals hounded down; Joy’s being suffocated, Illusions body-bagged; Justice proved a turncoat, And Mercy's out of style; While Truth's a wriggling prisoner To test cosmetics on. And the screaming never stops, The screams go on at night; The screaming never, never stops Till all our dreams are dead.

Something missing

One month on, and it doesn't get any better....

hole

someone dug a hole
I don't know where it came from
or how to fill it in
but here it is
in the middle of my life
getting in the way
all the time
whenever I want to go
anywhere, do anything
I have to leap over, step around
where once there was no hole
now there's a hole

it is as broad as your smile
and as deep as your eyes
it is the shape of your laugh
I gaze into the hole, and long
to jump in

Not exactly a poem....

Fate, like a monstrous pigeon,
Soars high above our heads,
Takes careful aim,
Waits and waits for the perfect moment
To unleash its horrid liquid bombs;
And all too late we realise
Why people wore hats in the '50s.

The question that's always plagued me is, why did they ever stop? Some people lay the blame at JFK's door - he was, was he not, the first hatless US President? But I don't want to get into that conspiracy theory.....

Sunday silliness

This is one of my older fripperies, but I don't think I've used it on here before.... and last week's musings on the Shenzhou spaceshot brought it to mind.

Are astronauts really
Always on time?
Or is the waitlessness
Just an illusion?

A Classical Sunday

It's been a long time - six months or more! - since I've posted any of my poetry. I've been in something of a creative slump this year...... and the number of entries under the 'Poetry (My Own)' tag has remained stuck at 49.

I'm not sure if this really counts, since it is only a translation, and a rather prosey one at that. It's all I can come up with at the moment.

I specialised in Classics at high school and in my first degree, and Catullus - the naughty one - was always a favourite of mine among the Roman poets.

Translations of this poem usually talk of counting 'kisses', but..... well, I believe there's a raunchier sub-text. Most of the 'Lesbia' poems are fairly bluntly about fucking, and I don't think this one is any different - it is only superficially more coyly romantic.

I have no way of knowing, but I fancy that the Latin word for 'kiss' could, in certain contexts, imply rather more, something rather cruder and more earthy; particularly, I suspect, with the oddly technical variant of the noun - basiatio: the process of kissing - that is used in the opening line. The French verb 'baiser', which is derived from this, carried such connotations, I believe, even in the time of Voltaire (I think I recall one or two places in Candide where it definitely seemed to be a little risqué); and today, I gather, it is considered thoroughly impolite. Basia and basiationes should, I feel, carry something of the same weight; but I found it impossible to come up with an English word that is appropriately suggestive without being explicit; so I have chosen instead to leave the activity unspecified, to leave these words 'untranslated'. We all know what he's talking about.

Quaeris, quot mihi basiationes
tuae, Lesbia, sint satis superque.
quam magnus numerus Libyssae harenae
lasarpiciferis iacet Cyrenis
oraclum Iovis inter aestuosi
et Batti veteris sacrum sepulcrum;
aut, quam sidera multa, cum tacet nox,
furtivos hominum vident amores;
tam te basia multa basiare
vesano satis et super Catullo est,
quae nec pernumerare curiosi
possint nec mala fascinare lingua.

Gaius Valerius Catullus (ca. 84-54 BCE)



You ask me how many times
Will be enough to sate or surfeit me?
As many as the grains of sand
On the North African shore,
Or as many as the stars
That look down on the furtive trysts
Of lovers in the silence of the night.
Only so many
Can sate or surfeit your crazed Catullus:
A number so great
That no snoops can count it,
And no ill-wishing gossip
Can jinx us by repeating it.

Chain of association

Is it sleeplessness that gets us thinking about things, or is it thinking about things that keeps us awake? It's a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem, that. This is one of the more interesting of several 4am doodlings this last wretched week has thrown up (prompted, I think, by the first item on the New Year's questionnaire that HiK posted the other day).

Scars

Distinguishing marks? None.
The coward preserves his body,
Watchfully avoids all injury,
Keeps bones and skin unbroken,
The fragile flesh free of blemish.

My friend has a scar on his head;
Mine are in the mind:
The memories of blood,
And of the exploding despair;
The soul clenched in prayer
Without a god to pray to.

There are scars of conscience too:
The funeral missed
And the one attended;
Familial duties barely served then,
Thwarted by distance now.

And then there are the scars on the heart:
All the eyes that dazzled and teased,
All the women I failed to win;
And the two I won but lost again,
Loves so much bigger than my life.

Yes, I have scars, but they are hard to see;
Just visible, sometimes, in my eyes.

A new poem

A recent jotting, perhaps not 'finished' yet.

