Pressing down, holding up

Based on an observation by my brother-in-law...

The oak: a woodland multistor(e)y

Such strength of trunk,
Lower limbs heavy as humvees
Or, as an English oak, Rolls-Royces
Held out at arm’s length –
Above then, a rank of standard family choices –
Estates or MPVs,
Then on up the bark-and-metal strata
To find Minis and Smart cars
Packed tight,
Their lightness amplified
By leaf-green paint-jobs –
Spraygun foliage
Aphid-waxed and tree-cut;
Out to the sparrow-bearing mopeds,
Bikes like ripe fruit
And old spare parts on twigs –
Fractal chrome.

From bad to verse

Along with some poetical chums, I'm currently working my way through these exercises as poem-a-day prompts. Yesterday's was "Write the worst poem you possibly can. Now edit it and make it even worse."

So I did. As did others.

What was interesting was (a) how difficult this was - the urge to avoid 'bad' poetry is strong, and (b) once achieved, the results are still good (in their own way) because they are funny, and that is positive. A lot of humour is about the unexpected, the disjointed, the out-of-place-or-time and so on, so maybe this isn't too surprising - and creating some mirth has to be a good thing, so maybe no need to analyse further. Here's my attempt:

Bad sex poem
[My submission to the ‘erotica’ section of this year’s Vogon Eisteddfod]

Jagged buttocks warts clash
Clash; clash clash; clash
Clash CLASH clash.
Oh, compartments! Look!
Oh, oh dumpling’s! Lovelier blancmange
From a packet. NO!
And some plastic sponge.
It wobbles.
I can see a cauliflower.
Woe! WOE!
My vegetable won’t grow –
WITHOUT some gravy.
Greeeen.
Cleverly I say ‘noirmange’
Now you see!
Yes, they are French but opposite.
That is clever so you like it. Vert!
Oui! Non! Like that.
But better.
Desire akin to that penned a few years ago by Alan Titchmarsh winning an award that’s somehow appropriate here but not the one he would have wanted I think it is over.

Watching the watchers

Mocking the snoops of the NSA etc...

Political Spectrum

Apparently you’ve been snooping with your Prism,
Rifling through everybody’s dirty electronic laundry,
Trying to shed light on the reds through greens to violets,
Cyber-paparazzi dredging shredding out of desktop trashcans,
Manhandling rantbook status updates,
Getting overexcited when someone Googles
‘Taliban’ or ‘Jäger-bombs’ –
Does a little warning LED
Flash on a wired black box in Langley or the Pentagon
Every time Monsanto’s labelled ‘evil’
Or YouTube gets another anti-warfare song?

Do you get a tingle
In your standard-issue underpants,
Stealthy teflon spY-fronts,
Watching all the Twitter-chitter-chat,
And amusingly recaptioned cats? –
‘LOLspooks’ –
If it’s me that you’ve been stalking,
You’ll know my taste in music’s loud,
That I’m inordinately fond of bugs,
Rather keen on all things green,
But to bigots, creatively rude,
And so on – no dots to join or evil plots;
My dissent is free for all to see,
So if you want to know,
Up in your silicon-chipped towers,
Just phone me,
(Normal office hours).

Confronting the confrontational

Carrying on with some political verse...

Taking down the fascists

Back then it was all boots in back-alleys,
Dodging bottles and brickbats,
Scanning the passed-round pages of Searchlight magazine
For news of who’s been outed –
Neo-Nazi teacher,
Neo-Nazi policeman,
Neo-Nazi care assistant;
Outed and out,
Hard skins on hard skins,
Abrasive times.

Twenty years later,
Keyboards are weapons –
Explosive blogs and Twitter-storms,
Report-bombing runs in facebook’s
Oh-so-social theatre of war –
Screenshots ring out right-wing alarm-bells,
Sound bigots’ online death-knells,
Watch Hitler-lickers’ mouths go dry –

‘I wuz hacked’,
‘I wuz reachin’ for the phone’,
‘I wuz showing ‘ow tall a sunflower is’ –

No, we all know a sieg heil salute when we see one,
So post, repost and hyperlink;
Hatecrime’s real, even when it’s virtual.

The cost of selling papers

Some media/political poetry - this one's been gestating for a couple of weeks...

