Network of Things

Rolled out like new thunder, 
A gleaming commentary on escape,
And redemption,
Listing hard and threatening,

It moves on, searching for the world’s edge,
Cutting new taxiways for sentient weapons,
New paths for the fallen to take to salvation,
Through the babbling mines,

The nets made of light and wire,
Surrounding the old flesh and blood,
The obsolete stuff, sensitive to ambience,
To drowning in its own solvent,

It’s a calling, an occupying of time,
A reward for automating death,
With sensors and robotics,
The stereo camera that clocks movement,

The heat-seeker of soft bodies,
All children of the dead-eyed inventor,
Maker of the shining, sterile beams,
Which cross the world with no intent,

But the defined instructions of paper-tape,
Binary-coded words without nuance or regret,
Their sealed orders are assayed,
Machined to the edge of visibility,

And they error,
Fail unsafe,
In the not found,
Always break bad,
But see no fault,
No funerals,
In crushed buildings,
The soft things,
They know, 
Not as makers,
But as targets,
As real as steel,
And Concrete,
War is peace
With machines,
We are collateral.

National Poetry Day 2013

Death of a Poet

They like their poetry to rhyme,
Men old before we'd call them so,
They like a beat to it,
All Iamb and Trochee in regiment,
Like the National Service,
That passed them by,

They'll quote the dirge of "real poetry",
As if defined by statute,
Laid down in steel like ships,
To slip without wave or sound,
Into the grey and maudlin sea,
Asleep with the polydactyls,

War and Peace in Haiku

With conflict we fail,
Our own humanity errs,
With every shot,

The gods weep for us,
All children one, divided,
By empty quarrels,

We'd not put paper,
Between the races living,
In the chosen land,

Take some blood for blood,
For measuring and placing,
All your ancestors,

Apart by billionths,
Separated by ideas,
Never ever wrong,

Gassed

Gassed by John Singer Sargent

I am ashamed that I have not seen this painting before. It took this cartoon in The Telegraph to bring it to my attention. The cartoon may be moot now after last night's vote and though it is hard to turn away from the terrible events which prompted it, and it may well be negated by any action taken by other countries, I am hopeful that this is the start of a distancing from these foreign escapades. I am sure that any statement that this is the start of a new, more peaceful era will be seen as hyperbole but like someone more erudite than me said 50 years ago, I can dream.

Cutaway

I do not own this ground,
But it falls to me to undo its covering,
To scrape away the grass and rocks,
To get to the rich,living earth below,
The earth of the million buried there,
Since hard life diffused to legends,
And the land was the choice,
For adventuring and invasion,

We've turned far away these days,
Leaving the escapades to others,
Rooted and indifferent to distant outrage,
It's now all just vapour and politics,
Parliament will simmer and steam,
With their cross-bench invective,
And we stand off from the first shot,
A sword's-length away from destruction,

Music for Geologists

This is the noise of rock drills,

The plates of Earth that slip,

And grate against themselves,

With a frequency set at decades,

The wavelength of an entire planet,

Stretched beyond its orbit,

Outside the Oort and dust,

The haunt of Pioneer and Voyager,

We'll tape it over a hundred years,

Then shrink it, shift the pitch,

And listen to the music of accretion,

The bass of all the continents,

The rhythm of an atmosphere,

Cycled and then recycled,

Into the sound of now,

The hit of the Millennium,

Airlane

Stolen from deities everywhere,
Omnipotence? Discuss,
And this is not in my philosophy,
Or anything that I might own,
I read the syllabus today,
And explained it all in seconds,
With a puff of non-existence,
Nothing necessary in chaos,

White Spot

Stand against the ban on peaceniks,
They're ill and do not approve of you,
For they deny their own existence,
Automatic writing shows the way,
A random graph of objects,
Lost on Chinese Railways,
Scrawled graffiti on the bridges,
Insulting party members,
Humming work songs while in government,
Show trials in the winter,
And the alphabet reordered,

