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.