Although the situation it describes probably is. There is only so long you can go on daydreaming about a woman who appears completely unaware of, and/or uninterested in, the possibility of your love. And I think one year may be long enough!

'Casual' readers of the blog may perhaps be confused. This is a love (non-)story that has played out more over on my 'love & drinking' alter ego of a blog, Barstool Blues (for example, in this post, albeit very obliquely), than here...... and more in the comments than the posts themselves. I am nothing if not discreet! That may be my trouble.

Tea with Madame X

I feared my love was obvious
It filled the room like sunshine
Perhaps too warm, too dazzling
I was showing my love too freely, clumsily
Letting it flow out of me in all directions
Spilling across the table towards her
I was too obvious, I thought, too simple
But if I'd had tactics, they were forgotten
In her presence
I lost myself in the details of her
Her hair, her eyes, her mouth, her laugh
I felt my love was obvious
But she managed to ignore it
Or swept it aside, as a minor irritation
Much as she absently dabbed with a napkin
At the stray crumbs of cake on the tablecloth
She smiled and thanked me and left
The café still warm with sunshine
But in another hour or so
It would be dusk

A different kind of haunting

My use of that resonant word 'haunting' in the last, frivolous post, reminded me of the following poem. I'm afraid I haven't really been writing any new stuff lately - a few jottings only, nothing of substance. So, I have to delve back into my archive. I don't think I've shared this one with you yet - another of my deceptively simple 'list' poems, another one inspired by my breakup with The Poet. Yes, yes, you've seen it all before! Please be patient with me: I will have something new for you again in a while, I'm sure.

Haunted

Every hour, every day
I miss you
Everywhere I go, everyone I meet
I miss you
Everything I do, everything I say
I miss you
Every time I go to bed
I miss you
Every time I wake up
I miss you
In a taxi, on the subway, in the street
I miss you
Every meal, every drink, every cigarette
I miss you
Every song I hear
I miss you
Everyone I sleep with
I miss you
Anything I read, any time I write
I miss you
Every single thought, every single breath
I miss you
Every time the telephone rings
I miss you
And when the telephone is silent
I miss you
Every time I close my eyes
I see you

Another painful Sunday

I spent much of yesterday slogging away over a new editing job (so much for not working on the weekends!). This was supposed to be just a "sample", to prove I know what I'm doing - although (unusually!) they have promised to pay me for it.

In 5 years of wrangling this kind of crap, I think this was quite possibly the worst article I've ever seen. Not only was the English dismal and the logical structure almost non-existent, but it was so sloppily composed that there were numerous errors even in names and dates - I probably had to spend an extra half-hour on the Internet just doing rudimentary fact-checking.

And not only was re-writing this horrendous English like wading through treacle.... the content (when it was intelligible) was often downright offensive. It was a (supposedly) academic article on China's foreign policy in Southeast Asia - full of trite, self-deluding nonsense about how "everybody loves us - and you'd better keep your goddamn nose out of the Taiwan issue!"

Yep, it actually included a line about how all the other countries in the region were happy to maintain good relations with China because they accepted that its military posturing towards Taiwan was just and necessary. Rather than vice versa! Rather than being so desperate to suck up to China that they pay lip service to the so-called "One China" Policy, while feverishly praying that it doesn't lead to a war??

It really is quite terrifying how thoroughgoing the propaganda on this issue is here. When I was teaching in a University in Beijing a couple of years ago, I found that every student (that's every single student, in the 5 or 6 large classes I was teaching) unquestioningly accepted that an invasion of Taiwan was likely, and would be a jolly good thing. They seemed to be gleefully looking forward to such an event. (I was tempted to show them the first 25 minutes of Saving Private Ryan, to remind them what a seaborne invasion is really like.)

The last time there was a major outbreak of such menacing jingoism in the local media, I dashed off this bitter little 'joke' of a poem.

A Dangerous Hobby

If you rattle a sabre too often
Its scabbard may come loose
Fall from the belt, clatter to the ground

Finding a bare blade in your hand
You have little choice
But to strike first

A Sunday poem

I haven't posted any poetry of my own for a while (well, apart from the weekly haiku, which seem too small to count, really). The reason, I fear, is that I have been too busy - or too depressed or too 'uninspired' - to write anything for the past few months (well, apart from the blogs, which don't really seem to count either).