The Sylvia Plath Riots

In 1980, as her daughters rebelled,
She joined them on stage at school,
A proto riot grrrl, always in, and black and white,
Spitting out the blood of her enemies,
That dissolved in the TLS she ate as fuel
For the venomous next phase,
The boyfriends cowered and left,
Excusing themselves to cocktails,
At F&F with Valerie and Ted,

It was revolution, nothing less,
Made cool again by low-slung bass,
And all her grammatical attitude,
Though the boys demanded choruses,
She stood tall upstage and faced them,
Making her own, new manifesto,
In just verse, truth and three chords,
Opening the set with drama,
And the dropping of a burning book,

So revolted by her lack of scansion,
The purring critics, missing rhyme,
Counting syllables and prime numbers,
In songs that were just prose to music,
Missed the point of drone and throb,
And called upon more subtle emotions,
To excuse the stench of politics,
Arguing themselves to singularity,
In the end of the Post War,

Sylvia burned the theatre down,

Prophets

They are here to save the world,
Lovers happy in their charity clothes,
Hair pinned casually as control,
To keep the clear view ahead,
They have all the basic needs,
Food and water and each other,
And that perhaps was me,
With all my empty counterculture,
Forever concealed in depths,
A minefield to catch invaders,
Passing the outer nets to harbours,
Where the battleships are moored,
Grey and stately, massive engineering,
Defining the situation with arms,
And meaning nothing.

Electroacoustics IV

It was always an imperfect sound,

The fundamentals never pure,

Were corrupted hard by simple air,

Made rough by ambience,

And all our inattention,

We had no control of sound;

It left our bodies unpiloted,

Hitting the ears, modified,

By miles of cracking vapour,

But now we can fill the mind,

With an exact sound, music,

Made to match the mind,

In which it is absorbed,

Joy and sadness moulded,

To the mood of the day,

And in that stream of sound,

We'll hide a way to kill you,

With resonant frequencies,

The World Between Worlds

It's not blood that marks these borders,
More like unending emptiness,

We thought this an adventure,
An end to the shelter of home,
Of family and all that went before,
From the snows of North Dakota,
To the sweat and toil of Mexico,
We've made our home at random,
In any truck or passing car,
We have loved each other,
And the loose and ragged drivers,
Who pilot us through this hell,
The shadowless infinity,
Of interstates and back roads,
The frame that builds this power,

In a dream all roads were gone,
Destroyed in some new plan,
And the union was deflated,
Peak oil passed and broken.

The World Dances When Not Observed

Hidden objects might leap galaxies,

Improbably transported,

Without intelligence,

Without adress or number,

Absence leaves all things unobserved,

And in the dark they dance away,

Rearranging for our return,

And yet we notice nothing.

Vindolanda

Turret duty makes the juices flow,
For northwards lie the killers,
Silent and unseen in the darkness,
And south of here is the village,
Beckoning and welcoming to us,
We've diluted the coming history,
Become resident by default,
Making homes and families,
In the rain and solitude,
Your average legionnaire,
Is the colour of his homeland,
And his homeland is the empire,
From dry desert to this edge,
There are lights out there,
The fires of other settlements,
But we are citizens and slaves,
To the machine that is the army,

Pau Amma

There's a hook on the wind,
Dragging us to sea,
And the salt on our lips,
Grows thick with the spray,

The sound is calm enough,
Hiding its currents in the blue,
But the threat is there,
A sharp turn and a pitch,

Into the swells and eddies,
And the water is in with us,
With the birds and fish,
Showing us who is in control,

Pelagic

We're here at the moment the breeze turns,

From landwards to seawards,

Swinging smoothly about the flagstaff,

Like the devil looking askance,

For those to pitch a deal at,

It was all no more than whispers,

Drowned out by the pain of existence,

But now the anchor's dragging;

And the ship slides out on the wind,

Into the glossy, ocean-wide currents,

Outside its rigid engineering tolerance,

The operating manual is unbound,

All its pages loosed in the wake,

Of this unhelmed vessel,

The crew have left their stations,

And made mad, and lacking sanctuary,

Desire a grounding as least worst,

This is the way the world turns.

