The Word Cloud

I wrote this on the side of a main street in Dublin while listening to a street string quartet that I love. Not sure if it's any good but I've been writing more poetry lately - though given I used to write none that wouldn't be hard - and thought I'd stick this up on the Cloud as I've been any for a while.

Vladimir

Their music came from ages past
From Paris, Vienna and Rome
Concert stage to opera hall
Echoes in ceilings of stately homes
Italian ballet to Russian dance
And few granted this rare chance.

But here they came:

Their stage - a square of street
So many to busy - just passed by
Yet somehow in time with the feet
That pattered along and we
The privileged few who stood our ground
-the elite- who understood, we heard
Beyond the pulsing city around
The magic that came through those notes.

The lead violin, whose feet would dance
And leap to the wonder of this own skill
They gave so freely what they had
A pittance cast from my hand until
The guilt of having so greedily and cheaply drunk
The sweetness of their songs had faded
With the last few notes that behind me sank. 

The blank page stares back, what will it convey?

...I haven’t a clue, so best call it a day.

But wait just a sec’, yesterday was the same -

And the day before that. Am I losing my game?

 

Should I change genre, perhaps to sci-fi -

And make my main character able to fly?

Perhaps wear a cape and revealing blue hose

And adopt a tough, manly, yet hands-on-hips pose.

 

Change over to fantasy; protagonist -

Perhaps is a vampire who’s hard to resist.

With pallid complexion and dark-as-night eyes

He fights for his heroine; never he dies.

 

Maybe he’s a wizard, who sleeps in a dorm’ -

And mails post by owl, can adopt weird form.

He’s ace with a wand and can ride on a broom

But will his near future hold all gloom and doom?

 

Perhaps he is Polish and lives as a Jew

A pianist maybe, with family too

Until occupied by the Nazis; he flees -

To hide in an attic; saved by the Ruskies.

 

A fit roman soldier who stands with his men

And battles, triumphant, again and again

Until he’s betrayed by a jealous Caesar

And forced to fight lions as Gladiator

 

He could be a Sea Captain, handsome and mellow -

Whose best friend’s Ship’s Doctor, who plays on his cello.

Captain always after the villainous pirate

But failure to capture same makes him all irate.

 

Or is he a runner who dreams of a Gold

And he too is Jewish, a force to behold?

Or maybe he’s Scottish; won’t run on Sunday

Believing it sacred, a day you should pray.

 

But hang on a minute, these I recognise -

I’m sure I have seen them before with my eyes.

 

The blank page stares back, what will it convey?

...I haven’t a clue so best call it a day.

Couplets and Climbing

 

Taking a brief stay in the Lakes for Chrissy’s birthday, we wandered around Keswick and craned our necks at Skiddaw, wondering if we’d ever get up there again. Maybe we might, we decided, but not down – not with our knees. Never mind, I concluded, we’ve had our turn.

 

The concept of turns seemed to hover in mind, because as we parked at Booths supermarket, I found a couplet going through my head.

                                    We’ve had our turn of being youthful

                                    And yet I’d say if being truthful...

At this stage I wasn’t sure what I’d truthfully say, but the feminine rhyme (ending on an unstressed syllable) had the effect of leading onwards, so I felt a poem might emerge.

 

We bought some salad, bread and chicken pieces. Then we drove to the lakeside - strolling along, stopping to eat, and ending at Friar’s Crag, the view John Ruskin considered supreme. From time to time I’d pause to jot a line or couplet in my notebook, so when we returned to our B&B I had enough to shape into a poem.

 

Some lines were chucked out. “Without her I’d be jagged, raw” sounded a bit self-obsessed. Others were added – the “depleted/completed” rhyme offering a nice, feminine-rhymed conclusion. Eventually, I guessed, I had a decent birthday poem to offer.

 

 

     Written Beside Derwentwater

             3^rd September 2010

 

We’ve had our turn of being youthful

And yet I’d say, if being truthful,

That youth is no great thing to miss

- The frantic grappling, urgent kiss –

For what she’s always meant to me

Is something more like liberty.