The News: A Narrative of Fear

Mohammed Saleem, 75 and father-of-seven,
Grandfather walking home from prayers,
A pensioner with a walking stick,
By all accounts a great bloke,
Cut down by a coward’s knife,
Stabbed three times in the back
Because of colour-race-creed;
Media scarcely notices,
Quietly murmurs about a murder,
No mention of ‘terror’.

DrummerLeeRigby, 25 and father-of-one,
Walking back to barracks,
Dressed in ‘Help for Heroes’ garb,
Hacked down by machete-men
Reciting the Koran,
Though more to do with mental health than Islam,
Media scream ‘TERRORISTS!’,
Headlines and webpages
Inciting fear and hatred,
Selling online ads and papers,
Giving neo-Nazis food for lack-of-thought,
By the way, more news-rags bought,
Driving more taunts, abuse,
Headscarves pulled down,
Shop graffiti, mosque attacks
And a fire at a boarding school until
Arson destroys a community centre, Muswell Hill,
‘EDL’ spray-painted on the walls,
It’s just good luck that no-one’s killed,
Violence organised and orchestrated,
Media reports this time, though they still won’t call it ‘terror’;
Wrong narrative when white kills black,
When the killer cites the Bible,
That doesn’t sell –
Not the right shade of bombshell,
Their blame; their shame
When the old man fell.

Babbling Brooke

A tree-themed (well, imaged) poem-pair with a nod to Rupert Brooke...

Peacetime

Ash-keys unlock oaken doors,
Sycamores rescue drowning acorns
By sending helicopter-seeds
And lifefloats,
Catkins yowl to be let in,
Dogwood barks to be let out;
Both shed leaves upon the floor.

Baumkrieg

Willows weep for fallen deadwood comrades,
Elders send saplings to the Front –
They’re only following orders;
It seems just yesteryear that they were buds and blossoms,
Blooming on the may,
Flying warning flags from beech-masts –
Now thorns are set, fixed as bayonets,
Sound the advance,
March across the Nullarbor
From where some come home,
Missing twigs and branches,
Bearing lop-sided crowns and leaf-scars –
At first tended like heirloom bonsai,
But later, when still unsightly, newly foreign,
Planted in the corner
Of some forgotten arboretum.

So terribly terribly Surrey

A probably awfully unfair look at yuppie Home Counties life, somewhat inspired by Luke Wright's take on Essex... and there's an audio recording here. Enjoy!

Gestures

This is the Birkenstockbroker belt,
All yummy mums and Womad-dads,
Mwah-mwah-dahling,
Wan-but-affluent,
Each pair with 2.4 ill-behaved black labs
And matching kids in ‘Chez Ami’,
Orlando, Portia or whatever
Named picked by putting pins in Shakespeare or The Iliad,
Parents clothed in Chiswick High Street harmony,
Oh-so-Surrey country tones
Forming Barbour-coat quartets,
Hunter-booted,
Rubber-suited (oh no, sorry,
that’s the couple down the road
who host those funny parties),
Met through Soulmates in the Grauniad,
Still odd sniffs of coke at media soirées,
Metrochemical, petrosexual,
Illicit upright flings,
Tell-tale smudges on Range-Rover wings
Wiped off with Hermès headscarves –
It’s dog-eat-dog in dogging-land –
Strict Trustafarians smoking feng shui reefer,
Designer drugs by FARC, or was it Shining Path?
Weekend revolutionaries,
Weekday worriers wearing
Nothing more radical than a pink Paul Smith shirt
And a tie that’s slightly humorous-yet-practical –
Head down, suit up and suck back the gumption,
Save up for a yurt at Bestival
‘Cos you know a few days of buying Fairtrade
And circle-jerking borrowed djembes
Makes up for 51 weeks
Of strip-mining capital consumption.

Of corsair I will

The pirate d’amour

I am the pirate of your heart,
I'll privateer you, buccaneer you,
Haul myself over hot keels,
Walk the plank if I have to,
Dive into your ocean
With a double-twisting, double back-somersault,
Entering with just the right amount of splash,
Difficulty 3.4, execution 10s across the board
(Enjoy the applause);
I will capture for you
Spanish galleons laden with doubloons,
Tricornucopias of riches laid out in treasure-rooms,
Taken while swinging from a yard-arm rope,
Cutlass clamped between chipped teeth,
Though, like any other man,
I am no island,
And would not wish to be marooned,
Even if
I sometimes need
To wander from the archipelago.

Mollusculation

A little molluscan versery...