It Glows

No more like you,
The open book,
Of hardware,
Left to rust,
As a reminder,
To us out of time,
That all decays,
The rough-edged echo,
Of the liquor stores,
Has paled in evenings,
With the loss of blood,
Across the pavement,
Where the spirit flows,
And genres fight,
For life,
This smoky shop,
Has all life in it,
All poisons we supply,
To those who come,
And those who talk.

Dreadnought,

Steel and power built this,
The high retreat from industry,
It's the modern world, invented,
In particle warps and grids,

The toy box for warring cousins,
The house of a rising gun,
Coalesced  in the converters,
and works of Sunderland,

We'll roll through the heather,
Down to the thundering sea,
And carry your ships to earth,
Breaking the ocean with grey,

And blood-tinged metal,
The flag of a rogue nation,
Declared in the high hills,
Flies in the wind from the moon.

Test Card F

For Carole Hersee

This is a precision game,
Your cross exactly centre sceen,
The colour accurate to a shade,
And in something so static,
So much to interest,
This loyal, daily viewer,

There's mathematics in the greys,
And science in the colour,
With a little integration,
We can measure the distortion,
Of a sixties TV screen,
Cast curved for strength.

And in that gentle smile,
to rival any ancient master,
Perhaps we see your mood,
That last forgotten argument,
But no fifth derivative,
Could ever measure memory.

Fomenting Revolution One Cup at a Time

 Time goes backwards, reaching the end of expansion,

With a reversed bang and a lost philosophy,

Alex has brought The West to its capitalist knees,

With a dropped gaze and her exotic accent,

Pouting and blowing in the Barrista's ear,

Whispered words of revolution and desire,

She is a sleeper, a detonater for revolt and putsch,

But tonight she's playing for his provincial soul,

For herself and not the commissars.

Coo! Haiku Two For You

Delay tomorrow,
For today is not over,
And I am not done.

Stream of Unconsciousness

It's the myths that hurt now,
The absolute and concrete belief,
In the small world that never was,

It’s been a million years,
Since we could count ourselves,
In thousands and know our own minds,

Without the need for averages,
And other calculations,
Designed to box us in,

Like the flow of time reversed,
Perhaps the universe reflects our images,
And not the glassy opposite,

From Lascaux to the elusive fresco,
We have been ever-more defined,
In each new and shining method,

Pixels these days match our retinas,
And frequencies conform to cilia,
We have achieved reality.

Sugar by the Pound

They can still send you bees by post,
In gently-humming, rough-pine boxes,
An incarcerated female army,
(Now guarded always door to door,
For our Queen will not handle theirs),
Hand-over-hand in the fetid darkness,
Slowly and surely they lay their plans,

These thugs have mobilisation fever,
A long-delayed and compressed anger,
Built in the hive mind of this scrap,
Torn from the precious motherland of wax,
There'll be an exodus, fight AND flight,
In the release of a thousand convicts,
Armed and dancing in the flowers.

Rorschach Test (After Golden Brown)

It's a screaming comedown through the bruising of light,
I thought I'd mastered ecstasy,
That I'd have the last few seconds to myself,
With the creep of lithium and dust,
The diffusion of all those empty stares I gave,
Remembered as the one most likely to ....

But in that ellipsis I faltered and became my other,
The blank and walking doll of history,
Ten years clean and then against the mast again,
Facing the whole girls and the candy girls,
I was the shining point of their star,
Or maybe just the earthly point of all of them,

I was the long-awaited, rough outline of the future,
So much the princess of New England liberal arts -
That I thought I'd made myself of nothing,
Of the vapour I desired to blank the world,
To stare it down in girls' games and tablets,
To flatten the creases of a long summer lost.