 

To look and know that she is there,

Walking earth and breathing air,

Evokes in me, by simply seeing,

A feeling of augmented being.

Without her all the world’s depleted

But when she smiles then it’s completed.

 

 

The original draft was inevitably rougher, and aspects of the present version might be disputed. Youthful grappling, for instance, could have its indignant defenders, and rhyming couplets might be considered slightly naff (fodder for greetings cards) but all in all I’d hope the poem can earn its keep.

 

As for climbing with dodgy knees, we got up Cat Bells next day (okay it’s not Everest but there’s scrambling involved) and – more to the point – we even got down. Maybe we’ve a few more turns yet.

For all you wonderful non-conformist and individualistic authors, and for those of you that have not yet had the pleasure of Jack Kerouac, please let me introduce you;

1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for your own joy
2. Submissive to everything, open, listening
3. Try never to get drunk outside your own house
4. Be in love with your life
5. Something that you feel will find its own form
6. Be a crazy dumb saint of the mind
7. Blow as deep as you want to blow
8.Write what you want bottomless, from the bottom of your mind
9. The unspeakable visions of the individual
10. No time for poetry but exactly what is?
11. Visionary tics shivering in the chest
12. In tranced fixation, dreaming upon object before you
13. Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
14. Like Prouse, be an old tea head of time
15. Telling the true story of the world in interior monologue
16. The jewel centre of interest is the eye within the eye
17. Write in recollection and amazement for yourself
18. Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
19. Accept loss forever
20. Believe in the holy contour of life
21. Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
22. Don't think of words when you stop but to see picture better
23. Keep track of every day, the date emblazoned in your morning
24. No fear or shame in the dignity of your experience, language and knowledge
25. Write for the world to read and see your exact pictures of it
26. Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visiual (American) form
27. In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness
28. Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better
29. You're a Genius all the time
30. Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven

Jack Kerouac - Novelist, Poet, Painter and all-round gorgeous guy.
 I think we could all learn a little something from Jack. XX

People are probably noticing a theme by now to the blogs I keep putting up, and I hope I'm excused in doing so. The trip I went on I hoped would inspire me to write and get some floundering projects up, and this a poem written in stream of consciousness to try and get some balls rolling. I hope people enjoy it.

Trains

Brilliant whiles spent, like pretty eyes

Cut amongst diamond skies.

Trees creep up amongst the mounts

To kiss the breeze. From window watch,

Caught, tied, loved in thought,

From window watch, mounts recede,

March on plains, grass wave with me.

As I from window watch

Caught, glass stuck to eye,

Eye to sight, and tender hand reality spites,

With simple wave and slight of thought

Pernicious man from window watches

As rain breaks clouds to feed the land

To let the land breathe back the clouds,

And move them on cross the earth

And I from window watch,

Past the land speeds,

And fast the past recedes,

Till memory fades in brave day

And rhyming schemes scream cliché,

And I from window watch.

  

the sun always shines, and the gin's always cold, I hear that you miss me, but I'm being good as gold.

I want you to think, about how we could have been, when you pushed me to the brink, you were my only dream,

I know I'll be condemed for my helpless un-Godly sin, that I broke the very fabric we're all suspended in,

I floated through my days, being poisoned by the hype,

I rotted and decayed, I smothered out the light,


But I need you to know when the tide comes in, and the shells are brought to shore,

that there's no one else on this ground,

I could have wanted more.

OH, TO BE A WRITER.

 

When my words move an eye to tear

Inspire the weary, allay fear

Aspire the brave to sacrifice

And make of men from smallest mice

A writer I will be

 

When my words mend a broken heart

Can tear a very soul apart

And question right and wrong, and war -

Or even up an unfair score

A writer I will be

 

When my words provoke thought awhile

Or cause a frown, a sigh, a smile

Or hasten lovers to their love

Or ascend to the heav’ns above

A writer I will be

 

When my words float upon the air

To quieten a dark despair

Or lighten up a heavy load

And cause a guffaw to explode

A writer I will be

 

But though my words are now complete

And screenplay, stacked, in bundle, neat

An editor’s report produced

And aptitude of same deduced

I cannot yet a writer be

I’ve not submitted yet, you see

Warning - new member here, shoving something adult-ish into the fray. This is a poem that was begun in the late 80s but has had to be modified as the population became less sluttish :-) So, I'm wondering if this is still viable. Please feel free to speak your mind. Thanks.