So, I've dug this out of my archives for you. One of my more frivolous things - inspired, I think, by one of my Charles Bukowski 'phases'; and probably also by some ruminations on the French expression petit mort.

the important things?


life and sex
are a lot alike:
generally POPULAR
and almost obligatory
yet somehow never
quite as much
fun
as one would wish

perhaps because
we are distracted
by the constant effort
of trying not to come
trying not to die
but of course
we do come
and always too soon
and we will die
too soon

and maybe
that is the point
and maybe afterwards
there will be
peace

Invented words

Don't you often think to yourself - happening upon some instance of mistaken word formation, some accidentally wonderful piece of invention (whether your own, or someone else's) - "Oh, that really ought to be a word."?

I do. Quite often.

The following short poem is, I think, a good illustration of the point.

The context is probably fairly self-explanatory..... but that's never stopped me adding unnecessary glosses in the past, and it won't now. Yes, I was mooching in my girlfriend's bathroom; I read - or misread - this rather wonderful word, that got me thinking..... And then it ended up in this piece of distilled heartbreak, where I was gloomily anticipating a long separation from her while she went back to the States for Christmas, and fearing (rightly, as it turned out) that this separation might prove to be permanent. It's one of my only pieces to be so 'personal' that I address it to someone in the Second Person; but I don't think that precludes it from being submitted to a wider audience.

Absence

Limelessness – the quality of being
Without limes.
A fine word: green and shimmering;
Musical, like the rustle
Of high tree branches.
Yet not a word at all, in fact;
Rather, a mental phantom,
A cognitive stumble
In reading 'Lime Essence'
On a jar of body-scrub
In your bathroom.

I miss these moments,
Scouring your apartment
For details of your history,
Your inner life;
Poring over books, CDs,
Ornaments, cosmetics,
To feel how they resonate of you.

I should go
And buy a dozen limes.
Their zest and fragrance may
Console me,
Give me some strength
To survive my long voyage
Across this bitter sea of You-lessness.

Another Milestone

Counting

How strange the human frailty for numbers.
Daunted by the multifarious world,
We fake some measure of knowledge and control
By naming, labelling, counting;
By parcelling out time
We deny dread infinity.
Counting somehow comforts us:
Counting the books on our shelves,
Counting the days of our lives,
Counting the loves we have lost.
The uncountable dismays, yet fascinates:
The books we don't have,
The days still to live,
The love yet to come.

This is a 'sketch' only. I just wrote it in a couple of minutes flat, to meet the need for some sort of commemoration of the fact that this is Post No. 500 here on Froogville. There might be the germ of something worthwhile in here.

Anyway, thanks for reading (and for commenting, those few of you that do). How many more posts will there be? Who knows? I am pondering giving up this blogging malarkey, since it is way too time-consuming - and I've never really felt that it is 'me'. Then again, I'm probably hopelessly addicted by now....

An old one, yet always new

I just turned up this old poem-fragment. I think it's from 10 or 15 (or more!) years ago, yet it still seems just as appropriate to me today. Yes, wistfulness - I do wistfulness a lot. I suppose the happier state would be wistlessness...

OK, perhaps this isn't very good - but I haven't felt inspired to write anything new for a while. Bear with me.

The drummers in my head have played too fast
And loud and furiously and strong,
Driving me always beyond the pace
My stumbling wits allow.

How long, how long I've searched for softer rhythms
To quell the riot of despair within my soul.
And after all these years, at last I find them
In the gentle steady beating of your heart.

Only let me lie
With my head upon your shoulder
And I can be at peace.
Only let me lie...

More morbidity

Forgive me - it's the time of the year.

I was thinking I hadn't posted much poetry this month. It's mainly because I've been too busy (or too 'uninspired') to write anything recently, and don't have that much left in the 'archive' that's worth sharing.

This is really just an unfinished sketch, another little bit of playing around with a line fragment that insinuated itself into my skull and refused to leave ("cool/cold kiss of the razor"), and which I've used elsewhere, probably to better effect. However, I think this has one or two worthwhile moments - I might do something with it one day.

I labelled this 'Suicide Note #4' partly because I write so many dark little pieces like this that I thought I might as well - slightly disparagingly - identify it, or 'anonymise' it, as part of a larger body of work, perhaps indeed an infinite series of such broodiness. Any random number would have done: I was tempted to use something much larger ('#378' perhaps); but '4' is an ill-starred number in Chinese numerology, symbolic of death - so it seemed rather appropriate.

Suicide Note #4

There must be something better

Better than the pain
Of being always poor
In a world that loves riches
Better than the pain
Of paying to live
By the month, by the week, by the second
Better than the pain
Of working only for pay
While the soul withers
Better than the pain
Of covering one's bills
While burying one's desires
Better than the pain
Of seeing what I once had, want again,
And know I will never have

Better by far, the brief sharp sting:
The cool kiss of the razor
Is the best pain of all