You'd all think I'd be close to exhausted these days,
The most senior officer of two new world orders,
Out of the long shadows and the doll's house,
But remember my line is never parallel with yours,
My sister, we waver and shake in our philosophies,
And all the world stops dead.

Alpha Papa - an Overlong Review

You laugh until you burst - that is all.

When Dolly Messiter Married a Person From Porlock

Try Pulling Your Eyelid Down and then Blowing Your Nose

We last went to Carnforth Station for a Brief Encounter visit before the children were born and it was grim. The station was poorly-maintained, the shops were shut and is was cold and windy. We returned today in decent British summer weather, the station has been refurbished and as you can see the Refreshment Room from the film has been restored to almost exactly the way it was in 1945. I half-expected to see Laura and Alec sitting at that little table in the corner reacting badly to Dolly Messiter's arrival. It was also buzzing with people - probably other BE fans - though of course it was only one among us who insisted on reenacting various scenes. The atmosphere was bolstered well by the regular yet sudden sounds of express trains screaming through the station on one side of the cafe and the gentle hum of bog units on the other. (I initially thought that the bell we kept hearing was like the one in the film which preceded the arrival of trains but bathetically it was actually how the kitchen called the counter staff.) I suppose I have to mention the food which was rather excellent - carrot and lentil soup for the ladies, Smoked Salmon Sandwiches for me and gourmet chips for the fussy eater who would rather run off an play with the typewriter on display in another room - I didn't pay enought attention to the captions to see if it was the actual machine that was used to write the screenplay.

There is however one small criticism. There is a decent mural high on the wall of the refreshment room. It describes various highlights of the nearby railways and valleys but as you can see below they seem to have cast Craig Charles and Commander Data in the film.

We'll always have Omicron Theta

Oh well. You can't have everything.

Pulsing With Busy-ness

The iconography of truth is never true;
Its subject is betrayed by murmuring academics,
And the daily thousand pages spat out in green inks,
And bold fonts, have no meaning beyond the parodies,
Of aging professors, doing the walk and talk,
Between the classical frames of Massachusetts colleges.

The diary entries, the lovers tied to dates and places,
The blooding and dancing of a mind combating chemicals,
Are just pitiful, unmoving flashes in the flow of vision,
On aging, flammable celluloid stacked high in rusting cans,
And we race to transfer all this memory to safer media,
Before it catches fire and burns black to spark to nothing.

Discrepant Statistical Manual Number Five

There is no wall between the real world and mind;
The faults in memory are burned away by light,
And cures we claim are just our breath upon the wind.

I manufacture friends, the letters which they send,
To cross the buzz of news, and feign a scarce delight,
There is no wall between the real world and mind.

With opposition, I think all these ills might end,
Within the great machines, and I believe despite,
The cures they claim, that are just breath upon the wind.

The complications suck us in, we are confined,
And speculate on new disorders, so we cite -
There is no wall between the real world and mind.

Break any rule to not live barbarous or blind,
Or fabricate regressions in the lines of sight,
For any cures we claim are breath upon the wind.

My truth falls with suns as I fail to comprehend,
Why there are dragons taking tea with me tonight,
There is no wall between the real world and mind;
And cures we claim are just our breath upon the wind.

The Fallback of Champions (and me)

The USB lies,
Upstairs and out of my reach.
So no Villanelle.

Prelude to a Villanelle

This is a feint, a line drawing of a dead woman,
Smiling at some party, resurrecting the idea of a smile,
From the lancing blows of unmet strangers in space,
Somewhere below the plastic paradise she lives in.
The photographer, free of malice, has done his best to hurt,
With his unconcern, his rough and airy way of posing,
These nervous girls - he’d be on a list in these days,
But mid-century it’s just the way things always are.

