Eardrum Buzz

I have measured out my life in lines of code …. And none of them mean anything. I am working on a new version of something which contains many division-by-zero errors. As division by zero errors, really mean that a result is infinity, can only assume that infinity is a valid concept in the universe of this application. We shall see.

There was an attempt at TS Eliot parody up there. When I first started reading poetry (when I stopped being a prosaic child I suppose) I rapidly moved from Robert Herrick (which I read because it was in To Serve Them All My Days) and onto TS Eliot which I liked because of the wide-ranging themes though you could never say I understood much of it. My own poetic efforts of the time were in the form of long, wide-ranging concealments of the things I saw around me which I thought deserved being recorded. I did a really long thing which filled pages of an A4 notebook and which cannot be said to have anything really concrete in terms of themes. Complete tosh where my ability to use an elegant phrase far outran any thought of meaning or narrative. Then I discovered Sylvia Plath and everything became correspondingly shorter and darker though trying to tease out the links between the seemingly surreal events in Plath’s poems and the real events of her life, made me able to say what I wanted to in a single page. Now of course, I think that Clare Pollard’s clash between rough night-club sexiness and Plathian dirge is the proper way to go. Not having ever been into nightclubs I suspect any attempt at this genre will be marked by embarrassing failure. It is a young person’s game.

None of those long poems are in typed format so unless I feel like typing up all that rubbish, the most you can expect is a scanned page or two.

What can I give you to be going on with?

Grass Cutting

There is a hidden scent across the lawn,
A cloud of something dragging after,
This girl, made to frown and tempt me
In the garden, neatly cut like memories.

And I bore her with a list of lessons,
Dragged from photographs of books,
I carry round inside my head,
To prove my love of ordered days.

Underwater shapes make patterns
On my closed eyes, the garden flattened
Out to black and red and movement
Of this place across my thoughts.

This is a dream of class and love,
Ideas switching silently from kiss
To kiss and sleep in afternoons
With sun or rain and music.