POEMS 2016
I’ve been mainly writing (about) Disturbing Words. Not sure if these are essays, prose poems, fragments, rants, or what, but they take up a lot of energy. And a lot of words.
A few others have gone to some very fine publications with generous editors. Support them as they support writers!
Goldene Yoykh, The Long White Thread of Words: Poems for John Berger, ed. Amarjit Chandan, Gareth Evans and Yasmin Gunaratnam. Smokestack Books.
Line of Visible Light, The Wapping Project: Transition, Transformation, Transience. Atelier Dyakova.
Film, Litmus: The Diagnostics Issue, 4
Born Into Soon the Sky, Visual Verse, 3.3
Glossary for Aulis, Visual Verse, 3.9
feels, datableed 2
if/then, Blackbox Manifold 15
Sunday Service, para*text [023.1] – print edition (with poem) sold out; paratexts to poem available online.
What I Heard about the Rock, New Boots and Pantisocracies
What I Heard about the Rock [edit] [audio version], Zarf 6
A Thing Like You and Me, aglimpseof
Re/Search (Dec 2015)
Likeness (Jan 2016)
Two or Three Things about Je Tu Il Elle (Feb 2016)
Believing in Plenty (March 2016)
Thing (April 2016)
And a couple of unpublished poems, the first written this spring while watching Jim Henson’s films on a train; the second written on a train to Edinburgh the day after the Brexit vote.
I have also spent a lot of time on trains this year.
Hero
Here you are, a beginning. With a sense of more, something, some thing or other. Then it comes and it is the world. You are after it and it is after you; you in it, and it in you. The beautiful room, the teacher, the model of your universe & you learn. You have music, that helps. Everywhere it takes you, an exchange. Wonder, at the strange, and greet it. It is all around you, for you. You are the thing that brings it, and brings it together. But not yet. The shining thing is missing. Or too close. Play your worth, make your choice: the tool that is your task. It echoes & the echoes call. Across the story. Help will hear but is slow; the things that want to hurt you hunt at speed, on wheels or wings or far too many legs. Every friend you make they will destroy; every gift or word its price. You wish you had. Never. The world you save, is it worth it? A shortcut stops your thoughts, cuts the journey to your cloth. Just one loyal friend, just one: the theory of the pair. Two sides are one, divided. And then un. One gesture heals the hurt across the world. Your suffering makes it easy; that easy. Is it fair? No. But it is all. All those who shape the story are forgotten, help and hinder. They are minor. You have found your place; the place is you. The story you. & outside you, the thing you fear (you long to be): the storyteller who has made you suffer, made you win.
Pathetic Fallacy
change rained out by greywhite clouds the weather is a swing state bellwether feather flock if not in this then where are we together we reveal our hearts in stickers glitter singing tender touches but these revels now are ended think but this: no rhyme can fix the broken there is no sonnet no sestina no cinquaine no epic no epigram no rondeau no ballade no villanelle no vers libre no limerick no lyric is a project of a lost convivencia an algebra of adding up to more together