This is the peak for The New American Female, the elite,
Of New England, posed for ever on the cartoon walls,
In the hothouse of insincerity, a magazine with sparks,
Made in the strain of long vowels and empty kisses.
Somewhere in the greenhouse, a future governor lounges,
Compact like a sidearm, ready for the call to edit,
Levelled dream-to-dream with senators and scientists,
Prepared for battle in the powder of a New York Summer.

Regime Change

And it rained for days, guttering down the street edges,
Seeping into the mind of man, made clever by gravity,
Until it pressed us hard against the brick of the embankments,
And we surrendered to the eternal reign of water.
The weather had seen our errors, the entropy that we ignored,
And unilaterally one night, had laid invasion plans,
Measured to last months- or years in outside estimates,
But we had fallen inside that first week, ground down by liquid,
Water-breathing dragons coming down like wolves,
From the convective rolls of clouds that organised themselves,
Streets in the upper atmosphere, tendrils in Kennelly-Heaviside.
Here they are the new military vapours, striped sky sergeants,
They were made intelligent by accident and coincidence,

Their consolidation evaporates like the dew that makes them.

Twitter Silence WIll Fall .. and Today of All Days

An excellent choice for Doctor 12. I've never seen an episode of In The Thick of it (calm down at the back) though I do know of his character's prediliction for choice language. Anyone who thinks that memories of this might detract from The Doctor's position as role model should review his part in the Torchwood special Children of Earth. I am hoping for fewer special effects and more character-driven stories, something that probably departed with John Pertwee, who has the honour of being my "First Doctor".

I generally try to maintain a calm air (for the children you know) but I was obviously shaking with the tension. Of course we knew it was Peter Capaldi from the second we saw his tensed hand. And glad we all were though with reservations from certain people **cough** Mrs deW **cough**.

They Don't Make Them Like This Anymore

Not that it takes much for me to rave about anything that PJ Harvey does but the release of her song Shaker Aamer is a laudable act of highest order. And this song sounds like it comes fresh from the enlightenment of decades ago - a song free of technological polish with nothing to veil the anger and importance of the message. A brave act from exactly the right person.

Listen here and think hard.

Lyrics here.

Blood and Ice Cream Complete

Well thanks to the wonder of DVD I've now seen all three Cornetto films. The credits are still rolling so I can go through the music but I can tell you that despite the blood and swearing even Mrs dW found it quite funny - like an Ealing Comedy with cojones - and it is an excellent film. Not sure how I feel about it relating to the other two but it is clear that all three films stand on their own. They feel linked in the way that early James Bond films seemed oddly like Chitty Chitty Bang Bang by virtue of sharing a writer, a producer and some cast members. Anyway this is not meant to be a review, just an update to last night's entry. Good film.

Not With a Whimper but a Bang!

To the cinema with daughter now able to accompany me to films rated 15 to see The World's End. Between us we have seen the first two films in the Cornetto Trilogy - me Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz for eldest. I knew there was no logical or character connection between the films but I was worried that I might miss some subtle arc and of course without viewing the missing film I cannot be sure. However, The World's End stands on its own beautifully without the need for props from anything that has gone before.

What strikes me now within an hour of it finishing is that it was both packed to the blue-stained rafters with action and yet was satisfyingly wordy and full of ideas and crafted exchanges. It's almost like two separate films have been played at the same time and instead of a mess of confusing sounds and images has produced something integrating and transcending both.

Don't let this put you off though. The whole thing proceeds with drive that manages to survive the sudden revelation of Newton Haven's great secret. And for a film with multiple decapitations, dismemberments and other gory diswhatsits, it is surprisingly bloodless though I'm sure this won't put off any gore fiends amongst you.

