It is finished then, this month-long project.
I hope it’s not a Weimar Republic of verse.
Has its completion earned your respect,
the finishing of this month-long project?
The results are available for you to inspect;
with luck I’ve not put poetry in a hearse.
It is finished then, this month-long project.
I hope it’s not a Weimar Republic of verse.
We are building the Big Society,
and doing it on your backs.
We won’t stand for any impropriety.
We are building the Big Society.
We will give you a life of variety
and we hope you enjoy dodging our axe!
We are building the Big Society,
and doing it on your backs.
Let me pretend to be honest now
or at least as much as any poet can.
It doesn’t take a reading of the Tao
to know I’ll write about this woman
again and again, for endless days,
while she declines my lecherous gaze.
She is yes, the best inspiration,
one that’s also a low-level addiction.
I’ve already written her sonnets galore –
truly, I’ve lost count of the number;
they’ve probably all made her slumber,
but hell, on the pile will go a few more.
So then, a new attempt to endear.
A crown to her, ‘The news from here’.
It was Wednesday. I was due at Oxford the next day, for my interview. And it was snowing, which was starting to make the drive up the M40 look a bit more hazardous than Dad would have liked. He had intimated as much that morning. Mrs King, my German teacher, on the other hand, had no doubts. There was a twinkle in her eye. She gestured out of the window, on the second floor of the languages block. ‘It’s a good sign, this snow. A prediction. You’ll get in.’ ‘How do you know?’ I spluttered. ‘I just do,’ was the gnomic response. Fourteen years, I still don’t know how she did it.
If it wasn’t for the women
I wouldn’t be a poet.
How else to fire up the oven
if it wasn’t for the women?
Now I’m like Edward Gibbon,
an endlessly scribbling robot.
If it wasn’t for the women
I wouldn’t be a poet.
is calling, so service might be, will be slow here the next few days.
Fingers crossed there are many drafts to share on Monday.
Backwards in heels
we’ll dance into
the Seasalter spray,
before feasting on
oysters, stout and each other.
Forward in evening dress
we’ll glide into
the Montauk wake,
before toasting on
cake, champagne and each other.
(Source: youtube.com)
Tommy you were good to me,
and your country true.
But now you’re back, what am I to do?
Arriving in a stock car van
to lie with the most illustrious of the land;
with due ceremony you are the Empire dead,
a king amongst kings.
But you were my king, my Empire,
not the generals’ or the princes’
or the vast concourse of the nation.
And now I am not just bereft of place,
but of you and everything I knew.
The multitude can hold you
and the good you have done
toward God and his house.
But I no longer can.
Greater love hath no man than this.
No woman too.
Do you think that when first presented with
that enclosed heaven above the Pope,
Michelangelo stopped for a moment,
then maybe a longer one, and still more,
as he attempted to count how many strokes
it would actually take to paint that sky?
How many times his arm would have to
conduct an arc, from down to palette,
back above his head, again and again
and again and again and again. Did he think
about how the brush would stay in his grasp?
The pen is slipping away from me into
horizontal weariness as I write this, contemplate
this one single, un-fluid flow. The autistic part
of me is not going to be happy until it can
at least guess some sort of recognisable
answer to such an insane question. We can
even begin to construct a formula: x strokes
per hour times days times years minus whatever
the assistants did. Haven’t you yet boggled at
the still way-off number this crude estimate
puts out? If I was a girl, I would always demand
a portrait. That’d be a real sign, true effort,
devotion; not just some words scribbled down
on a page while he’s probably thinking of some
other girl he’d like to write a poem about, in which
in which she’s having her picture painted,
her soul pinned.
(Source: opennotebooks.co.uk)
A holding space for the 30/30 Poetry Challenge for November 2010.
Homework from the Faber Academy
Non verse &c
