I'm not sure if
this is the first poem from Carol Ann Duffy but as a tribute to mark the deaths of Harry Patch and Henry Allingham dare I say it is up there with
Dulce et Decorum Est. It needs no analysis other than that provided by reading it. Please read it.
I cannot put my experience on the bus going home last night in any more PC way - I just have to say that we were accompanied by a mad woman. It wasn't the continuous swigging from a cheap bottle of cider than got to me. It was not the random asides to an invisible companion whose location was all the time defined by her creator's wide, staring, wandering eyes. It was neither the illicit fag smoked and stubbed out in the space of a minute (and being British no one dared berate her for it) nor the loud outbursts of swearing and sudden wordless noise. It was none of these. It was the pathos - "Is that me dad? I so miss him!." Had me filling up I can tell you. And then she was off the bus at the same point as me, and all at once she straightened up, stopped the ticks and Turettes and marched determinedly in the direction of some place she obviously had to get to, like Keven Spacey at the end of The Usual Suspects. Some Golem perhaps - all the rational people avoiding eye-contact, leaving her to her own seat even when the bus was full. And her age! From behind she had the unwashed hair of a latch-key kid, but when she turned, she had the face of Auden - lines and furrows, deep cares etched into her skin and then forgotten in the stupor of alcohol. And then the horror of revelation - she was perhaps younger than me. Her songs ranged from traditional folk to stuff by Yes so that was no clue as to how old she was. Internal tales sparked from this derelict - what gets someone so badly at odds with normality? How could she get it together enough to get on a bus - how did she manage to keep focused on her destination? How would she be sobered up or had the years of drinking turned even her sobriety into madness compared to the rest of us.
Then I remember my own life and so this just comes back to the old cliche of who decides who is mad. Madness is defined by distance from one's own mind and so outside of my own prejudices and desires, you are all mad to some degree. And then because of my sympathy for this woman, maybe I am closer to her than all the general nervous giggling than surrounded her on this bus. define a real rebel, not by his preparedness to stand around handing out radical political treatises, trying to drag the bourgeoisie into his world of socialism; he is as much hide-bound as the rest of us. Liberal at Twenty and Conservative at Forty defines your heart and your head. I steal all their ideas and hide them in boxes under then bed, never looking at them and so they will be thrown out with me when I die.
It rains a lot here today - thunder and lightning - powerful downpours - the full works. It has been so heavy as to be audible inside - behind these layers of glass that usually keep the sound of the world outside at bay as much as the drawn blinds keep the view hidden. But now it is sunny, a clean, polished sort of sunlight. You can tell the temperature just by looking at it - the clarity and lack of haze makes it clear that it is cold out there. I wrote down that I need to break routine. So many on the web have
ways of refreshing the whole daily experience but all I had in the notebook was to park somewhere different in the car park, to break out of my imagined Aspergers and to stop stopping in the same space I have done since I first came to this site. And by the time I remembered this sad note to self, I was out of the car and on the way to reception. I can spot my car on Google Earth because of this regularity. Who is mad indeed!
But then again, is not a poem worthy as a distraction from the mundane and bathetic? I have written plenty of them recently, far more than are up here which tend to be what I consider the throw-aways - the proper ones are kept back and why might that be? With this music in my ears and the unheard voices of the people moving only slowly at their desks, today is like a dream. The music pauses between tracks and in comes the wordless murmur of the workplace, the lowered voices of phone calls, the tantalising, one-sided conversations of business, all important and all full of meaning far beyond the information conveyed in just the words. Hear the timbre of one sentence compared to another. It conveys truth and lies, justice and beauty. But sometimes it is just plain information - illicit information not suitable for electronic conveyance, the program details of whatever it is that we do here. Sometimes I do not know what it is we do, being lost in the details of the sea-bottom to the ocean that contains our work. I have to end in the middle of this conceit for it is time.