From Plath to Panel : The Nao of Brown

I've found what must be the third of a great trilogy of graphic novels in The Nao of Brown by Glyn Dillon. (The other two are of course Logicomix and Nelson). However this was a truly random find - where the previous two had been bought after reading reviews, I found this after a good twenty minutes of perusing the comics shelf at Waterstones (no apostrophe required now). It was a no-contest - a few seconds of page flipping and it was decided on - the graphics are exquisite watercolours. But the story does not let you down either. A quirky-yet-gentle tale - without real anger despite the compulsions of Nao Brown which lead her to imagine herself committing acts of violence on the closest and most loved of her friends. I've not yet reached the end - maybe these obsessions will be made real - I hope not - but even then this will have been a beautiful thing. My daughter was also immediately taken by the artwork and I hope she reads it because it is as literary as any of the classic books she loves and hip enough to keep her in with the cool kids too.
by

It makes me want to draw - like reading The Waste Land made me want to write poetry. It is unfortunate that I draw far less well than I write poetry and I do that far less well than any of the poets I admire. However looking back my poetry has improved so maybe given time (in more ways than one) I could draw as well. I move from obsession to obsession without focus. As I said before, I am having to turn off the wifi to avoid being distracted while reading. And it works.

Your World and Mine is Full of Enemies

… and the spice of foreign wars safely out of sight.
The echoes of bombardments just across the sea,
Negotiate the mean free paths of rolling downs,
And at their end meander, dying in the city streets,
Mere annoyances to those that war has immunised.

The murmurings of gunnery, barely break the dreams,
Of those knocked into each other's sleep and arms,
By drink the night before, taken in fear of death.
One breathed love into the other's ear to beat,
The jabbering of basement bars in cheap hotels,

And so they meet and stalk the sticky corridors,
Rolling hard like on the first days of sailors' leave,
Falling on the bed and breathlessly, forgetfully,
They roll and dance, considering this day their last,
And later they wake fitfully to guns and thunder,

Merging in the dusty streets and Tenements of London.
They'll call him up this day or possibly the next,
With darker lotteries, and in turn they'll press his lover,
To dull and grimy service in the new factories,
And she'll convince herself it's better than before,

A warm room at night with friends and food and circuses,
With days of tedium, the sound of war masked by lathes,
And engines falling in the arcs of shelling.
She'll make the bomb that kills him blue-on-blue,
One accident in many yet she'll never know or care.

Mad Girl's Love Song

(Click here for Poem Text)

For years I thought that Sylvia Plath's Collected Poems was the definitive edition. I was aware that Ted Hughes was berated for lumping together most of the material written before he met Plath as "Juvenilia" and it was indeed clear that a lot of these poems were deserving of inclusion in the main body of work. Perhaps Hughes was not then aware that his own Collected Poems would include true Juvenilia such as "Wild West" written when he was 16 :

I'll tell you a tale of Carson McReared,
Who, south of the 49th was feared
Greater than any man ever before,
And men went in fear of his .44,
For he'd shoot the ears from any man
From Two-Gun Ted to Desperate Dan.

There ain't nothin' like that in Sylvia's Collected Poems. And there should be. We deserve nothing less than a matching complete edition. The title of this entry is also the title of this recent Plath Biography by Andrew Wilson which I've just finished reading, only after forcing myself to turn the internet off while I read it to stop myself looking up diverting details on The Interwebs.

In Forbidden Planet Action Figure terminology this is "Next Wave". After the crop of biographies gathered temporally around Bitter Fame, Anne Stevenson's detailed but definitely-flawed biography, (written jointly as Stephenson almost put it, with Hughes' sister Olwyn - so much so that it might have been better to attribute the book to a literary equivalent of Alan Smithee), there has been a gap of some years with just academic volumes. The fiftieth anniversary of Plath's death has sparked a new crop of popular biographies and the absence of Ted from the world seems to have lessened his family's desire to manage his image and to have allowed a refocusing of the analysis on Plath's life away from his influence.