Kissing the snail

The lipless mollusc puckers up,
Rasping tongue withdrawn –
There’ll be no escargot-kissing today;
Its footgutface extends
A tentacle or four
To feel-taste-see
If you are reciprocating –
Don’t mind the slime,
What’s a little mucus between friends?
Gently cup the spiral shell, lean in,
Hoping for a flash-bang-twinkle,
To manifest a glittering prince or princess –
Sorry, but that’s frogs
And you’ve just kissed a gastropod.

Out of the Ejector Seat

Words written after a day of hot sun and inspiration at the Ejector Seat Festival...

Penstroke

The Pen beats down,
Roasts my head with inky heat,
Nothing blocks the ABC, the UV to XYZ-rays,
No Ambre Voltaire,
No slipped-on shirt nor slapped-on hat,
No slopped-on factor-many –
The Pen pierces the shady canopy of trees,
Tans the page,
The vellum of my skin –
Tans, turns, tans, turns,
Makes more melanin,
Does my melon in,
Burns,
Leathers me with verbs,
Words inhaled like pollen or hot smoke,
Sneezed-coughed-spat back out in order,
Arranged as palisades,
But the Pen is unrelenting,
May bring into being
Jungles or deserts,
Savannahs or bleached reefs –
It does not care what
As long as it is not
Ignored.

RIP Iain (M.) Banks

A couple of months ago, my favourite author, Iain (M.) Banks, announced he was suffering from a terminal illness - yesterday he died. Then I wrote about the announcement, now I write in memoriam, again taking inspiration from his science fiction work (with the 'M.'), and the spacecraft who name themselves.

The ships that never were

Welcome
To my beautifully manicured venue,
Though detritus collects in hidden corners,
Just like a million other boxes,
Lifted by imaginary mourners,
At once grounded and enclosed, and so
I’m tired and someone’s glaring,
A virtual mountain-range of neuroses,
Unlikely to calm down in a hurry,
Not quite a pacifist, they’re staring
Fully equipped with the latest devices,
Wield the knife and slice
The matrix,
Upgrade and embrace
The spatio-temporal torsion,
Search among the vectors,
Punctuated static,
Unexpected divinity of spectres,
Crossing the transcendental periphery,
Quantifiably both something and nothing,
With an irresistible urge to investigate,
Seeking interesting opportunities,
Adding some real complexity,
3.141, you know the rest,
No final stopping place,
You’re great white whale-obsessed,
Blundering through a field of dreams,
Familiar with risk-perception,
Mind expansion if you will
(But trepanners will be prosecuted).

Now don’t forget to smile,
Or you’ll be
Missing out on the key to serenity,
A tragedian
Airing on the side of caution,
And forgetting yet again to
Take time to stop and eat the flowers –
‘Cos, you know
Cross-pollination
Is a socially acceptable
Way to fight the power,
Systematically dismantling ivory towers,
Grain by floating grain,
The unadulterated joy of pissing in a hurricane,
Revelling in
Smug feelings regarding the analysis of others,
A rockin’, rollin’ schadenfrood-dude,
Counting down to the beginning of the end,
Far too vainglorious to retire,
My back is turned and I walk away,
Which infinity will you try today?
With thirty seconds before the final cold or fire
A singularity would be more fetching attire,
Strangely charmed and quarkly spinning
Beauty is in the holder of the eye,
Now - kneel before Zod – only kidding!

Like a thunderbolt from a clear blue sky,
Don’t ever let me catch you kneeling,
Praying in the Great Glass Coprohedral,
Where light and thoughts pass straight through,
Not so much loyalty as inertia,
Kind words masking worried glances,
Working though a litany of trances,
Good story, bro, please tell it again
So it’s not lost
On those who never were.

Does something lie beneath?

Lake of Flies

The lake looks still.
The lake has only gentle ripples.
The lake hosts clouds of swarming flies.
The flies are unaware
The lake emits an air of menace.
The lake has great, dark conifer-reflection teeth.
The lake wants to drag me in and drown me.
The lake-spirit is not friendly.
The lake-spirit is malign.
The lake-edge is slippery –
All the better to grab a sliding limb
And pull it in;
I pull back.
The lake-water is black.
The lake may be deep or shallow.
The lake is a mirror of obsidian.
The lake stares back.
The lake dares you to stay too long.
The flies do not care.
The flies hum and hypnotise.
They bite and breed,
They breed and feed.
The lake holds onto secrets.
The flies suggest you seek them out.

The lake seems calm.
The lake is.