Tonight

Tonight I wrote a poem.

When I was done, I read it over and thought it looked like a puddle of vomit in the toilet.

Unlike a puddle of vomit, I've saved it.

Like a puddle of vomit, I don't think I'll show it to anyone.

I mention this only because I'm still writing which is better than not writing at all.

Excerpt from Planets by Kate Rusby

On nights like these
I could fly up to the sky above me.
Like Superman
I would change the course of earth below me.

Through the world I am wandering, wandering,
A soft breeze blowing, I am wandering now.
Through this world I am wandering, wandering.
These are the days I live now.

I can see
The planets are aligning for me.
And I dare not breathe for then
The clouds will come and then deny me.

Sonnet 138

I realize this is just something I could share in RSS, but it's so beautiful I can't not post it here. Dave McKean imagines Shakepspeare's Sonnet 138 as an animated film.

WHEN my love swears that she is made of truth
I do believe her, though I know she lies,
That she might think me some untutor’d youth,
Unlearned in the world’s false subtleties.
Thus vainly thinking that she thinks me young,
Although she knows my days are past the best,
Simply I credit her false-speaking tongue:
On both sides thus is simple truth supprest.
But wherefore says she not she is unjust?
And wherefore say not I that I am old?
O! love’s best habit is in seeming trust,
And age in love loves not to have years told:
Therefore I lie with her, and she with me,
And in our faults by lies we flatter’d be.

Existentialism and Poetry

The older I get, the more French Existentialism makes sense. And inspires me. Take the following from Camus' The Myth of Sisyphus:

Likewise and during every day of an unillustrious life, time carries us. But a moment always comes when we have to carry it. We live on the future: 'tomorrow', 'later on', 'when you have made your way', 'you will understand when you are old enough.' Such irrelevancies are wonderful, for, after all, it's a matter of dying. Yet a time comes when a man notices that he is thirty. Thus he asserts his youth. But simultaneously he situates himself in relation to time. He takes his place in it. He admits that he stands at a certain point on a curve that he acknowledges having to travel to its end. He belongs to time and, by the horror that seizes him, he recognizes his worst enemy. Tomorrow, he was longing for tomorrow, whereas everything in him ought to reject it. The revolt of the flesh is the absurd.

Emphasis mine. So I have this:

Building by Jason Mical

Stone and brick make this place
My fort.
My tree house.
This thing I cleared with a stick
and summertime persistence.

Time flows oddly here
Days in seconds
or seconds in days.
I'm eighty, wrinkled and out of breath,
I'm ten and can't sit still.

Entropy House I call it,
my carved-rock place,
where I rule as King and cannot be touched.

Speaking of entropy,
I return here more and more
The older/younger I get/feel
I don't want to waste my key after all.

A tower, a cave, an elevator to space.
A roller-coaster.
Magic it is and was, something ineffable,
Least of all by me and I'll be damned if I'm telling you.

I've never left this room,
doorless, windowless,
The way blocked by a triangle
of insecurity, fear and ennui.

Some days I am Spider-Man, climbing walls with my hands.
Some days I just am and call it good.

Poem: The Ash Tree City (Draft)

The Ash Tree City

"Circle Line chain now approaching,
stand behind the yellow line."

He growls in alleys on starlit nights
In dumpsters
Piles of human shit
Clothes and vomited kebabs
Sewer grates and curved windows.

His horns crown everyone:
Drunks in Burberry
The corner barber
BTP in H. Road Station
Football fans enjoying Premium Lager

Three sharp brass nails on a tail
Witch-dreams
and Old things, breaking through
Museum-Glass History.

"Stand clear the closing doors."

This is not our place.

It is bigger on the inside
Than it is on the outside.








This work is licenced under a
Creative Commons Licence.

What Times We Live In

Seth and I went to see Beowulf tonight, a movie that strikes me as remarkable for two reasons: first that for a time the most popular movie in the US was based on one of the oldest stories in the English language and second that it's basically a two-hour video game cutscene. I don't mean the last to be derogatory - I enjoyed the movie immensely - but turning everything into a CGI effect was more distracting than it was cool, as opposed to say 300 earlier this year.

They took some liberties with the story, but understandable liberties; overall it wasn't something that took anything away from the overall enjoyment of the "Beowulf is a fucking badass" premise of the story. You could argue that they aren't liberties at all, because Beowulf was a spoken poem long before it was ever written down and passed through several iterations before it reached the oldest known written form we have today. Oral stories change. Written stories can change. So adapting it to the screen and changing it a bit isn't bothersome at all - it fits completely the spirit of the original type of text. It also added another interesting dimension to the tale, the human side of the hero - which has been so overdone in comics recently it's drifting into cliche territory and Neil Gaiman was one of the writers, so take from that what you will.

I enjoyed it. I cheered for Beowulf, marveled at the effects, drooled at Angelina Jolie, and had a great time. That a poem 1400 years old can inspire that is also remarkable. If you have a chance, check it out.

London by William Blake

I wander thro' each charter'd street,
Near where the charter'd Thames does flow,
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

In every cry of every Man,
In every Infant's cry of fear,
In every voice, in every ban,
The mind-forg'd manacles I hear.

How the Chimney-sweeper's cry
Every black'ning Church appalls;
And the hapless Soldier's sigh
Runs in blood down Palace walls.

But most thro' midnight streets I hear
How the youthful Harlot's curse
Blasts the new born Infant's tear,
And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse.

The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner by Randall Jarrell

From my mother's sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from the dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.

The Portishead of J Alfred Prufrock

Another one to add to the "I should have done it when I had the idea" bin. In college, I thought mashing up TS Eliot reading his own poetry with electronic music would be awesome. Apparently, so this this fellow. Via MeFi.