Mad Girl's Love Song does indeed leave Ted as a blurry presence at the beginning and the end though last word really belongs to Richard Sassoon, who although a major presence in all the previous biographies, seems to have become The Colossus that Plath aspired to, and despite only having a few emails and stories from Sassoon, Wilson manages to give us a clear idea of his and Plath's relationship in a way I've not seen before. The pivot point of the timelines of Plath, Hughes and Sassoon is described well, in a way which re-balances this triangle of egos in a way which puts Plath and not Hughes at the apex. Sassoon is still alive and I am sad that he is not more well-known. Maybe he was never after the fame which Plath both craved and achieved but from this book it is clear that he had the intellect to match Plath and to obviously surpass Hughes.

I've always tried to step back from the vitriol that Hughes seems to attract and I still want to but the problem, as a fictitious academic with mild Aphasia once said of a past paramour, the trouble was that he had such a small .... what is the word .... intellect. Well when compared to Plath that is true.

Poem for a Birthday

They've sidelined misery today, turned away from hope,
With the nighttime wake guards, rifles down in due respect,
And strangely I'm elated this hot night, happy in the drip-drip,
Break-away of nations all in worship like a new religion,
Born of nothing but the mis-directed reverence for lineage.

We have our common kin, a lichen maybe, or a single cell,
As much an accident in this chain of errors made successful,
Through survival, the beating down of rivals, stealing food,
Being born just so and in the right position to claim gods,
As parents, like a gold idol levitated as proof of magic,

Proof of right to rule through ruthless mob denial of rights,
Of others. Keep it up - you need no guards these days,
Years ago you bred out revolution with your little gifts,
To the well-fed, to the entertained and reverent crowds,
Slack with the lottery of waiting, the public as the news.

And tomorrow they'll roll out the guns to celebrate a birthday,
Mark life with the instruments of death, the very limbers,
Made to carry to their final Mass, the passing monarchs,
Passing undivinely like us all, mortal after all, commoners,
Like us all, signed out for good like us all. Just a circuit,

And maybe I'm happy for the humans in this messy show,
Made possibly complete by birth in all this chaos of no function,
Drowned in a sea of goodwill and unblushing praise, but,
You'd think that reproduction was by decree and by degrees,
The truth of how the world should run is made plain to us.

Electra on Ctrl-Z Path

This may be the undoing of you,
The visit you audited yourself.
You tied your mind to paper,
And though you never said,
I saw the sun through leaves,
Dappling the track to your father,
The pulse of light matching you,
Beat for beat in love and fear,
For the magician bent double here,
Crushed roughly in the tomb.

You saw the bees still sleeping.
But now their waking hum pervades,
All you notarised, my small doll,
And I have begun the rollback of you,
Keystrokes repeating at my fingers,
Two little movements diagonally
Linked by Thumb and index,

I am rebuilding, fixing the failures,
With caresses of machinery and mind,
Mending your sparking cortex,
Every neuron undone and reconnected,
Reconditioning the cosmic clockwork,
As the world stops dead around us,
Undone, undone, you are undone,
Disassembled until you are just parts,
Laid out and lost under the chairs,
Unrepeatable in the chaos of the world.

Your trajectory is proof of my misguidance,
The failure of audiences everywhere,
Their peanut-shell detritus haloing
The dead ground of cheap movie houses.
You are a remade film, shrunk in dissection,
To your own pale, blank shell,
Like every dead, rock-star poet,
Burned out before achieving orbit.

But I have inserted an alternative,
I have the agility of hindsight,
A quick reply to All the Dead Dears,
Made to be forgotten in no weather.
You are in the moon your daughter sees,
Orbiting not this but every planet,
Not clockwork, but instead quantum,
Occupying all points simultaneously,
Surpassing the God you’d never speak to,
All history in one remembered line.

Fanfare Funfair

Feeling Crabby

Many years ago when computers were dangerous and new, I was given an Oric 1 in return for some work I did. This slab of plastic and mysterious, magical innards had a rudimentary sound chip which allowed me to program in notes and actually to play several notes at once. The very first piece of music I put in was a Crab Canon by Bach which had the brilliant time-saving property of being the same when played backwards or forwards and hence meant only half the amount of data input. I don't have the recording I made of it or even the Oric but I have been able to create a new version which you can listen to here. It's not long. Go on. I know you want to.