SEX WAR

The desperate bonking of single women

enthusiastic meetings of parts

are too earthy and sensible

for moral interference from wifely

men and women in conjunction.

 

Married women are garnished with gold

promised to keep the light of love

shining in their dignified windows

persuaded, in feeble negotiation

into casual Sunday sex, regardless.

 

This heaving of the underworld

stretches beyond coin, cash, salt.

We are all customers consuming

what we desire but the business

we should be minding is our own.

 

In days gone by we were Cavaliers

on the weekend tour, keeping eyes peeled

for well-heeled men with wallets

in clouded rooms, guessing careers

comparing body parts to heights.

 

Sliding from cocktail to bar our skirts

laughed, we’d slant eyes across pints of Coors.

Now bare-back riders buck no more

no sucking and jumping bones, dears –

safe sex penetrates.

 

In these diseased years thighs are tight.

I cancelled my ticket to ride

blew sweet kisses, goodnight good knights

sang softly of white wine and beer

for the end of the long, long night.

There are physical landscapes, and there are landscapes of the mind – and the two can merge when your travel is a pilgrimage. You might be wandering the monuments of stone-age ancestors or maybe following the footsteps of Romantic poets. In our case, we were tracking the West Country locations that Coleridge and Wordsworth would have known.

 

The Bristol Channel seen from high on the Quantock Hills is a great friendly lake with the islands of Steep Holm and Flat Holm basking between Wales, on one side, and Somerset, on the other. (“Lake?” says Wordsworth. “You want to come up our way, Sam, and tek a look at Windermere.”)

 

When you walk up Cheddar Gorge your head tilts back to see piled-up blocks of limestone teetering beneath clouds, ready to hurl themselves down at you. (“Oh that deep romantic chasm!” sighs Coleridge, his eyes rolling with sublimity. “You been at the laudanum again?” asks Wordsworth.)

 

Just outside Lynton, the Valley of Rocks lifts fingers of sandstone to pirouette between sea and sky. Back in 1799 Southey (poet laureate before Wordsworth) lay on Castle Rock and wondered if the whole area might be the ruins of some devilish work. (“Hello Robert,” says Coleridge, climbing up to meet him, “you know William, don’t you?”)

 

These and other locations – Nether Stowey, Alfoxden, Porlock – were where such Lyrical Ballads as ‘The Ancient Mariner’ or ‘The Tables Turned’ were conceived, and to visit them is to enter a border region, half way between poetry and place. In such a region the Earth ceases to be dumb with physicality, and every inch speaks with thought and meaning.

 

Perhaps our stone-age ancestors saw the Earth like this too. Their seasonal wanderings would take them to places sacred to their forebears, or perhaps to their totem animals, or maybe to the Earth spirit itself. And if modern guesses be correct, these places came to be marked by the henges, quoits and stone circles we now encounter.

 

Either way, they offer us landscapes of the mind – spaces resonant with meaning, areas we can enter when our travel is pilgrimage, border regions between poetry and place.

 

Perhaps you too have some such landscapes?

Blots on the landscaped canvas
Deserts or fields nobody cares
I picture artists's palettes
Wetted up freshly mixed
Sticky tainted death drawn shades
Painted out wounded faces
Mamed bodies blast blown apart
Sniper's Bullets aimed fired fell
Poppy red spills remembered
Clotted blood smells fill nostrils
Rotting fleesh stomachs churned chucked
Battlezone booms friends departed
Comrades in war fallen heros
Forever forgotten gone
Lest we remember each one
That gave their life in service