World Poetry Day - Culture Wars

For ChrisH

Usefully I'd legislate myself away he says,
Borne on the red wind to my oblivion,
But he is a deep sea fish, all teeth and rot,
A compound fury concealed in doggerel,

Barely holding back the spit and fleck,
Of rage and half-concealed despair,
We fail him with our lack of intellect,
One word in three or two above us,

And he berates obscenely, all our errors,
How we fail to understand the world,
Our place in it to serve just ourselves,
And now we are in the next war,

Unarmed with wit and cool obscurity,
One side victorious in Martin’s war,
The other trained in ill-formed invective,
Built on the containment of emotion,

And here I walk the narrow line myself,
Versed in biofeedback slowing hearts,
To limit tremors in the bolts I loose,
Secretly aching for that killer blow,

The froth-corrupted injury of silence,
That staggers; that shuts him up for good,
A word or two as a billion hollow points,
Launched late in this oh-so civil war,

At seven tonight we win, we break the news,
Of victory, the climb to sunlit uplands,
We can predict it perfectly, to a moment,
The fall of the last soldiers, posed on hills,

And left and right stand hand-in-hand,
Awaiting approbation that must surely come,
Citations, mentions in despatches, medals,
Glinting in the bloody light of evening,

But there are dead fonts now, empty op-eds,
The raw, unfollowed critic’s training course,
Swinging in the winds of change and spite,
It’s all one-sided now and in the name of balance,

Mash-ups (No Zombies)

It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they vapourised Syme, and the clocks were striking thirteen.

Is there anything else on Radio 4 at the moment? George Orwell and Sylvia Plath seem to have taken over and I'm expecting one or both of them to be guest editor on Today sometime next week. Not a complaint of course apart from the time it's going to take to listen to it all once it's off the PVR and on a device somewhere. 

Albert Farrar Gatliff and John Caulfeild Wolseley Gatliff

I didn't know but my dad had this picture of my great-great uncle - Albert Farar Gatliff, a general in The Royal Marines and a bearer of The Unknown Warrior in 1920. I've been trying to find him in this film ...

... but the picture was taken 20 years previously. Dad also has his swagger stick.

However, none of this is as important as another discovery prompted by discussions with members of The Gatliff Trust who were at my aunt's funeral. They asked me if I knew what happened to my grandfather's brother - my great uncle. We knew he died in 1914 though his date of birth would have made him 15 at death, a very young age for any combatant. However a few fuzzy google queries actually turned up that he was a Royal Navy Cadet and he died during surgery at Dartmouth. So John Caulfeild Wolseley Gatliff has been belatedly added to the Commonwealth War Graves Commision list of casualties - one of the youngest ever.  

Elizabeth Noel Gatliff: 1926-2012

My wife has pointed out almost every day for the last week that I have not blogged since September. Well here we are again. Sadly this hiatus has been because my wonderful aunt, Elizabeth Noel Gatliff, died on Boxing day. She was 86 and had a life of excitement and joy that most of us can only dream of. I'm posting this picture of her in the crowds on VE day which is how she should be remembered - with spirit and laughter. She was a nurse and health visitor for many years, working in Canada and Australia and visiting every part of the world without fear or anxiety. She did not see any divisions in the world, only people and believed that everyone could be better off basically by having a bit of respect and by giving up a bit of oneself to others. I am comforted that she died peacefully in the Horton Hospital in Banbury because she had campaigned with many other people to keep services from being moved from there to Oxford for the sake of saving a few pounds. I was touched and overwhelmed by the number of people who came to her funeral and I can only hope that I managed to convey the colour and excitement of her life in the tribute I wrote.